IN two months the people of Bosnia Herzegovina go to the polls, just nine months after the Dayton Agreement was signed and two months before the US presidential elections. This last point is important, as the timetable was geared to US electoral considerations and President Clinton's wish to deal with the messy question of former Yugoslavia before his own election in November.
But it would appear at this stage to be an election with little press freedom, an election without a vital democratic component. The process is flawed.
This is not something that keeps the leaders of the free world awake nights if recent history is any judge. From Cambodia to Palestine the US and the EU have been willing to pronounce elections free and fair, even though there was no free media to inform people, question politicians and act as a watchdog.
In Cambodia, in 1993, the UN, to give it its due, established its own radio station to make up for the absence of a vibrant media. It distributed free radios so people could listen to the election campaign. But there were never enough radios. That election was saved by the sheer turn out, more than 90 per cent, with people risking death in some cases to get to the polls.
It was a vote of confidence in democracy and marginalised the Khmer Rouge.
Since then, newspapers have been closed, journalists harassed, imprisoned and killed. The second Cambodian election takes place in two years. The legacy of the UN sponsored election will not include a free press.
In Palestine the count had hardly finished before the EU, including the Tanaiste, Mr Spring, as a member of the Troika, pronounced its satisfaction with the election Everyone knew President. Yasser Arafat was aware of media harassment and in one case, the imprisonment of a journalist for not placing a story concerning the president on the front page of Al Quds, the main Palestinian newspaper.
Media monitoring organisations from the International Federation of Journalists to Reporters san Frontier publicised the lack of press freedom as did both Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations, but to no avail.
The Russian election was somewhat different. Media bias was an issue, at least abroad. Maybe the bias was so obvious it could not be ignored, but the result has been questioned. Both the Organisation for Security and Co operation in Europe and the European Institute for the Media, expressed concern.
The OSCE said it was concerned at the way the media covered the election as a two horse race, between President Yeltsin and Mr Gennady Zyuganov and the positive coverage given to Mr Yeltsin compared to Communist candidate, Mr Zyuganov.
The OSCE questioned the funding of Mr Yeltsin's campaign but it did believe the outcome represented the will of the Russian people.
The European Institute for the Media, monitored the election for the EU's Tacis Democracy Programme. Its conclusions were more damming than the OSCE. Its preliminary report raised doubts about the impartiality of Central Election Commissions itself. It described the elections as a "step backwards", from the Duma elections last year, with all three television net, works working for Mr Yeltsin.
"The media coverage, marred the fairness of the democratic process of the 1996 Russian presidential elections. The bias on the national television channels, the pressure on editors and media outlets, the administrative and financial levers, the use of state and other resources and the excessive utilisation of the presidents advantage of being the incumbent combined to provide strong evidence that the candidates did not have an equal opportunity to present their case to the electorate."
The report said while it was impossible to quantify the relation between media coverage and election results, monitors thought "Yeltsin's use of and influence on the media, the marginalisation of opponents other than Zyuganov, the repeated insistence that Yeltsin was in the end the lesser of two evils, the denunciation of Zyuganov and the portrayal of Yeltsin as the choice of the future, may have secured Yeltsin's victory".
Nowhere has the media played a more significant role than in the former Yugoslavia. Mark Thompson in his book, Forging War, a study of the media in what was Yugoslavia, demonstrates that the war could not have been launched or sustained without the cooperation of the Serbian media as the willing creatures of the Milosevic government.
What was necessary was an intense propaganda campaign to mobilise the population to make war thinkable in Yugoslavia, let alone inevitable, according to Thompson.
Michael Williams in the latest edition of Index on Censorship writes of a "degree" of pluralism and media freedom existing in the Bosnian Republic, based in Sarajevo. However, he says of the Republika Srpska: "If the absence of media freedom and freedom of movement was not crippling enough, the mocking presence of Karadizic cruelly undermines the expectations for September's election."
There is no national media or freedom of movement for journalists. Even where a limited freedom of the press exists in the Bosnian Republic, it is threatened by increased authoritarianism. No Bosnian Journalist can go into Serbia or Croatia.
If the hope is that the election throws up an acceptable conclusion, it will still not be good enough. Democracy is more than just people voting and votes being counted. It is a culture that takes time to develop. To hold this election without a free press guaranteed access to all areas, able to print or broadcast without harassment means the result is marred. If there is no free press, there is no democracy.
If the press in former Yugoslavia can be mobilised for one candidate or party during the elections then the media will continue, as in Russia, to be pressured after the election.
There was a little evidence that the Organisation for Security and Co operation understood this in Russia. It is supervising this election. If there is no free press then it should demand the elections be postponed, regardless of the demands of US politics, until this is rectified.