Rivals admit that Serb hard-line party appears to have won Bosnian Serb presidency

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - The hard-line Bosnian Serb party founded by indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic appears to have won the presidency of the Serb ministate in Bosnia, supporters and rivals said Monday.

Victory by Mirko Sarovic over the Western-backed Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik in Saturday's nationwide elections would be a setback for closer integration between Bosnia's three major ethnic groups, despite a strong showing in Muslim areas by parties promoting ethnic tolerance.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which supervised the balloting, released official returns Monday from 68 of 146 municipal election commissions. The figures showed Sarovic leading with 102,112 votes to Dodik's 66,733.

Two other candidates trailed with a total of about 34,000 votes.

An official of Sarovic's Serb Democratic Party, Milovan Bjelica, said reports from the party's observers at precinct level indicated Sarovic would finish with about 60 percent of all votes cast.

''We are now sure about the absolute victory of the Serb Democratic Party candidate in the first round,'' Bjelica said.

There was no comment from Dodik's party. However, Mladen Ivanic, a key Bosnian Serb politician who opposes Sarovic said Monday it appeared the Serb Democratic Party had indeed won the presidential race because voters feared the elimination of the Serb ministate.

The Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war, divided Bosnia into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb republic loosely tied together by a federal parliament, a three-member presidency and other federal institutions.

Voters in the two ministates chose members of the federal parliament Saturday. Those in the Muslim-Croat Federation selected their regional legislature and officials of 10 regional cantons, and Bosnian Serbs voted for a president and vice president of their half of Bosnia.

In the eastern Bosnian Serb town of Pale, Sarovic's supporters celebrated their apparent victory until dawn Monday. A convoy of almost 100 vehicles, many displaying pictures of both Sarovic and Karadzic, cruised the streets of Pale and nearby Sokolac.

The hard-line Croatian Democratic Union, or HDZ, also claims to have picked up strength in Croat areas. The party is urging a breakup of the federation with the Muslims in favor of a separate Croat ministate, which international officials oppose.

International officials who administer the country had hoped the election would break the grip that nationalist, ethnic-based parties have held since the war ended. Those parties led their communities through the war and have resisted efforts to reconcile Serbs, Muslims and Croats and forge a multicultural, unified state.

Preliminary, unofficial returns showed many Muslim voters did turn away from the nationalists, abandoning the Party for Democratic Action of former Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic in favor of reformers in the Social Democratic Party and the Party for Bosnia-Herzegovina of former Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic.

Silajdzic, one of the Dayton negotiators, wants to abolish the Serb republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation in favor of a unified state. Political observers in the Bosnian Serb republic say his remarks drove many Serb voters to the Serb Democratic Party.

The Serb Democratic Party, known by its Serbian initials SDS, claims it has revamped its leadership and will cooperate with international officials administering the country under the Dayton agreement.

However, numerous Western and Bosnian officials are skeptical. They point to a large number of SDS members who were involved in atrocities during the Bosnian war, even though many of them have not been indicted for war crimes by the international court in The Hague.