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Bosnian Parliament Elects Muslim
SARAJEVO, March 27 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Bosnia's central parliament on Tuesday elected moderate candidates for the Muslim and Croat seats in the country's tripartite presidency, confirming the end of nationalist supremacy, news agencies reported Tuesday.
The parliament elected Jozo Krizanovic, a Croat, and Beriz Belkic, a Muslim, both candidates of the Alliance for Change, a reformist grouping which now dominates both houses of the assembly.
The Croat seat in the presidency has been empty since Ante Jelavic was sacked earlier this month by Wolfgang Petritsch, the top international mediator, for leading Bosnian Croat nationalists in a bid for self-rule.
Halid Genjac only took the Muslim seat on an interim basis last October when he replaced Alija Izetbegovic, the veteran Muslim leader who stepped down due to failing health.
Tuesday's election is expected to be confirmed later by the House of Peoples, the upper house of the central parliament.
If confirmed, the new Muslim and Croat members, along with the current Serb presidency's chairman Zivko Radisic, will remain in office until new presidential elections, due in 2002.
Krizanovic, a 56-year-old businessman from the central Bosnian town of Novi Travnik, of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), the Alliance's major force, was the only candidate for the Croat seat.
The Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), the main Bosnian Croat nationalist party, did not nominate its candidate and did not attend the session, in protest at Petritsch's decision to remove Jelavic and ban him, along with three other HDZ officials, from holding any public office, an HDZ official told AFP.
Belkic, 54, the former prime minister of the Sarajevo canton, from the moderate mainly Muslim Party for Bosnia-Herzegovina (SBiH), defeated a candidate of the main Muslim nationalist Party of Democratic Action (SDA), Amor Masovic, 45, the head of the Muslim commission for missing people.
Following the election, Belkic voiced hope that the presidency could become more efficient as the two new members would have represented "the same program, the same political orientation and the same working plan."
The Alliance for Change was set up after the November 2000 general elections in a successful bid to end the supremacy of nationalists for the first time in 10 years.
With the support of the moderate Bosnian Serb parties, the Alliance managed to form the central government without nationalists for the first time since the end of the 1992-95 war.
It also formed the government of the Muslim-Croat Federation, one of the two entities that make up post-war Bosnia. The other is the Serb-run Republika Srpska (RS).
The signing of the Dayton Agreement in November 1995 marked the end of three years of bitter civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a former constituent republic of Yugoslavia and created a multi-ethnic parliamentary democracy.
The U.N. Security Council also appointed a High Representative who is charged with the implementation of the peace agreement and the co-ordination of the various civilian organizations and agencies in Bosnia.
Progress so far has been mixed. The country has been more or less at peace since 1995, and the economy is starting to recover from the disasters of the war. During the communist period, however, Bosnia was one of the richest regions in Eastern Europe.
Bosnia, however, is still a long way from functioning as one country: suspicion between the two halves, so recently at war, is still high. And Bosnia's neighbors, especially the predominantly Serb Yugoslavia, tend to hinder rather than help its development.
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