Clear winner in Macedonia vote, guns still in play
By Ellie Tzortzi
SKOPJE, June 2 (Reuters) - Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski scored an overwhelming election victory on Sunday but the violence that marred it may perpetuate divisions and delay the country's progress towards European Union membership.
Gruevski's conservative VMRO-DPMNE party will have the healthiest majority in parliament in over a decade, riding on a wave of nationalist anger over Greece blocking Macedonia's NATO membership invitation in April.
The victory vindicated Gruevski's controversial decision to call a snap election, gambling that the snub would strengthen his hand and pay off with a stronger 4-year mandate.
But with one man dead and nine others wounded, some observers blamed Gruevski for ignoring the risk of violence among the 25-percent Albanian minority, divided between two hostile parties both with links to armed groups.
Though confined to Albanian areas, the violence could perpetuate an impression in Western minds that, 7 years after the country was pulled back from the brink of all-out ethnic war, the Kalashnikov remains a stubborn part of Macedonia's political process.
"We can expect a very bad report card," said analyst Dane Taleski. "We won't be getting a date for (EU) accession talks this year."
Besides the gunfire, which halted voting in one town, ballot boxes went missing and two election officials were briefly held by gunmen before being rescued unharmed by police.
In 2001, the West used the lure of NATO and EU membership to get Albanian guerrillas to disarm and take part in national politics. But the Albanian community is now riven by disputes over who gets to share power.
The Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) blamed the rival Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) -- Gruevski's partners in the outgoing coalition -- of colluding with the police on Sunday in "provocations, violence and psychological terror".
They have been on bad terms since 2006, when the DUI, which won most of the Albanian votes, was left out of the coalition government.
"HIGH PRICE"
The leader of the main opposition Social-Democratic Union, Radmila Sekerinska, conceded defeat and congratulated Gruevski, but said "the price that Macedonia had to pay is too high".
The West is alert to any instability in the Balkans so soon after the February secession of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians from Serbia, the latest shudder in a region torn apart by the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
In what looked ominously like a re-run of 2001, police in armoured cars rushed to the bullet-scarred Albanian town of Aracinovo after local monitors reported the arrival of men with machine guns. They came under fire and retaliated, killing one gunman and injuring two others.
The DUI said the incident was initiated by plain-clothes police. Among a dozen men arrested later was a notorious veteran of the "Albanian National Army" of 2001, who has links to the DPA party.
"In most parts the vote was fair and democratic, but sadly in one part there were irregularities," Gruevski said, promising a re-run in all the areas where there had been trouble.
His next step will be to form a coalition to bolster his estimated 60 seats in the 120-seat assembly. He has said he would prefer an alliance with the DPA, a move likely to further alienate the large number of Albanians who voted for the DUI.
"Despite the violence and ballot-stuffing, we still have more deputies than the DPA," senior DUI official Xhevat Ademi told Reuters. "This won't be the first time they convert defeat into victory." (Additional reporting by Benet Koleka and Kole Casule)
