Guidelines to Assist National Minority Participation in the Electoral Process Page: 16 certain circumstances make the critical difference between a party assuming and losing power. It will also determine the level of representation of parties especially representative of minorities. The choice then of the most appropriate system becomes a critical one. But, electoral systems alone do not solve potential ethnic conflict. The electoral system must be viewed as one of a multiplicity of interlocking mechanisms which, taken together, will have the effect of accommodating national minorities and ensuring their effective participation in public life. By way of illustration, reserved seats for a particular community may ensure them representation, but, unless the underlying processes and mechanisms, such as funding, eligibility, training and education are provided, that representation may have little influence. Accordingly, while the electoral system may ensure minority representation in the legislature, there remains no guarantee that the minority represented in the legislature will be accorded any material role in the parliament or in government structures. Representation is often not enough. It needs to be supported by other measures. For example in Parliament, the minority may be accorded key seats in parliamentary committees that concern the interests of national minorities or special procedures may be established to deal with minority vetoes in respect of minority issues. In government structures, the proportional allocation of civil service positions may be a mechanism that may be considered to give real meaning to minority participation in public life. These kinds of supporting measures all contribute to turning what would otherwise be a formal minority of seats in Parliament into meaningful participation of a national minority in public life. There may also be a perception of tokenism in an allocation of seats to a national minority without those seats constituting a platform for a meaningful influence on the decisions that affect that minority. That perception undermines the legitimacy of the State’s measures to accommodate the minority, allowing ethnic entrepreneurs to attack and thereby undermine the accommodation accorded to the minority by the State. It is essential that the electoral system take account of displaced persons or refugees who may be resident outside the country. This is particularly the case after serious ethnic conflict when refugees or displaced persons may consist substantially of one communal group. In that event, a constituency system may not be appropriate because of the difficulties associated with access to the constituency either for the purpose of registration or voting. It is also essential for an electoral system to take into account the existence of national minorities that are, or may in the past have been, nomadic. The strict application of a constituency system may effectively disenfranchise them. The establishment of an electoral district in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to enable the election of a representative of the Roma community is an example of a good practice. This district, Shuto Orizari, encompasses the largest concentration of Roma in Europe. External voting provisions should apply equally and should not have a detrimental effect on national minority representation. If there are external voting provisions, national minority suffrage and representation should be encouraged. The manner and form in which statistics are compiled, or in which a national census takes place, is important in that reliability, accuracy and fairness may affect issues of national minority representation of how an electoral system can lead to lead to serious conflict is Lesotho. In the 1998 election the ruling party won 79 out of 80 constituencies with only 60.5 percent of the votes. The post election violence, protesting the result, led to armed intervention by neighbouring States and the establishment of an interim political authority charged with the responsibility of designing a new electoral system with elements of both a constituency based system and proportional representation.