Word: serbe
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...Yugoslavia's presidential election, but not the full extent of his defeat - and that sets the stage for a dramatic showdown with an opposition ready to take to the streets to claim its victory. Preliminary official results announced Tuesday put opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica eight points ahead of the Serb strongman, but deny him the 50 percent margin required to claim first-round victory. Opposition leaders scoff at the figures released by Milosevic's electoral commission, confidently claiming that independent officials monitoring the count at local ballot stations confirm that Kostunica won 55 percent of the vote. Reading Milosevic...
...Still, the tide has turned dramatically against Milosevic. If even the official election results reflect a defeat by the opposition, it may be only a matter of time before the military, business and political elites that have kept the Serb strongman in power begin trying to secure their own positions in a post-Milosevic Yugoslavia. Already the rabid nationalists of Vojislav Seselj's Radical Party - once the most bellicose backers of Milosevic's military misadventures of the past decade - have jumped ship, proclaiming a Kostunica victory and urging that it be respected. Kostunica is no NATO shill - he even suggested...
Stealing an election in Serbia isn't easy, even for a felon as seasoned as Slobodan Milosevic - and that makes the Serb strongman more likely to play for time, or even start another war somewhere as an excuse to hang on to power. As results poured in Monday from ballot boxes from all over what remains of Yugoslavia, the bitter winter of 1996-97 may be weighing heavily on Milosevic's mind. Weeks of massive street demonstrations in Belgrade had forced him, early in 1997, to concede city hall to the opposition party chosen by the voters...
...relied to keep him in power may now conclude that he has become a liability. Kostunica may well turn out to be Milosevic's worst nightmare, not simply because he's more popular with voters, but also because he may be sufficiently acceptable to the military and other Serb elites to allow them to finally jettison a leader who presided over a decade of disaster. Kostunica, after all, is a nationalist - albeit comparitively moderate - and firmly opposed to NATO. He's even vowed that, if elected, he won't hand Milosevic over for trial in the Hague...
...trial," of course, was primarily a propaganda stunt designed to distract Serb voters ahead of Sunday's election, in which polls indicate they plan to deliver Milosevic a humiliating defeat at the ballot box. Still, nobody's under any illusions that the outcome of the actual vote will prevent Milosevic from declaring victory within hours of the polls' closing and, with the backing of his army, daring anyone to disagree. But the Clinton-Blair "trial" may have a more sinister intention than simply cocking a snook at the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. Now that Clinton, Albright, Blair...