Moderate Claims Party Victory in Kosovo Vote

Moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova claimed a sweeping victory Sunday for his party in Kosovo’s first democratic elections and said it is time for the province to become independent of Yugoslavia.

The first official results from Saturday’s municipal vote will not be released until today, but based on his party’s monitoring of the ballot count, Rugova declared victory in two-thirds of Kosovo’s towns and cities.

Rugova’s main political rival, former guerrilla commander Hashim Thaci, did not comment Sunday. But a broad defeat for his party would raise fears of a political vendetta against Rugova’s party officials, several of whom were killed or wounded in the run-up to the elections.

If the official count confirms Rugova’s claim that his Democratic League of Kosovo won 60% of the vote throughout Kosovo, it would mark a stunning political comeback for a man who led a failed campaign of peaceful resistance against Serbian rule. Kosovo is still formally a province of Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two republics.

Rugova, an intellectual educated at France’s prestigious Sorbonne, was widely criticized here for shaking hands with former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in the early days of NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign last year to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo.

At the time, he was in effect a prisoner with his family in his Pristina home and was clearly under duress when he went to Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, to meet with Milosevic and call for an end to the fighting.

Rugova--whose party campaigned for seats in local assemblies under the slogan “For the Future of Kosovo and Independence”--offered no apologies after the war ended, and most voters apparently forgave him.

Like most voters, Rugova saw the massive, peaceful turnout in the local elections as a kind of referendum on independence.

“This election had both a local and national context--which is independence for Kosovo,” Rugova told reporters Sunday.

“I am for straightforward, formal recognition of Kosovo,” he added, arguing that it should happen while the present U.N. administration and foreign peacekeepers are in control.

“Today or tomorrow,” he continued. “For me, better today.”

Almost all of Kosovo’s minority Serbian voters boycotted the elections to protest continuing attacks on Serbs by members of the ethnic Albanian majority and what many of them see as the United Nations’ failure to ensure that the province remains part of Yugoslavia in accordance with a Security Council resolution.

Bernard Kouchner, the top U.N. official in Kosovo, said he believes that Kosovo Serbs regret their boycott. He plans to appoint Serbian representatives to local councils in areas where Serbs still live. Kouchner said he may also hold fresh elections in the few municipalities where Serbs form the majority.

Neither Rugova nor Thaci was a candidate Saturday, but they are likely to run for the territory’s new assembly in balloting expected next year. Kouchner still has not decided when to hold the general elections, when Kosovo’s cry for independence is likely to be much louder and potentially more dangerous.

Yugoslavia’s new president, Vojislav Kostunica, has made it clear that he will try to prevent independence for Kosovo. With Serbs still dominant in the mineral-rich north, many ethnic Albanians fear that the peacekeeping force led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is overseeing the partition of Kosovo.

Rugova led a decade-long passive resistance struggle against Serbian rule in Kosovo that won praise from Western governments but won the territory’s ethnic Albanians little more than increased repression under Milosevic.

The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, took up arms against Serbian forces in what the first fighters called an effort to wake up a population whom they believed Rugova had lulled to sleep.

When an all-out civil war erupted at the end of February 1998, the KLA quickly rose from a small guerrilla force condemned as “terrorists” by Washington to a large army of “freedom fighters.”

In just a year, it managed to draw NATO’s overwhelming force onto its side, and the defeat of Milosevic’s troops made Saturday’s first free vote possible.

With open support from Washington, Thaci transformed the KLA into a political party, called the Democratic Party of Kosovo, whose campaign slogan was “We Remember the Glory and We Build the Future.” Yet the guerrilla heroes apparently lost out to Rugova’s moderates in all but the most hard-line KLA strongholds.

Rugova’s party claimed majorities in Pristina, Kosovo’s provincial capital, as well as the divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica and most other major towns.