LARGE SCALE "ELECTORAL ENGINEERING" AMONG BH REFUGEES

SARAJEVO, August 9 (Hina) - 268,841 refugees and displaced persons requested to be enabled to vote in their new residence during Bosnian September elections, spokeswoman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Joanna Van Vliet said in Sarajevo on Friday. More than 222,000 requests came from the Serb entity, van Vliet said, adding that at the same time, the OSCE Mission received 523,753 registrations to vote from refugees settled outside Bosnia. Leader of the Office for Coordination of International Monitors at the Forthcoming Elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ed van Thijn, warned that numerous instances of "electoral engineering", showing attempts to direct refugees and displaced persons to vote in certain regions, had been registered so far. Van Thijn warned of impermissible blackmailing of refugees and the displaced with humanitarian aid, which was particularly evident in the Serb entity, from where the largest number of requests to vote in new residences had come. Such instances had occurred during registrations of refugees in Yugoslavia as well. International monitors noticed that at least 25 registration posts showed that refugees were demanded to give up voting on the territory of the Bosnian Federation and to do so in Republika Srpska. It was suggested to these refugees to state Srebrenica, Bratunac and Zvornik as the new residence, while the most extreme example was that of Brcko, where Serb authorities, settling 30,000 refugees, did everything in order to alter the ethnic picture of the area before the end of arbitration. However, van Thijn, former Dutch Minister of the Interior and Amsterdam Mayor, pointed out that similar things took place on all sides. "I'm not sure that all Bosniaks deported from the Serb entity want to vote in that area at all costs", he said. "Such procedures are a constituent part of a game directed towards a final territorial division of BH. People are being moved against their will in order to achieve certain political goals, which is a serious violation of human rights", said van Thijn. He also warned that international monitors must have free access to all voting posts on election day and that no special procedure of authorizing their presence would be allowed. Problems related to this were currently being discussed with Croatian authorities, van Thijn said. A plan for the supervision of the 14 September elections provided between 1,200 and 1,500 monitors, including 175 parliamentary representatives, mainly from West-European countries and the United States. (hina) ha as 091516 MET aug 96