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Serbia's Reformers Celebrate As Milosevic Party Licks Wounds
by Victoria Stegic
BELGRADE (AFP) - Serbia's reformers celebrated Sunday their landslide victory in parliamentary polls, while the party of Slobodan Milosevic licked its wounds as it was swept from its last bastions of power.
The Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) won 65% of the votes in Saturday's polls, giving them 178 of Serbia's powerful assembly's 250 seats, the electoral commission said, citing preliminary figures based on 56% of the votes so far counted.
The opposition victory, which had been widely expected, was the culmination of the process begun in September when the DOS's Vojislav Kostunica pushed Milosevic from the federal presidency.
The result gives the new authorities a strong mandate to start rebuilding the country, impoverished by years of sanctions, corruption and conflict.
Milosevic's Socialists suffered their second resounding defeat in three months, garnering only around 14%, or 36 seats.
Unlike September's federal polls, when Milosevic sparked a mass uprising as he tried to suppress his electoral defeat, the party immediately acknowledged their fall.
One party official said Milosevic was "calm and cool" when he heard the bad news, radio B92 reported.
The Socialists were in "unstoppable decline", losing another 20% of the votes since September, political analyst Vladimir Goati said.
By contrast, DOS leaders said their share of the vote had swollen by 300,000 in three months.
Trying to put on a brave face, the party that Milosevic founded a decade ago said it was still the largest single party in parliament, as the DOS is an alliance of 18 partners, many of which might have failed to cross the five percent assembly threshold alone.
"This will be a government which fights for the people and not for itself, and the people will soon see the improvement," said DOS leader Zoran Djindjic, who is set to become Serbia's prime minister.
"The most important thing is to form this government and put it to work as soon as possible, not to waste time ... Our government will be transparent, incorrupt and honest," said Djindjic.
Kostunica, acknowledging the "immense" task ahead for his alliance, said the Serbian people had given the new government the mandate to start rebuilding the country.
Serbia faces a cold winter of fuel shortages and power outages despite massive international assistance, and DOS leaders have warned that the public could show its discontent with strikes in the coming months.
It also has to patch up frayed ties with Montenegro, which has threatened to bail out of the Yugoslav federation unless its constitutional status is improved after moves by Milosevic to sideline the tiny republic.
The outlook on that front looked promising after Montenegrin Prime Minister Filip Vujanovic said he was "convinced the new government in Serbia will be a good partner" for talks on the federation, formed in 1992.
The DOS likewise faces a huge challenge in U.N.-run Kosovo, the southern province whose ethnic Albanian majority boycotted the polls, staging protests that the elections even took place in the territory they say should be independent.
Kosovo's ethnic unrest has spilled over the boundary into southern Serbia, where ethnic Albanian separatists are fighting for the region to be united with an independent Kosovo.
Djindjic blamed public discontent with the crisis in the south for the surprise showing for the party of slain paramilitary leader Arkan, which appeared to have just scraped over the five percent threshold into parliament.
Arkan, like Milosevic indicted by a U.N. court for war crimes, was gunned down in January in a Belgrade hotel lobby.
His Serbian Unity Party was set to take 14 seats, the electoral commission said, while another ultra-nationalist group, the Serbian Radical Party, would have 22 deputies.
Western officials warned of the danger of the lurking nationalism that led the former Yugoslavia into a decade of conflict and disintegration.
"The forces of extreme nationalism are still alive and the danger they represent should not be forgotten or underestimated," said Adrian Severin, special envoy for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Despite the warning, the OSCE said the poll had met democratic standards.
Although final official results will not be released until Wednesday, reformers are already hailing the outcome as the end of a painful era.
Milosevic's party was the heir to Yugoslavia's former communist regime, which ruled since 1945.
The polls are seen by many as the final chapter in the transformation of the face of Eastern Europe started by the fall of the Berlin Wall 11 years ago.
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