Both Sides Claim Victory in Yugoslavia

As unofficial results from national elections trickled in through the night, supporters of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his chief rival, Vojislav Kostunica, both claimed victory in the early hours today.

But after a day of voting that the opposition said was rife with tampering and intimidation, many here were still doubting that Milosevic would accept the results if he lost.

Opposition hopes surged soon after midnight as the Serbian Radical Party, headed by key Milosevic ally and ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj said its members on the election commission were reporting Kostunica ahead in the ballot count.

Suddenly, people were openly thinking the unthinkable--that Milosevic might actually be forced from power. Then, just before 1 a.m., the neo-Communist party headed by Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic, said the Yugoslav president was headed for reelection in the first round of voting.

“According to the latest data, Slobodan Milosevic has won 54.8%,” said Ivan Markovic, a top official of the Yugoslav United Left party.

Srdjan Bogosavljevic, a respected pollster, said the preliminary results indicated that Milosevic supporters had failed to rig the vote in his favor but that their failure might not stop him from ignoring the results and claiming victory.

“They cannot steal the elections [through fraud], but they can simply declare victory,” Bogosavljevic said in an interview in Belgrade, capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia, the larger of its two republics. “They obviously didn’t come up with something clever.”

Early today, Kostunica predicted victory for himself.

The claims and counterclaims were based on fewer than 1 million votes. There were more than 7.8 million eligible voters, however, and Bogosavljevic said the results could shift dramatically as more ballots in Milosevic’s rural strongholds were tallied.

The federal election commission said no official results would be announced until later today at the earliest. About 70% of eligible voters went to the polls, according to unofficial estimates, and analysts said such a strong showing would favor Kostunica.

The conflicting claims of victory followed accusations of widespread irregularities, including the arrest and assault of monitors trying to guard against vote-rigging.

“It is worse then ever,” said Marko Blagojevic, a management board member at the independent Center for Free Elections and Democracy. “I don’t think elections like this were ever held anywhere, ever since the Stone Age.”

Milosevic refused to let internationally recognized election monitoring groups into the country, barred most foreign journalists and then expelled or arrested more than 20 such reporters who were in Serbia to cover the vote.

Instead, Belgrade invited 250 carefully screened election monitors from 52 countries, who Milosevic’s government said were sufficient to certify the vote as free and fair.

Blagojevic’s group deployed 7,500 of its own monitors at polling stations across the country and cataloged a litany of violations.

Serbian police arrested two of the monitors in the southern city of Nis, an opposition stronghold, as they tried to photograph a member of Milosevic’s Socialist Party campaigning outside polling stations in violation of the election law.

Calling the group part of a foreign plot to remove Milosevic, Belgrade refused to grant the volunteer monitors official credentials, which meant that few of them were able to report irregularities as eyewitnesses. Rather, they interviewed voters outside the polling stations with standardized questionnaires.

Many of the items in the volunteer election monitors’ long list of complaints were relatively minor problems given the large turnout. But monitors were not able to check balloting in some of the places where Serbian analysts had said election fraud could most likely occur, such as military barracks and refugee shelters.

Milosevic, an indicted war crimes suspect, also took many of the steps that made a free and fair election impossible long before Sunday’s vote, the opposition charged.

For months, his police had been closing down independent broadcasters, arresting and harassing opposition activists, and using the army and claims of foreign plots to destabilize Yugoslavia to stir up what his opponents called a “war psychosis.”

Yugoslavia’s state-controlled election commission announced on the eve of Sunday’s vote that people would have to let officials open marked ballots to ensure that extra ballot papers prepared by alleged foreign conspirators weren’t hidden inside.

Although the ballot inspections weren’t carried out in Belgrade, members of the election commission, which is dominated by Milosevic loyalists, routinely violated the right to a secret ballot in most other parts of the country, Blagojevic of the Center for Free Elections and Democracy charged.

In most cases, he claimed, local election board members made it obvious that they were looking to see which candidates voters had circled on their ballots. For example, the officials held ballots up to the light, claiming that they were checking what kind of paper they were printed on, he said.

He also said the police presence had increased in many towns around polling stations, in an apparent effort to intimidate opposition supporters.

Mass boycotts by voters in the republic of Montenegro and in Kosovo, a majority ethnic Albanian province of Serbia under United Nations control, also left a large number of unused ballots that the opposition said Milosevic could easily use to steal a victory.

In Montenegro, Serbia’s smaller, pro-Western neighbor in the Yugoslav federation, most voters heeded their government’s call for an election boycott. Yet about 18,300 Montenegrins claimed they were sick and cast absentee ballots, according to Montenegro’s health minister, Miomir Mugosa.

That was more than 4% of the republic’s 444,130 registered voters, and since there were no reports of an epidemic, Milosevic’s opponents saw the high number of “sick voters” as another sign pointing to massive vote fraud.

Milosevic has won past elections on the strength of claimed landslides for him and his party from among the 2 million Kosovars--the vast majority of whom refuse to vote in Serbian elections. Fewer than 100,000 Serbs reside in Kosovo, according to official estimates, yet Serbian opposition forces reported ahead of the vote that Milosevic claimed more than 1 million Kosovars were registered for the election.

The U.N. Mission in Kosovo deployed 230 two-person teams early Sunday to check every one of the 489 polling places identified by either the Milosevic regime or the opposition as having been designated for voting in the province. Bernard Kouchner, the U.N. special representative in Kosovo, said his observers had seen possible voters entering only about 260 of the listed sites.

“Our teams witnessed a total of 44,167 people visiting polling sites in Serbian areas,” Kouchner reported, emphasizing that this was the “upper limit” of possible votes, since those who watched the comings and goings had no way of knowing who actually cast ballots.

In the Serb-populated village of Klokot, in a volatile southern region of Kosovo, “just about everyone who lives here voted,” said Pfc. Michael Reeves of Arkansas, a peacekeeper posted atop his armored vehicle for the day in the dusty street outside the community’s polling place. Like all others in the effort to keep an eye on the vote, he said the ethnic Albanian majority that surrounds Klokot had left the Serbs in peace.

Meanwhile, in the Montenegrin coastal town of Kotor--a crossroads between East and West for more than a thousand years--the outdoor cafes were a lot busier than the local polling station.

Just under 13% of the town’s registered voters had bothered to cast ballots by the time polls closed at 8 p.m.

Six men from Kotor’s election board, most of them supporters of Milosevic and his allies, sat at a long table under a stuffed boar’s head in the Kotor Society of Hunters’ office.

At midday, the election officials were staring at the wall, waiting for voters.

According to local residents, one of the men was a captain in Milosevic’s military police.

Luka Frayevic, 25, sat on the stone stairs next to the polling station, where he and some friends had agreed to meet and keep an eye on the election officials, who included his former school principal. Frayevic refused to go in and cast his ballot.

“If I voted, I would wound Montenegro,” he said through a translator. “For us, these are not legitimate elections.”

In Kosovo, Kouchner said the U.N. and European Union agencies involved in the monitoring exercise had no information about how, where or by whom the ballots would be counted, and he repeated the oft-cited quip of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that “it’s not the number of votes that counts but who is counting the votes.”

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Times staff writer Carol J. Williams in Klokot contributed to this report.