Violence disrupts Macedonia elections

MACEDONIA’S parliamentary election was marred by violence in Albanian areas and suspected fraud yesterday, with one person shot dead and nine wounded, and voting halted in one town after a gun battle.

The poll was seen as a test of the nation’s political maturity after campaign violence raised fears that slow progress toward European Union membership could be further delayed.

Police arrested a former leader of an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group in connection with the violence, a senior government source said.

The country’s electoral commission said there were instances of suspected fraud and irregularities such as broken or missing ballot boxes and stolen voting materials.

“I have to express my regret and worry that after the elections in 2006, which were overall evaluated as very good, this year we have bad elections, with a great number of incidents,” commission chief Jovan Josifovski told reporters.

Scuffles broke out in several Albanian areas and a small explosive device was thrown at an empty cafe. Near Skopje, voting was stopped in the town of Aracinovo after a gun battle.

Police said officers went to the town 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 ethnic Albanian Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) said the incident was initiated by plain-clothes police.

In Skopje’s Cair neighbourhood, another shooting took place in the courtyard of a school serving as a polling station.

One DUI official was in a critical condition and five other people were wounded, police said.

The DUI’s leader, former guerrilla commander Ali Ahmeti, blamed the rival Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) and the police for “provocations, violence and psychological terror”.

The two parties are bitter rivals for the vote of the 25% Albanian minority. They have been on bad terms since 2006, when the DUI, which won most of the Albanian votes, was left out of a coalition government in favour of the DPA.

The violence is the worst since the end of the 2001 rebellion, when all-out ethnic war was averted by the West using the lure of NATO and the EU to secure more rights for Albanians and get guerrillas to disarm.