KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Yugoslavia, Sept. 25 ? Moving to preempt President Slobodan Milosevic, the chief opposition candidate in Sunday's Yugoslav presidential vote declared victory today, and tens of thousands of his supporters held a huge party in Belgrade to celebrate.
With his bold declaration, made in the absence of official voting results, Vojislav Kostunica appeared to be trying to demonstrate enough self-confidence and public support to force Milosevic to concede defeat. The opposition contends that despite widespread fraud and voter intimidation by the government, Kostunica carried the day on Sunday.
Kostunica said at a news conference today that if Milosevic challenges his claim, the opposition movement will "defend our victory by peaceful means, and we will protest for as long as it takes. . . . We will fight in democratic ways. The truth is our strongest weapon. We don't want to provoke internal tensions."
The European Union, the United States and other Western nations ? including France and Italy, which have traditionally been less hostile to Milosevic's government ? threw their weight behind the opposition, declaring that any claims of victory by the government would not be credible and calling on Milosevic to step aside.
The Western powers view him as having directed a decade of ethnic warfare in the Balkan region and say he must leave if they are to lift economic and political sanctions they have imposed on Yugoslavia. Milosevic has been indicted as a war criminal by an international tribunal in the Hague.
Kostunica made his victory announcement in a vacuum of reliable information about the actual results of the voting. Government election authorities have so far released only early figures, showing Milosevic in the lead. In any case, the opposition has declared itself unwilling to believe any official vote count, saying the numbers will be manipulated by the government to deny what they contend was a clear win by Kostunica.
Two other opposition parties that fielded presidential candidates, the Serbian Radical Party and the Serbian Renewal Movement, both credited Kostunica with victory.
Milosevic, who has not appeared in public since he visited a polling station on Sunday morning, gave no sign today that he is prepared to concede the election and resign. At the same time, police and other security forces under his control did little to obstruct the opposition rallies.
Tonight in Belgrade ? capital of both Yugoslavia and its dominant republic, Serbia ? Kostunica supporters rallied in force, shouting such slogans as "Save Serbia, kill yourself, Slobodan!" Similar rallies were reported in many cities around Yugoslavia.
At the Belgrade gathering, famed folk singer and dissident Djordje Balasevic made his first appearance in two years, having withdrawn from public performances to protest Milosevic's policies. No new rallies were organized by the government today, after only a few hundred Milosevic supporters attended a Belgrade rock concert Sunday and suffered the taunts of participants in a larger Kostunica rally.
The government appeared to be grappling through much of the day for a credible accounting of the election results, which analysts here believe Milosevic had expected to win handily.
"We are encountering a wall of silence," said Sinisa Nikolic, an opposition member of a federal election commission. "We are sitting here and asking what to do. We have no access to where computer results are being calculated."
Given Milosevic's tight control of the military and police, as well as his frequent use of repression to silence dissent, he retains the option of insisting that the vote was really in his favor and then cracking down on opponents.
He also could claim that a second round of balloting is needed because no candidate attained a majority of all votes cast Sunday. If he does, a runoff between the two top vote-getters ? Milosevic and Kostunica ? would be held on Oct. 8. But such a vote would hold new risks for Milosevic, because his opponents in Montenegro ? Serbia's Western-oriented partner in the Yugoslav federation ? who orchestrated a massive boycott of the Sunday's vote within the republic, have said they would vote for Kostunica in a second round.
Legally speaking, Milosevic could concede defeat but remain in office until the middle of next year, to finish his current term.
At a Belgrade news conference this afternoon, Gorica Gajevic, a senior official of the ruling Socialist Party, said that with more than a third of the vote counted, Milosevic had won at least 45 percent. She added that she expected his vote tally to surpass 50 percent, ensuring a first-round victory. Gajevic said further that she expects the Socialists to capture a majority of both houses of parliament.
But another official in the ruling coalition, Ljubisa Ristic, conceded that the party had suffered a major defeat in municipal elections that coincided with the presidential vote. Opposition leaders agreed, saying, for example, that the opposition had won 105 of 110 local assembly seats in Belgrade and 68 of 70 seats in Cacak, while in Novi Sad Milosevic's Socialists won only 11 of 90 seats.
Zoran Djindic, a leader of the 18-party coalition that backed Kostunica, said results from 60 percent of the nation's polling stations indicated that Kostunica had won 55 percent of the presidential vote, compared to Milosevic's 35 to 37 percent. He said further that Kostunica would not bargain with Milosevic to produce a compromise.
The opposition's claims of victory were based on tallies submitted by its election monitors, who stood by as government members of local election committees counted ballots throughout the country after the polls closed late Sunday.
"In essence, we won everywhere," said a joyous Dragisa Djokovic, who heads Kostunica's Democratic Party offices here in Mitrovica, in the Serbian province of Kosovo. He said he expects "changes, and good changes" in the wake of the vote, which he said Milosevic would be able to ignore for only a limited time before public protests force his resignation.
In 1996, Djokovic said, Milosevic was able to block certification of opposition victories in major Serbian cities for nearly three months. This time, he said, "We will finish it much faster." He said that Milosevic's security forces would be unable to squelch the protests because "tanks can be driven by young guys, and they have brains and can think. Generals do not drive tanks."
Officials of both the opposition and the ruling coalition here in Mitrovica, which was occupied by NATO troops following the Kosovo war last year, agreed that Milosevic had out-polled Kostunica within the municipality. But the balloting in Kosovo was boycotted by virtually all of the province's ethnic Albanians, who make up 95 percent of the population. In Montenegro, according to its independence-minded government,three-quarters of the population boycotted the vote.
In Mitrovica today, an air of gloom pervaded the offices of Socialist Party officials. A secretary at one office told a visiting Serbian reporter that "no one wants to say anything. They are sad." And two officials berated a Serb standing near the entrance to their office with a copy of the independent newspaper Blic in his hand.
"Why are you grinning?" one official asked angrily, adding that he should be reading one of Yugoslavia's pro-government newspapers. The main headline on Blic, a leading Belgrade daily, said "Kostunica, the Winner of the Fair Election."
Many independent experts have alleged that the polling process was corrupted by Socialist Party officials who maintained a tight grip on voting stations. But those criticisms largely dissipated today in the wake of signs that Kostunica made a strong showing anyway.
"Finally, we are free," a 22-year old university student named Milica Danilovic told the Associated Press in Belgrade. "We can start breathing like normal people. Smiles are back, the pressure is gone, we are flying!"
Kurt C. Davidson -- 2000