Macedonia hopes to avoid violence in vote re-run

By Matt Robinson

SKOPJE, June 15 (Reuters) - Macedonia holds a partial re-run of parliamentary elections on Sunday, hoping to avoid a repeat of violence that marred the original vote and could delay its bid to join the European Union.

Around 10 percent of the population have the chance to cast votes, mainly in ethnic Albanian areas where fraud, intimidation, and a fatal shootout affected the June 1 ballot.

The re-run will not change the winner of the election -- Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski's conservative VMRO-DPMNE -- but could decide which of the two main Albanian parties claims first place among the country's 500,000 Albanians.

"There is no way around it, voting day must be peaceful," a senior Western diplomat told Reuters this week. "The people should be given a chance to go to the polls without fear. Anything less would be a huge setback that will isolate the country."

The European Union is determined to keep the former Yugoslav republic firmly on the path to membership -- particularly after Greece in April blocked an invitation for Macedonia to join NATO in a row over the country's chosen name, which is the same as Greece's northernmost province.

The snub fuelled nationalist sentiments in Macedonia, which Gruevski rode to victory on June 1 with the healthiest parliamentary majority in more than a decade.

But election monitors said the government had failed to halt campaign violence among Albanians, and to ensure voting went peacefully. In the worst incident, one person was killed in a shootout in the village of Aracinovo.

The monitors said their final verdict would depend on the government addressing the election's failings, and the conduct of the re-run.

Macedonia came to the brink of all-out ethnic civil war in 2001, but NATO and EU diplomacy pursuaded Albanian guerrillas to disarm and enter politics, in exchange for greater rights.

The West is on the alert for signs of fresh tensions, months after Albanians in neighbouring Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. Macedonia's 25 percent Albanian minority is divided between two hostile parties with links to armed groups.

Gruevski will pick one of them -- either Ali Ahmeti's Democratic Union for Integration or Menduh Thaci's Democratic Party of Albanians -- as a coalition partner to bolster his majority in the 120-seat parliament.

The country hopes to secure a date to begin accession talks with the EU later this year.

(Editing by Matthew Tostevin)