Preliminary results from a two-day parliamentary vote at the weekend indicated yesterday that the new government of Republika Srpska will be fragmented. "It will be, basically, a hung parliament," said an international official who has analyzed the results.
The division means Karadzic's hard-liners can no longer dominate the Bosnian Serb government with the same impunity they have enjoyed for the last two years - a period they used to obstruct Western efforts to impose peacetime reforms.
But with no party achieving a majority in the 83-seat legislature, getting anything done with the new government may prove equally complicated.
The election was the first formal gauging of the political strength of Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, whom Washington and its European allies have backed in her power struggle with predecessor Karadzic. U.S. and other Western officials consider Plavsic to be more cooperative, despite her own nationalistic leanings, in adhering to the Dayton peace agreement.
Yeltsin, sitting at a table in his Kremlin office with a somber Chubais nearby, sternly instructed Russian journalists to stop probing for scandal about Chubais, a first deputy prime minister. "I said you don't have to try and make an effort, that's the main thing," Yeltsin said.
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