July 01, 2000
Kosovo municipal poll to be held under proportional representation
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, July 10 (AFP) -
Kosovo's municipal elections will be held in October under a system of proportional representation, the OSCE ambassador to the province said Monday, declaring it Kosovo's "first free, fair and informed democratic test."
The use of proportional representation for polls in Kosovo's 30 municipalities had been fiercely opposed by some political parties but the system was chosen as the only practical way to organise a poll this year, said Daan Everts at the Pristina headquarters of Kosovo's UN administration.
"If we had more time we could look at more options. The simple fact is that October is election month. There is a lot of pressure both from inside Kosovo and the international community to hold the poll by then," he said.
Everts also announced that, following what he described as an "ambitious" decision by the province's UN administrator Bernard Kouchner, a third of those named among the first 15 candidates on each party's list must be women.
"We have used this before in Bosnia and it has made a massive change to local politics there. Kosovo is blazing a trail, many democracies are lagging behind on this," he said.
The municipal councillors will serve for a term of two years, he said.
The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe has launched a drive to encourage people living in Kosovo to sign up to a civil register of its inhabitants.
By July 6, 879,137 people had been signed up to this list from an estimated population of 1.9 million, the OSCE said.
Those registering and eligible to vote are also being put on an electoral roll, but the vast majority of Kosovo's Serbian minority have refused to take part. Only "several hundred" from among the 100,000 Serbs remaining in the province have registered, according to the OSCE.
Everts said he had held a series of meetings with Serb community leaders to try to persuade them to take part in the poll.
Many of Kosovo's Serbs have fiercely opposed voter registration, branding it an attempt to legitimise a separate ethnic Albanian state.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that some 210,000 non-Albanians, most of them Serbs, have left Kosovo since the UN adminsitration took over in June last year.
Everts said he had 30 mobile voter registration centres ready to go into Serb-controlled areas to allow these people to participate in the poll, but that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's government in Belgrade had so far refused them access.
"Belgrade is very, very negative about anything that encourages democracy in Kosovo," he said.
Everts said he had warned Serb leaders that if their supporters did not turn out to vote, the parts of Kosovo where their communities are still the majority could end up with ethnic Albanian-led local councils.
The choice of a proportional system, which would not prejudice a future decision on how to conduct province-wide elections, would strengthen the hand of Kosovo's smaller parties, Everts said.
The vote would be on an "open list" under which electors can choose to either back the party of their choice or indicate an individual preferred candidate, Everts said.
"Using an open list had made the organisation of the poll more complicated, but local parties said they would prefer this system. Many Kosovars will vote for people, not parties," he said.
Two major ethnic Albanian parties -- the LDK of Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo's "president" under an unrecognised parallel government before the UN arrived, and the PDK of Hashim Thaci, ex-political leader of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army -- opposed the use of proportional representation, Everts admitted.
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