"IN no other country," says a senior Bosnian opposition politician, "which has gone through what this country has gone through has a timetable like this been imposed.
"The election is only happening because of the American political agenda. It is a disgrace to the western world."
Few believe that Bosnia is ready for an election. Solemn commitments in the Dayton agreement which ended the war here have not been met. Half the electorate are displaced persons. Nowhere has ethnic cleansing been reversed. Electoral engineering, officially sanctioned by the electoral regulations, is rampant.
The three main nationalist parties representing Bosnia's Muslims, Serbs and Croats will win. They are, effectively the parties that went, to war. They are not competing, against each other, only against smaller parties within their own ethnic groups.
They control the major news media and the police, curbing free speech, assembly and movement, although even without this facility they would probably win anyway.
Dayton says the elections must be democratic, free and fair. "They will not be the democratic, free and fair elections that are known in the democratic world," the US ambassador, Mr Robert Frowick, said in Sarajevo last Tuesday. Mr Frowick is the head of the OSCE mission in Bosnia charged with organising, the elections. If he says that publicly, other westerners put it more strongly in private.
Mr Frowick added, however, that he believed the elections were a first step towards building a stable, peaceful Bosnian state. What he did not say, but what everyone knows, is that the primary pressure to hold them now comes from the US electoral agenda.
President Clinton set a deadline of the end of this year for the withdrawal of Ifor, the multinational intervention force in Bosnia. The joke in Sarajevo is that the Bosnian elections will be postponed if the US elections on November 5th are.
The Bosnian, elections will confirm in as public a way as possible what everyone knows that the idea of a united, multi ethnic and multicultural Bosnia is dead that the state now consists of separate Serb, Croat and Muslim regions bound together in a state whose existence - two of the three groups oppose.
In this situation, there is ample opportunity for further war, and sooner rather than later. The only hope of preventing it in the short term is a credible threat from the international community of severe economic and military punishment.
Electoral engineering
The Dayton agreement divided Bosnia into two entities a Serb Republic, known as Republika Srpska, comprising 49 per cent of Bosnia's territory, and a Muslim Croat Federation comprising 51 per cent. Each of these entities will elect its own political leaders on Saturday. In addition, all will vote for joint political structures, an assembly and a three person presidency, who will be the political representatives of the entire Bosnian state.
The electoral regulations are a recipe for electoral engineering, and the opportunity has been seized by all sides. The extraordinary 50 per cent of voters who are displaced persons can register to vote where they live, where they used to live, or where they want to live.
So parties have encouraged some voters in areas where they expect close to 100 per cent support to register in areas where they fear they may lose. The Republika Srpska authorities have registered voters in towns within their territory they might otherwise lose.
Republika Srpska
Serb voters are being told by their politicians that the election will validate their separateness. The certain victory of the main nationalist party, the SDS, led by Dr Radovan Karadzic until he was forced by the US to step down recently, will be taken as a vote to have nothing to do with a Bosnian state or power sharing.
"There is no Bosnia," the leader of the Serb Radical Party (effectively co runners of the SDS), Mr Vojislav Seselj, declared to applause at a rally in the relatively moderate town of Srbac last week.
There are hopes, however, that these secessionist ambitions will be tempered by economic and political reality. Republika Srpska needs international help and assistance to rebuild the region's economy. "When World Bank loans and EU aid start to flow in, they may find it much harder to break away," a European diplomat said.
According to a senior figure working with the OSCE, the Serbs know they must play ball. "There is no industry functioning over there. They, have no economy. Their industrial plants and factories were all interdependent with plants in the rest of Bosnia, they were part of the same assembly line, they integrate naturally together.
"They also need international respectability and international aid and trade." Sanctions against Republika Srpska are due to be lifted after the elections. They aspire to secede, they may be persuaded by reality to stay.
Muslim Croat Federation
The main Muslim party, the SDA of President Alija Izetbegovic, will win a landslide among Bosniac voters. The HDZ, heavily influenced by gangsters and mafiosi, will win overwhelming Croat support. Then the marriage of convenience that is "the federation" will come under great strain.
(The term "Bosniac" has been introduced into Bosnia's lexicon in recent years to describe those who favour Bosnian unity. It effectively describes the Muslim population by its political aspiration rather its religion.)
The Muslim Croat Federation is no more than an alliance between former enemies to fight a common enemy, the Serbs, Bosnians and Croats fought each other for close to two years but were persuaded by the US ambassador to Zagreb Mr Peter Galbraith, that a MuslimCroat alliance was the only way to defeat the common enemy the Serbs. The alliance was signed in Washington in 1994.
At Dayton, the alliance was formalised and the Muslim Croat Federation emerged as the larger of the two Bosnian entities. But Croats do not feel they are treated equally within the federation and keep quiet about their desire to secede only to avoid economic sanctions.
Their concern is heightened by developments on the Bosnian side. The old rhetoric of multiculturalism and a multi ethnic state has almost disappeard. The SDA of President Izetbegovic is basically a Muslim nationalist party. Bosnians were ethnically cleansed raped and murdered as Muslims. It is not surprising now that they identify themselves politically as Muslims.
SDA rallies have been awash with Islamic rites and flags. A key SDA slogan is "In Our Own Religion - In Our Own Country". There is no significant force within the federation preaching pluralism.
The Bosnian state
Common institutions governing the two entities may therefore face political gridlock from day one. The three person presidency, consisting of a Muslim, a Croat and a Serb is due to meet four days after the election result is declared.
All decisions must be unanimous. The three members of the presidency will be deeply hostile to each other. Issues they fail to agree are to be referred to the courts for arbitration. The courts are expected to be busy.
If the openly secessionist Serbs and the equally, but more quietly, secessionist Croats find common ground, Bosnia faces a major crisis regarding its continued existence. Two minorities make a majority.
"Bosnia Herzegovina will be the most decentralised state in the world," according to the international High Representative in Bosnia, Mr Carl Bildt. It will have very small central powers, with strong local power. This is its only hope.
If Serbs within their own entity can feel relatively autonomous, while at the same time obtaining economic rewards by remaining within the decentralised state, the unified state may at least be born.
DAYTON also established a programme to train and modernise the Bosnian government army. Funded by the US and Gulf states, it will greatly improve its firepower and professionalism.
The European Union is unhappy with this programme, which benefits both Bosniacs and Croats within the federation army. "If you operate from the premise that the next war will be between Bosniacs and Croats, then you are arming both," says one western diplomat.
Bosniacs are now increasingly confident of their military prowess. In recent months state controlled television has been showing reconstructions of glorious Bosniac victories in the war. Combine this with the army training and re equipment programme, and you have an army which could be tempted into an adventure.
That temptation could come if Republika Srpska resists an organised attempt to put, Muslim refugees back in an ethnically cleansed town, across the line dividing the entities. It could come from Croats deciding to opt out of Bosnia and join mother Croatia.
Most accept that war, is inevitable unless there is a sustained international economic and military involvement. Most western states appear willing to embark on such a longer term involvement, beyond the 1996 deadline for withdrawal of Ifor. The precise nature and effectiveness of a new military force will not be known until after November's US presidential electionf.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/SJQTLMCMMRC2PLALXUKEWWS6HU.png)