Milosevic Crony Is Declared Winner of Serbia Election

Milan Milutinovic, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s handpicked candidate, was declared the winner Monday of a fraud-marred election for the presidency of Serbia.

Opponents immediately cried foul. But this is a fraud international officials are not likely to protest too vociferously. The reason: Milutinovic’s rival was an unpredictable ultranationalist whom the West refuses to recognize.

Weary Serbs went to the polls Sunday for the fourth time in 2 1/2 months to elect a president. The previous balloting was invalidated because no candidate received more than 50% of the vote or because turnout was too low.

On Monday, the official Serbian election commission reported that just over half of the electorate had turned out Sunday, with Milutinovic taking 58% of the vote to 38% for Vojislav Seselj, a former paramilitary commander and leader of the Serbian Radical Party.

At a cocktail party Monday night in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, Milosevic congratulated Milutinovic as the new president of Serbia. “I wish him much success,” Milosevic said.

The election of his man cements Milosevic’s near-absolute hold on power in the Balkan state and seals his remarkable recovery from the political turmoil of a year ago, when daily demonstrations threatened the decade-old Socialist regime. Sunday’s result also dealt further damage to Serbia’s already weak, corrupt political system, which seems to withstand all pressure for reform.

International election monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe blasted the election as “fundamentally flawed.” Aside from overwhelming bias in the state-run media in favor of Milutinovic, there were numerous reports of ballot-box stuffing and violence at the polls.

The most egregious cases occurred in the Kosovo region, which is largely populated by Albanians, who refused to participate in the election. There are fewer than 20,000 Serbian voters in Kosovo, yet the official results showed more than 100,000 ballots cast there.

Seselj said he would protest the election. In October, Robert Gelbard, the Clinton administration’s senior envoy for the Balkans, branded Seselj a fascist and said the U.S. would not work with him. Most Western embassies in Belgrade won’t have contact with him.

Seselj--the brusque, intelligent mayor of the Belgrade suburb of Zemun--organized paramilitary forces accused of killing and driving out non-Serbs from villages in neighboring Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina early in the Balkan war. He has threatened to use “any means” to reconquer territory that has seceded from Yugoslavia. His election would have deepened Serbia’s warmongering image and international isolation--a notion that Milutinovic used effectively in his campaign.

Analysts in Belgrade said Milosevic and his leftist coalition partners, after three rounds of inconclusive balloting, apparently calculated that they could risk fraud to ensure the victory of someone seen as the lesser of two evils.

Milutinovic, 55, has until now been Yugoslavia’s foreign minister. He has impressed visiting diplomats as an old-style Communist apparatchik who is nothing if not loyal to Milosevic. Barred from a third term as Serbian president, Milosevic last summer made himself president of the Yugoslav federation, which is composed of Serbia and Montenegro.

But he needed a faithful servant to replace him in the Serbian presidency and to help him transfer more powers to the Yugoslav top office.