[ALBSA-Info] INTERVIEW-Kosovo elections seen in October-OSCE

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

INTERVIEW-Kosovo elections seen in October-OSCE

By Beth Potter

  
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, March 2 (Reuters) - The head of the international group 
charged with running elections in Kosovo pointed on Friday to October as the 
likely date for a ballot for a provisional assembly. 

The exact date will be determined by how long it takes to register Kosovo 
Serbs and the sort of electoral system chosen, said Daan Everts, head of the 
mission in Kosovo of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe 
(OSCE). 

"The safest is to say October," Everts told Reuters in an interview when 
asked to give an election date. 

"If there's massive international registration, it would affect the timeline. 
We would not be able to have elections this year," he said, referring to 
people from Kosovo living abroad. 

Kosovo's Albanian majority wants elections soon to give them more of the 
autonomy they have been promised since NATO's 1999 bombing campaign that 
ended repressive Serbian policies in the internationally-run Yugoslav 
province. 

But Serbian officials have expressed fear such elections could be seen as a 
springboard towards independence from Yugoslavia. 

SERB OBJECTIONS 

In Belgrade, a member of Yugoslavia's new reformist leadership said the time 
was not yet right for such a vote. 

"We believe there are no conditions for real elections in Kosovo, the whole 
region is more than unstable, politically dangerous, it is a powder keg," 
said Yugoslav Telecommunications Minister Boris Tadic, a deputy leader of the 
Democratic Party. 

"As long as we still have terrorist attacks on members of our ethnic group 
there are no conditions for political action of Serb political parties in 
Kosovo, there are no conditions for objective and normal elections," Tadic 
told a news conference. 

Seventy-five thousand minority Serbs boycotted Kosovo's first post-war 
municipal elections last October partly out of protest at their isolation in 
NATO-shielded ghettos and did not register for the vote, unlike the 
province's ethnic Albanians. 

But Everts said Belgrade's new reformist government had sent general signals 
that it wants those Serbs to register now. 

Yugoslav and Serbian authorities as well as Western powers all oppose 
independence for Kosovo. 

The United Nations Security Council resolution which ended the Kosovo 
conflict is ambiguous on whether the territory remains part of Serbia. But it 
stresses the sovereignty of Yugoslavia, of which Serbia is the dominant 
republic. 

Everts said a provisional self-government body would not be able to make 
decisions about the final status of Kosovo and that defence and foreign 
affairs would also be off limits. 

"That would be outside their power," Everts said. 

The United Nation's Kosovo governor, Denmark's Hans Haekkerup, on Thursday 
asked the OSCE's permanent council in Vienna to step up election 
preparations. 

Haekkerup also stressed that a legal framework for a provisional Kosovo 
government must be in place before the vote. 

One of the main issues on the table is how Serbs and other minorities will be 
included in such a government, Everts said.