CLINTON ADMINISTRATION STANDS BEHIND TIMETABLE FOR BOSNIA ELECTIONS.

Byline: Peter Slevin Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

As Bosnians prepare for troubled elections that befit a troubled land, the Clinton administration is defending a vote that looks as likely to further divide Bosnia as unite it.

The White House pushed hard for elections as a stepping stone to Bosnia's postwar reconciliation. Administration advocates hope Saturday's vote will produce some much-needed Bosnian teamwork and smooth the way for a clean December exit of most American troops.

But on the eve of a vote expected to strengthen Bosnia's hard-line nationalists, reconciliation remains a distant dream, and a rapid U.S. withdrawal appears increasingly unlikely. The administration is talking guardedly of a longer-term U.S. military presence.

Even the election's American overseer, Robert Frowick, has described the election schedule as ``rushed.'' Critics monitoring the bitter campaign argue that its timing owes more to American domestic politics - especially President Clinton's promise to withdraw U.S. troops - than to Bosnian realities.

``The election timetable is unduly compressed,'' said James Schear, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. ``The result is a process that is dangerously vulnerable to fraud and abuse and manipulation. Everyone's going to win a piece of the turf and no one's going to be happy.''

Susan Woodward, a Balkan specialist at the Brookings Institution, predicts the vote will produce conditions ``diametrically opposed'' to the intentions of the accords reached last year in Dayton, Ohio, which laid the foundation for today's peace.

``Dayton envisioned the capacity to create common institutions. And, therefore, once the Bosnians created common institutions, everyone else could leave,'' Woodward said. ``But the nationalist result on all sides is going to make it more difficult.

``The result of the elections,'' Woodward concluded, ``will not make the American troop exit quicker.''

Continued tensions between Muslim, Croatian and Serbian factions have convinced influential observers in the United States and abroad that the current U.S.-led military presence should stretch well beyond December.

The Clinton administration, mindful of the U.S. presidential election Nov. 5, has avoided a public discussion of the pros and cons.

``I really do believe it is premature to say what force, how long, let alone who will command it,'' Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Wednesday. ``There is a whole host of questions that have to be answered, but the debate is starting.''

Testifying to the Senate this week, John Kornblum, the senior State Department official on Bosnia, first ducked a question about U.S. plans. He then demurred by saying that the United States will hold some ``very important discussions'' about security arrangements.

Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold, the only Democrat to vote against the U.S. deployment, said he remains skeptical of the international military mission that sent 60,000 soldiers, including 20,000 Americans, to police Bosnia. About 15,000 U.S. troops remain.

``I share the fear,'' said Feingold, ``that after investing more than $3 billion in the Bosnian peace process, elections will bring us back to where we started: a region full of hostile, ethnically divided factions, facing off at tenuous borders, under unstable military, economic and social conditions.''

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger calls the current Bosnian political campaign an ``electoral travesty'' and argues that it should be abandoned. Bosnians should vote first whether they want the multiethnic state propounded by the Dayton agreement, he said.

Instead, they will be voting for representatives to shape a new Bosnian national government.

Nine months after American-led forces occupied the war-ruptured country, Bosnia remains an unhappy mess. Rather than pulling together, as international mediators in Dayton hoped, the three embittered ethnic groups are pulling apart.

The NATO peacekeeping force succeeded in separating the warring armies. They preserved a cease-fire and helped establish a measure of orderliness and renewal after a war which killed more than 200,000 Bosnians and turned more than 2 million people into refugees.

But the return of refugees has been repeatedly blocked, accused war criminals retain significant power, and a vocal concentration of candidates declare that the country should never become whole.