Election violence deals setback to Macedonia
Macedonia's aspirations for joining the European Union and NATO suffered a heavy blow Sunday after parliamentary elections in the poor Balkan country turned bloody, with one person shot and killed and nine wounded in the country's ethnic Albanian areas.
The vote had been seen as a test of Macedonia's democratic credentials as it seeks to join the EU, the world's biggest trading bloc, while overcoming a recent rebuff in its attempt to join NATO. Instead, Macedonia emerged as a new problem child of the Balkans, with the elections marred by violence between rival ethnic Albanian groups and allegations of fraud, including broken or missing ballot boxes and stolen voting materials.
Ivica Bocevski, a government spokesman, said by telephone that 13 people had been arrested after clashes in Albanian areas.
He said the State Election Commission had also suspended voting in at least 17 polling stations because of irregularities. He said there would be a rerun of elections in polling stations where intimidation, violence and ballot rigging had taken place.
"We will not allow any group or individual to jeopardize democracy in this country," he said, emphasizing that irregularities had occurred in only 1 per cent of the 2,900 polling stations across the country.
But international independent election monitors said the abuses were far more widespread. Denis McShane a former Europe minister in the government of former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, was in the capital, Skopje, on Sunday as a monitor for the Council of Europe. He said new elections would need to be called for the vote to have any legitimacy.
"This vote is a tragedy for supporters of Macedonia's EU and trans-Atlantic future," he said. "Nobody can form a government on the basis of an election in which police have stuffed ballot boxes and thugs are attacking polling stations."
Reuters reported that voting had stopped in the town of Aracinovo, near Skopje, after a gun battle. It said police officers went to the town after local voting monitors reported the arrival of men with machine guns. They came under fire and retaliated, killing one gunman and wounding two.
The police said the violence was the result of fighting between rival ethnic Albanian political parties, the Democratic Union for Integration and the Democratic Party of Albanians, which are fighting for the vote of the Albanian minority in Macedonia. The two rival parties have been at loggerheads since 2006, when the DUI won the most Albanian votes in parliamentary elections but was left out of a coalition government in favor of the DPA.
The violence Sunday was the worst since 2001, when ethnic Albanians fought a six-month insurgency for more rights for ethnic Albanians, and an all-out civil war was averted by the West using the lure of NATO and EU membership to press guerrillas to disarm.
The irregularities of the election could not come at a worse time for Macedonia, a poor country of two million people on the Balkans' southern fringe that has been seeking to buttress its Western credentials after a series of recent setbacks. In April, Greece blocked Macedonia's NATO bid after a protracted battle over the name that Macedonia shares with a Greek province. Athens insists Macedonia should be known by its formal name, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or Fyrom.
The conservative party of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski has played on Macedonia's nationalist pride over the battle with Greece, and analysts predict that he will win the elections, with or without a recount.
The country's EU aspirations have also lagged behind those of its neighbors as it has struggled to live up to the EU's standards of rule of law while failing to modernize its economy sufficiently.
Analysts said the election showed that the West needed to expand its scrutiny and oversight of Macedonia or risk allowing the country to destabilize the Balkans.
"These are the worst elections we have ever had in our history as an independent state," said Biljana Vankovska, professor of politics at the University of Skopje. "The West is partly to blame because it has not been tough enough in the past and has turned a blind eye to violence in past elections."
Vankovska said she feared that the violence perpetrated by the country's ethnic Albanian minority could fan tensions with ethnic Macedonians because of resentment that interethnic clashes between Albanians were stunting the country's progress.
Sadi Bexheti, director of the Albanian University in the ethnic-Albanian area of Tetovo, blamed the violence on a gun culture in the ethnic Albanian areas, which he said were lagging other wealthier parts of the country.
"There are too many guns, too much violence - it has got to stop," he said. "The problem is only in the Albanian community. Things now could become more difficult for Albanians here."
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