Milosevic’s Foes Say Only Vote Fraud Can Save Him

Faced with the strongest challenge in his 13 years of rule, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is fighting for reelection Sunday amid Western and opposition fears that he will win the only way the polls say he can: through massive vote fraud.

Milosevic is losing his almost hypnotic hold over most Serbs, who once revered him as a national hero. If he steals the election Sunday, or in a second round, Milosevic will have sacrificed his last vestige of legitimacy.

A relentless effort to silence opposing voices has left Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, with almost no independent broadcasters, a constantly harassed and splintered opposition, and leading politicians who fear for their lives.

But a former law professor and Serbian nationalist named Vojislav Kostunica has managed to rally a beaten-down people to become the front-runner in preelection polls, and Milosevic--who has been indicted by an international tribunal on war crimes charges--cannot afford to lose.

Milosevic’s government insists that independent Serbian polls, which show him between 6 and 20 percentage points behind Kostunica, are part of a Western plot to destroy Yugoslavia.

But leading Serbian pollster Srdjan Bogosavljevic has counted the votes, both real and phony, that he believes Milosevic will be able to reasonably claim Sunday and says the Yugoslav leader will fall short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff election early next month, probably against Kostunica. Two other candidates in the race are lagging far behind in the polls.

Bogosavljevic, who heads the Belgrade-based Strategic Marketing agency, said only blatant and obvious fraud would allow Milosevic to avoid a runoff. “It can only be done by annulling some results, declaring that something, somewhere, was irregular,” he said. “But it would be very difficult.”

Clinton administration officials have been vocal in their contention that fraud is likely in Sunday’s vote. “I think that Milosevic is going to do everything he can to steal the election,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Reuters news service Thursday. And on Friday, White House spokesman Joe Lockart said: “We believe that . . . the possibility of fraud is quite high and that Milosevic will do anything to hold on to power.”

The regime’s best opportunities for vote-rigging are in places closed to opposition monitors: army barracks, mental institutions and prisons; in the Serbian province of Kosovo; and in Montenegro, Yugoslavia’s smaller republic.

Milosevic has already signaled how he plans to rig the election by using phantom voters in Montenegro, whose pro-Western government is boycotting the poll, and in Kosovo, a senior U.S. official said in an interview from Washington.

Belgrade’s official voters lists include ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, who for the most part have vowed to boycott the Yugoslav election. But their ballots likely will be cast for them in favor of Milosevic, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition he not be identified, citing administration policy for diplomatic matters.

More than 1 million people in the province are on the voter lists, but Kosovo has only an estimated 100,000 Serbian residents. A total of 7.8 million people in Yugoslavia are eligible to vote.

Bound by a Security Council resolution affirming that Kosovo is part of Yugoslavia, the U.N.’s administration in the province agreed to let Belgrade set up 300 polling booths. Peacekeepers led by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will provide security.

That bizarre twist will make the U.N. and the Europeans unwitting accomplices in the fraud that likely will keep Milosevic in power, say Kosovo Albanians and other critics who question international efforts to protect Serbian voters.

“They’re going to need protection after what they’ve done to us. They wouldn’t have the guts to come out and vote if someone wasn’t guarding them,” said 19-year-old ethnic Albanian Ramadan Prekopuca, a hospital orderly in the Serbian enclave of Kosovo Polje. “What I don’t understand is what the U.N. is doing in getting involved in an election it has said it doesn’t recognize and doesn’t support.”

Officials of the United Nations, the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe plan to monitor the vote.

The ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo will hold its own elections Oct. 28, and most see Sunday’s election as an attempt by Belgrade to reassert sovereignty as the Kosovars strive for independence.

If no candidate takes more than 50% of the vote Sunday and Milosevic survives as one of the two in a runoff, he might seek to scare voters away from the second ballot to ensure a low turnout that would hurt the opposition, said Bogosavljevic, the pollster.

“With a little bit of electoral gymnastics,” he added, Milosevic could declare himself the winner with the same gall he showed in claiming Serbia’s conquest of NATO after 78 days of bombing last year.

“He declared victory over NATO, and a large number of people still believe that we did defeat NATO,” the pollster said. “Why, then, wouldn’t a large number of people believe that his party is the victor?”

Milosevic has admitted election observers from “friendly countries” while barring most foreign journalists and other independent observers, so it will be left to volunteer monitors from opposition parties to expose ballot-stuffing and other fraud.

The big question is what Yugoslavia’s Serbian majority will do about fraud this time. Exhausted and deeply cynical after a decade of war, sanctions and Milosevic’s heavy-handed rule, Serbs have gone to the streets in mass protest before, only to see their dream of democracy vanish in clouds of tear gas.

Aleksandar Tijanic, a former Serbian information minister who knows firsthand how the president’s mind works, questioned whether Kostunica and his supporters have what it takes to get rid of Milosevic.

“This is a war between those who can kill to prevent democracy from happening in Serbia and those who are not ready to die for democracy in Serbia,” Tijanic wrote last week in his column in the weekly Nezavisne Novine in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “So, what can Kostunica say to Serbia on the evening of the 24th? What would Serbs like to hear that night?”

Bogosavljevic also expects any protests against a Milosevic victory to fizzle out, especially with expectations running so high before the vote.

“They are exceptionally motivated at the moment, since most surveys predict Kostunica’s victory in the first round,” he said. “But when this victory fails to take place, I am afraid that their reaction might be apathetic.”

In late 1996, the last time Milosevic tried to deny opposition victories in local elections, protesters took to the streets and finally forced the president to back down in early 1997. Many opposition leaders then used control of city halls to enrich themselves.

Kostunica is popular now largely because he criticizes the West and isn’t corrupt, but he is a gray technocrat who has yet to show whether he can lead people to the police barricades night after night, when the truncheons and tear gas start flying.

Vuk Draskovic, a fiery leader whose popularity soared during the 1996 protests, now lives in self-exile in Montenegro and refused to join the 18-party coalition backing Kostunica. By going it alone, Draskovic is likely to split the opposition vote and help Milosevic’s ruling Socialist Party and its allies win crucial victories in local and parliamentary elections.

If Milosevic’s forces take control of several key municipalities, they would make it all the more difficult for the opposition to maintain pressure with protests.

“Milosevic will do whatever he can to prevent people from going to the streets,” the U.S. official predicted. “He may even pull some fast ones. What if he calls off the elections, for instance? What if he bans demonstrations and so forth? He’s increasingly worried. You could imagine him taking more drastic steps.”

While there are dissenting voices in the lower and middle ranks of the army, the top commanders--and, more important, the police--remain fiercely loyal to Milosevic and have already warned that they will do what is necessary to defend his regime against a popular uprising.

Just a week before the election, army Chief of Staff Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic invoked the heroic battles against the Nazis in World War II to warn that Sunday’s vote would be another “D-day when we should, practically, once again be in the first battle lines.”

“Because we will again say that the members of the Yugoslav army will do everything to preserve the freedom and their country,” Pavkovic continued. “We will not allow anybody to take away from us--in a cheap, sleazy and rotten way--our freedom and fatherland.”

But stealing an election victory could undermine Milosevic’s legitimacy enough that the soldiers might turn their guns on him, the U.S. official suggested.

“Milosevic has to worry about his army,” the official said. “He’s installed a bunch of yes-men at the top, but in the middle officer corps and among the conscripts there’s a lot of discontent.

“We have the sense from reports that there are increasing signs of dissension and questions about this guy’s leadership.”

Preelection polls are often unreliable in an autocratic state where many prefer to keep political opinions to themselves. But for the first time, poll after poll is telling Milosevic that he will lose.

One recent poll gave Milosevic only 22% support to Kostunica’s 40%. But the latest and most respected survey, published Wednesday by Bogosavljevic’s Strategic Marketing agency, puts the gap between the two at just under 6 percentage points: 32.5% for Kostunica to 26.6% for Milosevic.

Milosevic’s opponents in Serbia think that supporters of independence in Montenegro and Kosovo want him in power because his indictment last year by International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague on charges stemming from his army’s conduct in Kosovo leaves him in no position to defend Yugoslav sovereignty at, for instance, the U.N. Security Council.

Kostunica has promised that if elected, he will not hand over Milosevic for prosecution in The Hague, even though Western leaders have repeatedly said they would insist on a trial.

In July, Milosevic rewrote the constitution in a matter of hours to allow himself to run for reelection, this time by going straight to the people in a direct vote instead of being chosen by parliament.

That left the U.S. and most European governments in the unusual position of urging Yugoslavs to vote in an election that may be neither free nor fair.

The hope, the U.S. official said, is that ordinary Yugoslavs will see for themselves what a fraud Milosevic has been all along and will finally get rid of him.

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Times staff writer Carol. J. Williams in Pristina, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.