Talk:1990 Bosnian general election

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Expanding/Correcting the Results for the 1990 BiH Presidential Elections

Hello,

I've noticed that the current English-language Wikipedia entry for the 1990 BiH Presidential Election (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bosnia_and_Herzegovina_general_election,_1990&oldid=496112586) has information that is both inaccurate and incomplete.

At present, our article lists the numerical results and percentages for 28 presidential candidates and indicates that the election was won by Fikret Abdic of the Party of Democratic Action. The actual story is much more complicated.

The source for our information is Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook by Nohlen & Stöver. I have a great deal of respect for these authors (who've done similar work on elections in other parts of the world), but any compendium of this sort is bound to have some errors and omissions -- and their coverage of BiH 1990 has both. The vote totals appear correct (i.e., they correspond with those in another reliable source that I've found), but some important context is missing, some of the party affiliations are wrong, and the percentages add up to the rather problematic total of 433.4.

The 1990 BiH Presidential election was held to fill seven positions on a republic presidium. Six positions were elected by BiH's "nations" (two by Bosnian Muslims, two by Bosnian Serbs, two by Bosnian Croats), and the seventh was chosen to represent "others." (Ejup Ganić, a Bosnian Muslim, was elected to the seventh position as a "Yugoslav.") Although Fikret Abdic received the most votes, he agreed to allow Alija Izetbegović to become president of the presidium. All of this information can be found in Viktor Meier's Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise (trans. Sabrina Ramet; Routledge, 1999), p. 193; there is a limited preview on Google Books.

Mirsad Karic addresses the 1990 BiH election in his essay, "Social Cleavages, Conflict and Accommodation in Bosnian Political History from the Late 19th Century until the 1990s," published in the Turkish journal Bilgi #22 (2011) [online copy here. On p. 91 of this article, Karic lists the top three candidates in each field and provides their party affiliation, citing Suad Arnautovic's Izbori u Bosni i Hercegovini 1990: Analiza IZbornog Procesa as his source. The numbers are identical to those in Nohlen & Stöver.

The book De la Europa del Este al este de Europa (Universitat de València, 2011), edited by Carlos Flores Juberías, includes an essay by Virtuts Sambró Melero entitled "Las elecciones de 1990 en Bosnia." This work, focusing on results in the region of Doboj, clarifies the identities of the candidates who ran in each of the national fields and the "other" field. This book, too, has a limited preview on Google Books.

Most of the party affiliations provided by Nohlen & Stöver are accurate, but there are three exceptions: Nenad Kecmanović is listed as a member of the Communist Party, and Đevad Haznadar & Ranko Zrilić are listed with the League of Socialist Youth–Democratic Party. All, in fact, were members of Ante Marković's Alliance of Reformist Forces of Yugoslavia. This is clarified in Virtuts Sambró Melero's doctoral thesis, "Contextualització i anàlisi de les eleccions del 18 de novembre de 1990 a la R.S. de Bòsnia i Hercegovina" (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2009). If stronger published sources are required, I'll note that several books identify Kecmanović as having been the leader of the Reformists in BiH (e.g., Neven Andjelić's Bosnia-Herzegovina: The End of a Legacy, p. 162), and that Haznadar indicates that he was a Reformist candidate in this interview.

I'll add these details and corrections to the article in a moment. I should add that I find it very strange that the full results of this election have not (until now) been easy to find in one place, given their significance for the brutal civil war that followed. (This statement is not intended as criticism of any author or WP editor.) CJCurrie (talk) 02:26, 19 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Addendum: While editing the article, I noticed an apparent discrepancy in the vote totals for Ejup Ganić -- Nohlen and Stöver list him as having received 709,691 votes, while Karic indicates that the number is 709,891. Since Karic's article is specifically focused on the 1990 election (and Nohlen and Stöver's book is not), I've included the latter total in the article. CJCurrie (talk) 03:38, 19 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]