THE international organisers of Bosnia's first post-war general election declared it a triumph yesterday, despite widespread misgivings about the value of the exercise and fears about the outcome.
The monitors of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE) said Saturday's polling had passed off "calmly and serenely, almost without incident", with a turnout of between 60 and 70 per cent.
But within an hour of polls closing at 7pm, the ruling Muslim party, President Alija Izetbegovic's SDA (the Party of Democratic Rights) claimed that there had had been "technical irregularities" which had "flawed the vote", particularly in Serb entity of Bosnia .
The SDA said that it would not recognise the vote in the Serb half of the country, Republika Srpska, and would take the matter to the United Nations Security Council.
Yesterday, the Serb electoral authority based in the village of Pale outside Sarajevo, suspended counting throughout Serb territory without explanation.
A delegation of the OSCE election team, under its deputy chairman Sir Kenneth Scott, immediately set off to Pale to investigate. After an hour, the Serbs agreed to restart the count. But the declaration of results has been delayed further.
Yesterday afternoon, the OSCE figure of 60 to 70 per cent for the turnout was revealed to be conjecture rather than fact. "It's a guess, a hunch," a spokesman admitted.
Kris Janowski, of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), said the low turnout of refugees willing to cross ethnic boundaries to vote in places they had fled was the most disturbing aspect of the election.
It had been expected that up to 140,000 Muslims would register votes in their old home villages. Only 20,000, at most, took the buses provided. "Large numbers were simply afraid to cross over the line," said Mr Janowski.
The UNHCR had registered a number of cases of deliberate obstruction and intimidation of refugee voters, he said. The worst was at Kopaci on the edge of the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, where Serb election authorities and police stopped 600 Muslims and refused to allow them to vote.
"The Serbs used deliberate delaying tactics, saying the papers weren't in order," Mr Janowski said. After 10 hours, the Muslims decided to go back to Sarajevo without voting. The Serbs said they could open new polling stations, but by then the buses had left.
At Krupa, outside the Serb-held town of Banja Luka in northern Bosnia , a party of 12 Muslim refugees was told they would not be allowed to return to their old home districts to vote, and would have to vote in Krupa instead, which they refused.
In Sarajevo, voting was suspended for several hours at three polling stations, and Ifor troops had to be called to one station to calm an angry crowd.
Ballot boxes and polling stations in Pale, the Bosnian Serbs' capital, were unsupervised by international officials for several hours. Local officials forgot to ink the finger of each voter, a means of checking if someone tries to cast a ballot twice.
Bosnian Serb television announced that 1,300,000 Serbs - a figure which equates to the entire Bosnian Serb population before the war, including children - had voted.
The growing misgivings will delay the OCSE certification of the poll's validity. This is not expected until tomorrow or Wednesday.
"I think there is something fishy about the voters' lists," said a Serb voting in central Sarajevo.
"They are supposed to relate to the census of 1991 - but seem to have been manipulated. But then the whole idea of this hermaphrodite state of one authority but two halves is absurd.
"There is nothing like it in the whole world - and it won't work."
