SARAJEVO, Oct 19: Nationalists scored a clean sweep of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency in elections two weeks ago, according to final results released on Saturday, despite international pressure for a vote for reform.

But there was no clear winner in the race for Bosnia’s central parliament and the assemblies of the country’s two highly autonomous halves — the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serbs’ Republika Srpska — although the nationalists again put on a strong showing.

The largely symbolic joint presidency will be shared by Sulejman Tihic of the Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA), Mirko Sarovic from the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) and Dragan Covic from the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), replacing three moderates.

The three parties led Bosnia into brutal inter-ethnic conflict in 1992 and continued to rule the country in a de-facto coalition until the last elections in 2000, when a moderate alliance took control of the central parliament.

Dealing a blow to Western attempts to marginalise hardliners, Bosnians showed broad support for the nationalists in the October 5 elections, amid widespread dissatisfaction at the perceived failure of a moderate ruling coalition at the state level.

Officials said voter turnout at the weekend was the lowest since the 1992-95 war, when the country’s Croats, Muslims and Serbs turned on each other with a viciousness not seen in Europe since World War II.

The multi-ethnic Social Democratic Party (SDP), the main force in the state-level coalition, lost close to half of votes it had won in previous polls.

Under the 1995 Dayton peace accords which ended the war, Bosnia was divided into the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republika Srspka (RS).

The Muslim winner of the presidency, Tihic, 51, is a former prisoner of war who was captured and tortured by Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-95 war and was in Bosnia.

His Serbian counterpart Sarovic, 46, has demonstrated no desire to distance himself from the wartime policies of the SDS and its founder Radovan Karadzic, the fugitive war crimes suspect.

Cavic, 46, is considered a moderate within the HDZ, the party that led other Croat nationalists in an attempt in 2000 to establish a third exclusively Croat autonomous zone in Bosnia.

According to results for the 42-seat central parliament, the three nationalist parties will not be able to form a majority even if they join forces.—AFP