Kosovo partially repeats marred parliamentary poll (2nd Roundup)

Dec 16, 2010, 18:55 GMT

Pristina, Kosovo - Kosovo election authorities on Thursday ordered a partial repeat of the Sunday's snap parliamentary election that was marred by allegations of violations and fraud.

A repeat vote will be held on January 9 in three municipalities - Drenas, Skenderaj and Decan - and several polling stations elsewhere, said the head of the central election commission Valdete Daka.

The decision was based on evidence of electoral fraud, Daka told a press conference in Pristina.

The three municipalities have a total of some 130,000 registered voters, while in Kosovo overall there are 1.6 million. On Sunday the recorded turnout in the problematic municipalities approached 100 per cent, in comparison with the 47-per-cent average Kosovo-wide.

The commission decision backed the claims of the opposition accusing Prime Minister Hashim Thaci's Democratic Party (PDK) of rigging the vote in several municipalities, but not their demand for the repeat of the entire election.

Earlier Thursday, the leading opposition party, the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), said that because of fraud the elections should be re-scheduled all over.

According to incomplete, preliminary results from the central election commission, Thaci's PDK won the most votes, collecting 33.5 per cent, ahead of the LDK with 23.6 per cent.

Along with other opposition parties, LDK accused PDK of cheating through multiple voting, particularly in Thaci's strongholds of Drenas and Skenderaj.

'Serious violations in at least seven municipalities jeopardized the election in general,' a spokesman for the LDK, Arben Gashi, told the German Press Agency dpa.

'If we want a truly democratic process, we must repeat the vote Kosovo-wide. It is not enough to repeat the election just on some municipalities,' Gashi said. He charged that 'ballots were also rigged in large numbers' elsewhere.

The third-placed Self-Determination party and the fourth-strongest, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo also complained of massive violations in Sunday's vote.

Daily Koha Ditore on Thursday however quoted election commission head Valdete Daka as saying that law envisages a repeat vote only in polling stations where irregularities were recorded.

After initially congratulating Kosovo for an incident-free election, the European Union took a neutral stance regarding the allegations of electoral fraud, saying it was waiting for all possible steps in the election process to be exhausted.

'We are waiting for the election process to conclude. It's still running its course, and we wait to see the final result before we say anything further,' EU spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic said.

'The rules need to be respected, we all recognize that, and the procedures need to take their course,' she said.

Thaci meanwhile came under additional pressure over a report by the a Council of Europe rapporteur, Dick Marty, who accused him of heading a network of organized crime responsible for smuggling heroin, weapons and even killing Serbs for illegal organs trade.

In the wake of Marty's report, the former chief war crimes prosecutor for former Yugoslavia now Swiss ambassador to Argentina, Carla del Ponte, urged the EU law-enforcing mission in Kosovo, the EULEX, to investigate allegations that Thaci was involved in the murder of Serbs for their kidneys.

Thaci on Thursday vehemently denied Marty's accusations, but they will likely hamper his plan to build the government coalition with representatives of the Serb minority, who have 10 out of the 120 seats in parliament reserved for them.

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