http://www.centraleurope.com/yugoslaviatoday/news.php3?id=202664

Kosovo Serbs Turn out for Chaotic Yugoslav Election

PRISTINA, Sep 25, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) Kosovo's defiant Serb
minority turned out to vote in a chaotic, improvised sideshow to
Yugoslavia's
election Sunday, reaffirming the federation's claim on the breakaway
province.

The Yugoslav province's UN administration kept a discreet distance between
itself
and the federal legislative and presidential elections, which began in a
hurried and
at times shambolic fashion, boosting fears of massive fraud to come.

In the largest remaining Serbian area, the north of the province around the
divided
town of Kosovksa Mitrovica, furious rows broke out between opposition
officials
and members of President Slobodan Milsoevic's Serbian Socialist Party (SPS)
about the right of displaced Serbs to vote and about interference by party
members in polling.

The massive migrations caused by the Kosovo war and its aftermath have
thrown
electoral lists into confusion. In a Mitrovica schoolhouse designated as a
voting
station for displaced people only 80 names appear on the list, although
"there are
hundreds of displaced people" according to Edvard Vizin, head of the
station.

"There are no polling booths and the voting slips are being handed out by
SPS
members," complained the opposition's Dragisa Djokovic, after she was thrown
violently out of a polling station by Milosevic supporters after complaining
of voting
irregularities.

In the central encalve of Gracanica an onlooker, who did not want to be
named,
told AFP that SPS officials had a second voting list to enable their
supporters to
vote twice.

"If things aren't going well for Milosevic they'll get a call from
Belgrade," he said,
"Then they'll bring out the second list and officials and factory owners
will force
people to come and vote."

But despite the refusal of Kosovo's UN mission to help organize the vote --
which
it has branded a "farce" -- and the almost total opposition of the
province's ethnic
Albanian majority, Yugoslav officials managed to open polling stations in
both
Serbian areas and in the capital Pristina, AFP reporters saw.

"The entire international community has done everything it can to work
against us
and stop the poll," declared Vasic Srdjan, 40, an ardent Milosevic
supporter,
voting in Gracanica

"But on the very day they allowed the elections to take place every illusion
that
Kosovo would ever be independent fell."

The votes of Kosovo's Serbs could be vital for Milosevic if he is to see off
the
challenge of Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition candidate who leads the
latest
opinion polls.

Officials of the Yugoslav election commission and SPS members distribute
voting
slips and ballot boxes for the Serbian and Yugoslav general election, and
the first
round of the Yugoslav presidential poll.

Voting began at 7:00 a.m. (0500) GMT in Gracanica and Mitrovica but was
delayed until around 9:00 a.m. in Pristina, where one mobile polling station
was
deployed in Ulpiana, the one inner city estate where some 50 Serb families
still live
in the otherwise ethnic Albanian capital.

The head of the UN mission, former French health minister Bernard Kouchner,
has
refused to legitimize the Yugoslav poll by organizing or monitoring the
voting, but
instead has put in place a network of "witnesses" to "assess the magnitude
of
activities."

The plan, officials told AFP, is to give the lie to any inflated claims by
Milosevic's
regime that is has succeeded in gaining hundreds of thousands of votes in a
province where the ethnic Albanian majority is expected to boycott voting
totally.

On Sunday small groups of UN officials, OSCE election monitors and NATO
peacekeeping troops maintained a discreet vigil in front of polling
stations, AFP
saw, keeping a tally of those coming and going.

The UN mission in Kosovo has administered the province since last June when
the
NATO air bombardment brought to an end the 1998-1999 war between ethnic
Albanian separatists and Belgrade's troops.

An estimated 100,000 Serbs remain in the province which has a population of
two
million. A further 187,000 non-Albanians, most of them Serbs, have fled
Kosovo
since the end of the war, fearing revenge attacks, according to the latest
figures
from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.


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