In Bosnia, Elections Test Country's Lingering Fault Lines

As Bosnia heads towards elections Sunday, candidates are ramping up nationalist rhetoric, testing the seams of a country still struggling to unite a quarter-century after it was torn apart by war

Sarajevo, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 5th Oct, 2018 ) :As Bosnia heads towards elections Sunday, candidates are ramping up nationalist rhetoric, testing the seams of a country still struggling to unite a quarter-century after it was torn apart by war.

The Balkan state is stitched together by a tenuous power-sharing arrangement between groups that clashed during the 1992-1995 conflict: Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims, also known as Bosniaks.

Sunday's poll will put the country's complex political system on full display, with voters casting ballots for a dizzying array of leaders and legislatures to fill out Bosnia's numerous layers of government.

The main race will be a run for the three-headed presidency, which rotates every eight months between a Serb, Croat and Bosnian Muslim leader.

But in a sign of the nationalism threatening the country's fragile status, the front-runner for the Serb presidency seat, Milorad Dodik, is a man who regularly calls post-war Bosnia a "failed concept".

Just this week, the US-sanctioned candidate told a crowd in Zvornik, which lies on the border with Serbia: "When you talk about (Bosnia), don't talk about a state, talk about a territory."Dodik, a pro-Russian nationalist in the running for the central presidency, has led Bosnia's Serb sub-region since 2006 and has periodically called for a referendum on its independence.

His rival for the Serb presidential seat, incumbent Mladen Ivanic, is warning voters that Dodik is leading Serbs towards "uncertainty, risk, conflict, and isolation".