Subject: Kosovo Serbs happy to "back the winner" in Serbian poll
Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2000 6:30:09 PST
From: C-afp@... (AFP / Dave Clark)
Organization: Copyright 2000 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
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KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Yugoslavia, Dec 23 (AFP) - As a steady
stream of Serbs passed through polling stations in Serbian areas of
Kosovo, many were happy simply to be able to vote at all in
elections for the republic whose writ no longer runs in their
region.
Despite the arrival of election materials and voting forms only
the previous night, the mood was upbeat as the Serbian political
machine cranked into gear in Kosovska Mitrovica, the main town in
the region.
After a slow start, a steady stream of voters were passing
through two nearby schools.
The co-ordinator of the town's election commission, Zoran
Vukadinovic, said that these scenes were being repeated in voting
stations across Serb-majority north Kosovo and in some of the
remaining Serb enclaves in the ethnic Albanian dominated south and
centre of the UN run province.
"We have had no problems so far, and we believe the vote will be
fair," he said.
In the dark confines of Kosovska Mitrovica's Cafe Pelivan,
stall-holder Milkovic Dragoljub said his fellow-Serbs will simply
back the winner, following a local tradition of backing a
strongman.
The grinning 53-year-old cheerfully admits that he backed then
president Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslav federal presidential
elections in September, and just as cheerfully confirms that this
time he will back supporters of Milosevic's successor, reformist
Vojislav Kostunica.
"No-one can compare with Kostunica. He is strong, good-looking,
intelligent, patriotic and a nationalist, but a moderate
nationalist," he explains, as French UN peacekeepers huddle around a
brazier in the street outside.
"He has opened the door to Europe to us, to our friends in the
West. We need him to talk to our friends in England and France."
The cafe's dark interior, in stark contrast to the sunshine
outside, underlines the fact that more than 17 months after the end
of the Kosovo conflict the province's UN administration can still
not ensure electricity supplies.
For the Kosovo Serbs the vote has a dual purpose. To choose
their political masters in Belgrade, but also to reaffirm Serbian
sovereignty in a province where the ethnic Albanian majority is
hellbent on turning international rule into the first step on the
road to independence.
And, after 17 months in which northern Mitrovica, the Serb part
of this ethnically divided town, has been a centre of often violent
opposition to the international presence, the voters want a Serbian
government which can talk to the West.
Merima Cekic, 23, has every reason to want a strong, reformist
government to return normality to the region.
A qualified town planner, specialising in traffic flow, she now
trafficks cigarettes on Mitrovica's bustling main street.
Cekic, a Serb speaking Bosniak or Muslim Slav, admits that her
electoral choice is based on who she thinks will win.
"Kostunica, it's going to be Kostunica," she declares.
The tattered election posters and overlapping graffiti slogans
remaining from the September campaign, during which Kostunica was
pelted with rotten produce by an angry mob in the square just
outside Cafe Pelevin, are a testament to changing local loyalties.
But the town has always been united in one ideal: "Kosovo is
Serbia."
"Kosovo has always been Serbian and always will be. Our churches
annd monasteries are here. It's as if someone asked the Jews to give
up Jerusalem," Dragoljub says.
South of the heavily guarded bridge over the river Ibar, the
ethnic Albanians could not disagree more.
They will not vote, and one of their nationalist parties has
called for Saturday to be a day of protest against the Serb claim on
what they too see as their homeland, and theirs alone.