Panic Cries Foul, Calls for Fresh Elections in Serbia

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia —  Yugoslav Prime Minister Milan Panic called Monday for fresh elections, charging that fraud and manipulation gave Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and his nationalists their strong lead in early returns from Sunday’s presidential and parliamentary elections.

Foreign observers dispatched to monitor the elections backed Panic’s claims of widespread irregularities. “The electoral process was seriously flawed,” said a statement from the monitoring mission of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Unofficial results indicated that Milosevic is likely to get at least the 50% of the vote necessary to avoid a runoff against Panic, a wealthy naturalized American citizen who left his Southern California pharmaceuticals company in July to take over the government of his native country.

With about 15% of the vote counted, Milosevic was reported to have 56%, with 34% for Panic. Full results in Serbia are not expected before Thursday.

“We are confident that Milosevic is convincingly ahead of Panic and that he will win in the first round,” Socialist Party spokesman Ivica Dacic told reporters.

Panic’s office claimed, on the basis of exit polls commissioned by his campaign staff, that he was running ahead of Milosevic. But if the trend of the unofficial results carries through to the final tally, Serbia’s Socialists and their satellite ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party appear headed toward a comfortable majority in the Serbian Parliament.

The strong showing of the ultranationalists reflected a popular vote against the West. Most Serbs rejected Panic’s moderate policies of reconciliation with their former compatriots in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, where ethnic Serbian minorities have staged bloody rebellions against the independence that would sever them from the republic of Serbia.

Backed by state-run television, Milosevic has whipped up fears that the West is conspiring against the Serbs. In conservative, increasingly isolated Serbia, his message of defiance found support. Many voters opted for the strongman and his allies who pledged to defend Serbian interests instead of Panic, who promised to bring peace and return Serbia to the international community.

“The early indications leave Serbia in a state of dangerous polarization, with no chance of any policy change,” said a Western diplomat.

Some foreign envoys based in Belgrade have expressed concern that if the Yugoslav people fail to reject Milosevic, who is blamed for instigating the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, Western countries may be more inclined to intervene militarily to halt any further spread of the Balkan conflict.

President Bush and British Prime Minister John Major agreed in Washington over the weekend to press for tougher sanctions, including cutting off postal and telephone links, to pressure Serbia to stop its support for the war in Bosnia.

The surge of electoral support for ultranationalism underscores the risks confronting Serbia’s ethnic minorities, who make up one-third of the republic’s 9.8 million people. Ethnic Albanians, Hungarians and Muslims could face the same fate as Bosnia’s Slavic Muslims, most of whom have been displaced, imprisoned, abused or killed as Serbian fighters carry out their practice of “ethnic cleansing” to create purely Serbian territories.

“The nationalist lead makes remote the possibility of Milosevic leaving office without violence,” another diplomat said.

Early results indicated that the Serbian Radical Party could control as much as 30% of the 250 republic parliamentary seats. Party leader Vojislav Seselj--a Milosevic ally and commander of a heavily armed private militia accused by American officials of war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia--has called for ethnic minorities and politically suspect Serbs to be expelled from Serbia.

Seselj is almost certain to be joined in Parliament by Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan. He is a notorious Belgrade crime boss who commands a fierce paramilitary unit known as the Tigers. He was seeking to represent the Serbian province of Kosovo, where Albanians make up more than 90% of the 2 million population. Kosovo Albanians boycotted the election in protest of the brutal police state in which they are forced to live--a move that deprived Panic of a large pool of potential opposition votes.

U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger last week included Seselj and Raznatovic on the roster of suspects he proposed be brought before an international war-crimes tribunal.

Milosevic’s apparent lead came amid mounting charges of election fraud and manipulation. Even by late Monday, the electoral commission still had not released the figure for voter turnout.

Leaders of the DEPOS opposition coalition, which backed Panic in the election, said the unexpectedly large share of the vote going for Seselj’s Radicals is suspect, because the party itself has never enjoyed the popularity of its flamboyant leader.

Panic said he will seek an annulment of Sunday’s election and demand a rerun within 90 days. He said election committees in many rural areas have counted ballots for the presidential race instead of sending them to the central electoral committee where there were observers present. “This was in violation of the electoral regulations,” said the head of the CSCE observers, Jack Zetkulic.

Observers, opposition leaders and diplomats all reported numerous cases of people being deleted from voter registries, ballot box stuffing and unsealed ballot boxes.

“The elections were not fair. But we have to wait until they announce the results,” said a foreign observer. “Given the very close nature of the election results thus far, any amount of registration problems--between 5% and 10%-- might determine the outcome.”

Aside from the complaints of voting irregularities, foreign observers lambasted as grossly unfair the obvious support for Milosevic by the country’s most influential media, especially Television Serbia. The broadcast network is controlled by Milosevic supporters.