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Monday, September 25 6:09 PM SGT

Opposition shrugs off Milosevic success in Kosovo

KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Yugoslavia, Sept 25 (AFP) -

Serb opposition leaders shrugged off the apparent massive election success
of President Slobodan
Milosevic in Kosovo Monday, declaring the result in the province irrelevant
in Yugoslavia as a
whole.

Officials of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) said their monitors
had succeeded in
preventing Milosevic from stealing the votes of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian
majority, which boycotted
Sunday's poll.

They said the number of votes cast by Serbs in the province would not be
enough to derail the
presidential bid of their candidate, Vojislav Kostunica.

"It's not important if he (Milosevic) wins here, because the numbers are so
small," Marko Jaksic, a
senior DOS official, told reporters in the northern Kosovo town of Kosovska
Mitrovica.

"The main task of our party was to prevent the manipulation of Albanian
votes and give the Serbs a
chance to vote for whoever they want," said Milan Savic, the opposition's
chief electoral official in
the Serbian town of Prokuplje, where many of Kosovo's votes were counted.

Savic said that DOS officials had toured potential polling stations in
ethnic Albanian areas of Kosovo
on Sunday and found the few that existed were closed or empty, a claim
already made by Kosovo's
UN administrator, Bernard Kouchner.

"We found as a material fact that in some places voter stations were not
open," Savic said, "We took
pictures. The international community helped us very much by providing
security for our visits."

No official results have been released from Kosovo's Albanian areas.

Savic estimated that if Albanian votes were discounted, Kosovo had an
approximate electorate of
around 50,000 Serbs, of whom he said about half had voted, too small a
number to make a big
difference across Yugoslavia.

Those who did vote however voted mostly for Milosevic, Jaksic said.

"The massive number of votes for Milosevic is the result of media
propaganda," Jaksic said.

"Our people are in a bad situation, they are very poor. He tells them all
the time through the state
media that he will bring back the Serbian police and Yugoslav army, and that
only he can make a
better future," he said.

With only partial unofficial results in from Sunday's presidential poll, the
camps of both Kostunica
and Milosevic were claiming the lead early Monday.

Kostunica insisted that Milosevic had failed to obtain the absolute majority
needed to avoid a second
round run-off.

But Milosevic's backers insisted their man was leading, with one top ally
saying he was on course for
a first-round victory.
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