Commission to Screen Ballots in Yugoslavia

Voters in today’s crucial elections will be forced to hand over their marked ballots to ruling party officials in what the opposition calls another attempt to scare off people planning to vote against President Slobodan Milosevic.

The state-controlled electoral commission announced the unprecedented move Saturday afternoon, claiming in a statement that the measure will guard against a foreign plot to stuff ballot boxes to ensure an opposition victory over Milosevic.

The commission, which is stacked with officials from Milosevic’s ruling Socialist Party and its allies, said the “special procedure at the presidential poll” will require voters to open their ballots before casting them so that officials can check whether another ballot is hidden inside.

“Foreign elements who orchestrate subversive activity have prepared a sabotage plan,” said the commission’s statement, which was read on state-run television. The opposition called the commission’s decision a blatant violation of the right to a secret ballot that will especially intimidate opposition sympathizers in towns and villages where they fear being singled out for retaliation by Milosevic supporters.

Zarko Korac, a politician in the 18-party coalition supporting Milosevic’s main rival, Vojislav Kostunica, said the commission also was creating a pretext to cancel some of today’s ballots in a desperate bid to make sure Milosevic wins.

“They want to claim that we stuffed the ballots, and that gives them the opportunity to annul the results at some polling stations,” Korac, leader of the Social Democratic Union, said in an interview in the capital, Belgrade.

“It remains to be seen how many people will get scared away,” he added. “This is another blow against us. But we still think our candidate [Kostunica] has a big enough advantage” to win.

Korac is convinced that Milosevic can’t possibly falsify enough ballots to get a majority in this first round of voting, but many analysts have said that the Yugoslav leader is determined to make sure he doesn’t have to challenge Kostunica in a runoff.

The commission’s election eve announcement came soon after Belgrade ordered the army to guard polling booths in Montenegro, Serbia’s weaker, pro-Western neighbor in what’s left of the Yugoslav federation. The army will deploy 700 federal troops, out of an estimated 20,000 stationed in Montenegro, to guarantee “regularity of voting,” an army statement said. By using the army in an election day show of force, Milosevic risks setting off a dangerous confrontation between his soldiers and Montenegrin police loyal to President Milo Djukanovic, who wants independence for the republic.

Montenegrin Justice Minister Dragan Soc told the Associated Press that the republic’s police wouldn’t stand aside and let the Yugoslav army take control of polling stations.

“There can’t be any agreement with the army,” Soc said. “Their aim is to keep our police as far away as possible from the polling stations” and “attempt to intimidate [people] and demonstrate force.”

The U.S. and other Western governments have long warned that if Milosevic feels his hold on power slipping, he may try to provoke a conflict in Montenegro. With a population of about 800,000, the republic is badly split between supporters of independence and those who want to remain in Yugoslavia, and if a civil war erupted here, it could be one of the bloodiest in the destruction of the former Yugoslavia.

Despite pressure from Washington to participate in today’s elections, Djukanovic’s party and its allies are boycotting the vote. After years locked in a standoff with Milosevic, most Montenegrins have grown accustomed to threats and counter-threats, and there was no hint Saturday that tensions were rising here in Budva, a coastal resort town on the Adriatic Sea.

But in Belgrade, capital of the republic of Serbia as well as of Yugoslavia, there were reports of increasing nervousness among ordinary people as state-run radio and television bombarded them with stories of foreign conspiracies to invade Yugoslavia with mercenaries, or to rig the election to install a pro-Western government.

In the broadest crackdown on international media coverage since the North Atlantic Treaty Organization began 78 days of bombing in March 1999, Milosevic’s officials have refused visas to most foreign journalists. About 20 reporters were reportedly expelled from Belgrade on Friday. Many foreign journalists have come to Montenegro to cover the election because Djukanovic allows them into Yugoslavia in defiance of Milosevic, whose soldiers are under standing orders to arrest any found here without valid visas.

Also Saturday, Deputy Foreign Minister Miroslav Milosevic informed Western diplomats in Belgrade of what he claimed was an opposition plan to set up a “government-in-exile” in Montenegro and ask for recognition from Washington and European governments, independent Radio B2-92 reported. The station is one of several that Milosevic has closed down during the past several months in a relentless drive to silence opposition voices, but B2-92 has managed to keep reporting through its Web page and via satellite.

More than 7.8 million people are eligible to vote in today’s elections for president, representatives in two houses of parliament and local government offices. Pollsters say a low turnout would favor Milosevic, who has relied for more than a decade on a powerful party machine to mobilize his legions of supporters as their country disintegrated around them.

Today’s vote is the first time Yugoslavia’s president will be chosen in a direct poll. Under the previous constitution, which Milosevic rewrote in July so he could run for a second four-year term, the president was elected by parliament.

Independent polls have shown Milosevic anywhere from 6 to 20 percentage points behind Kostunica, an uncharismatic former law professor who has emerged as the surprise front-runner by combining moderate Serbian nationalism with attacks on corruption and Western policy toward the Balkans.

Because Milosevic has barred independent election monitors representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the opposition hopes that its volunteers will catch any fraud. Kostunica’s coalition also plans to announce its own unofficial ballot count tonight and has asked supporters to attend rallies in towns and cities across the country, in what it calls the “Squares of Truth.”