Yugoslav Court Voids ‘Part of ‘ Disputed Election

The struggle for presidential power in Yugoslavia grew more confusing Wednesday night as the nation’s Constitutional Court issued a terse ruling that the opposition fears will force a new election.

The unanimous ruling on an appeal by opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica was announced in one sentence by the state-run Tanjug news service, which said the court had decided “to annul part of the electoral procedures” for the disputed Sept. 24 presidential election.

The statement did not specify which portion of the election had been voided or what action, if any, would be ordered.

The court, whose members were handpicked by President Slobodan Milosevic, promised to release a full decision today, state-run Belgrade Radio reported.

Kostunica claims the Federal Electoral Commission, which also is controlled by Milosevic loyalists, forged results of last month’s election to deny him an outright victory. The Yugoslav government has scheduled a runoff for Sunday, but the opposition leader is boycotting the vote, and Wednesday’s court ruling may cancel it altogether.

Milosevic is notorious for sowing confusion to buy time in a crisis, and Kostunica’s supporters suspect that the Constitutional Court move is just such a ploy.

“It is possible that the whole first round [of voting] will be repeated, which may delay elections for two or three months,” said Dragor Hiber, a law professor and deputy leader of the Civic Alliance, part of Kostunica’s 18-party coalition.

It’s also possible, Hiber said, that the court might annul all or part of the Sept. 24 balloting in the southern polling districts of Vranje and Prokuplje, which the opposition claims was rife with vote-rigging.

A third possibility is that the court could order a recount, Hiber said. But the opposition says the government has already burned and dumped many of the ballots from the disputed election, and it doubts that a proper recount would be anything more than a fraud.

Opposition supporters, meanwhile, won a small victory over Milosevic’s forces Wednesday when demonstrators broke through a police cordon to take back partial control of the largest coal-mining complex in Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

Just over three hours after riot police stormed the Kolubara mines, strikers driving a rusted bulldozer broke through a crowd of officers gathered on the main bridge leading into the complex.

As the police stood by, some smiling and others looking bewildered, more than 1,000 supporters of Kostunica streamed through the front gate of the massive open-pit complex.

Other Kostunica supporters later converged on the area to hear their leader speak to a large rally staged between two of the complex’s four pits.

Milosevic “is doing the sabotage,” Kostunica told a crowd of about 5,000 striking miners and protesters as they jeered the Yugoslav president. “What you are doing is the will of the people. They are breaking the constitution, and we are defending it.”

The Kolubara complex, about 25 miles south of Belgrade, the capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia, fuels one of Serbia’s main power-generating stations. The Serbian government says the strike is criminal “sabotage” because it is forcing power cuts.

But the 7,500 strikers insist that they have no other way to fight what they consider Milosevic’s theft of Kostunica’s election victory.

“This is the critical place of the whole revolution,” said Ljiljana Jovicic in an interview minutes before the strikers and their supporters broke through the police lines. “I’m just afraid of a conflict.”

Until Tuesday night, Jovicic, 35, had never been to the mines, where her husband runs the computer department. But when he joined the strikers in support of Kostunica, Jovicic “went there to help them, to express my support.”

At least one protester at the Kolubara complex struck a police officer with a bottle, and half a dozen police briefly clubbed some of the surging demonstrators. But the confrontation was mostly peaceful.

On Tuesday, a Belgrade prosecutor asked a judge to have two opposition figures and 11 striking miners arrested as threats to national security, but on Wednesday there was no sign that any of the men had been detained.

The miners strike, which began Friday night, has cut the normal stockpile of coal at nearby depots to less than half, and the reserves will run out altogether by Saturday, said Krsto Vukovic, the state-run power company’s deputy manager, at a Belgrade news conference Wednesday.

Belgrade and other major cities and towns are already suffering six-hour rolling blackouts, but the situation could get much worse if about 60,000 unionized power workers carry out a threat issued Wednesday to participate in a general strike.

Kostunica’s coalition has failed to deliver on its threat of a general strike so far. The opposition first said it would bring Serbia to a halt Monday, then switched the date to Wednesday and now says the action will occur today.

The opposition plans to bring busloads of supporters from around Serbia to Belgrade at 3 p.m. today, the deadline its leaders have set for Milosevic to admit defeat. Kostunica’s alliance has added several demands, including the resignation of top editors of the state-run media and the lifting of all charges against opposition activists.

Strikes have stopped garbage collection in Belgrade, closed many shops and disrupted numerous factories, but the civil disobedience campaign has had only scattered support, most significantly in opposition strongholds outside Belgrade.

The Yugoslav government refused to give visas to some journalists wishing to cover the country’s Sept. 24 election and its aftermath. Watson, among those denied visas, has reported on the vote from Montenegro, Serbia’s pro-Western sister republic, with the help of a stringer based in Belgrade.