Yugoslavia, Nov. 17 (UPI) -- As Kosovo's first general election got underway Saturday, an anthrax scare forced the quarantine of thousands of mail-in ballots received from abroad.
A team of about a dozen local and international election observers began carefully opening and inspecting each of the 15,000 envelopes for suspicious powder or other substances.
The election monitors, among them several European career diplomats, donned face masks, rubber gloves and plastic gowns for the task, which was expected to continue through Sunday before all the ballots could be transferred to the main counting center. No tainted ballots were found Saturday.
Checking each ballot individually was only "precautionary for ourselves, our staff and people in Kosovo," said Claire Trevena, spokeswomen for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that is overseeing the election. No specific threat of a biological attack had been received, she said.
All the envelopes had already been subjected to an infrared scan designed to kill any bacterial spores in Vienna, Austria, where the ballots were mailed to OSCE headquarters. Trevena put the chances of finding a contaminated ballot at a mere "0.0001 percent." Still, preparations for the manual screening process had been made several weeks ago and the ballots were placed under guard at a temporary office set up an isolated industrial district outside Kosovo's capital Pristina.
Emerging from the cramped office where the inspection was taking place, one British election official with long experience with the OSCE said the tedious process disgusted him. "It's ridiculous to be reduced to this," he said, taking off a facemask and rubber gloves for a brief break.
Ethnic Albanians living abroad, mainly in Germany, Switzerland and Austria sent most of the votes received by mail. Thousands of other ballots being cast outside Kosovo by Serb refugees living in Montenegro and Serbia proper were not affected by the anthrax precautions.
Turnout at the polls was running slightly behind that of last year's local elections, but was expected to top 70 percent, according to the OSCE. Serb participation in the vote was expected to be far lower than the overall figure, though election officials were pleased that Serbs did not boycott the polls as they did last year.
Scattered protests briefly broke out at several polling places when Albanian hard-liners demanded that the Albanian flag be flown outside schools and offices where voting was underway. OSCE officials had forbidden the display of national symbols at election sites to keep Kosovo's minorities from feeling discriminated against in the 90 percent ethnic-Albanian province.
After a flurry of consultations among top election officials, the OSCE backed down and allowed the flags to fly, in a compromise that allowed balloting to continue without further interruption. Police in the southern city of Gnjilane said protests there lasted only 20 minutes and passed without incident.
Many Serb voters in the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica were reported to have been intimidated by groups of nationalist Serb paramilitaries covertly keeping tabs on polling places near the city center. The paramilitaries, known as the "bridge watchers" for their often violent attempts to keep ethnic Albanians from crossing to the Serb-dominated north side of the town, had urged a boycott of the election.
Ethnic Albanians nearly unanimously want to see Kosovo become an independent state and many expect the election to push their cause forward. U.N. officials have repeatedly said the poll will not affect the final status of Kosovo, which remains unresolved more than two years after an eleven-week NATO bombing campaign wrested control of the province from Yugoslavia.
The election will choose Kosovo's first-ever democratically elected parliament, restoring partial home rule for the first time since former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic revoked the province's autonomy in 1989.
The Democratic League of Kosovo is widely expected to come out on top in the polls, propelling its leader, Ibrahim Rugova, to Kosovo's presidency. However, the new government will have limited authority, as key responsibilities will remain in the hands of the U.N.-led administration of the province.
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