SARAJEVO : Test for Yugoslavia

Bosnia-Herzegovina is one of the more obscure of Yugoslavia’s six federated republics, but multi-party elections to be held there Sunday are considered a key test of whether the country can survive as a single nation.

The republic has Yugoslavia’s most volatile mix of nationalities and religions, with its 1.8 million Muslims, 1.7 million Orthodox Christian Serbs and about 400,000 Roman Catholic Croats forming a threshold between Communist Serbia and the new northern democracies of Slovenia and Croatia.

If Bosnia’s Communists are ousted by a proposed Catholic-Muslim democratic alliance, it would be a severe setback for Serbia’s hopes to retain Communist leadership over a united federation, and could even lead to ethnic clashes.