Thousands line up to vote in Kosovo

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- Ethnic Albanians anxious to determine their own futures mobbed polling stations Saturday to vote in the first province-wide elections since NATO and the United Nations broke Slobodan Milosevic's grip on Kosovo.

Lines snaked around schools and public buildings, but apart from some pushing and shoving, little serious trouble marred the vote to choose deputies for a parliament that will run Kosovo together with the United Nations and the alliance.

"I thank God for giving me life to see this moment," said Fatime Krasniqi, 61, who lost nine family members during the 1998-99 war. "I hope something better will happen to us now."

Ethnic Albanians see the vote as a step toward independence -- a concept that frightened many minority Serbs into staying home.

Serbs remained split over participating in an election many fear will even further dilute the influence of the central Yugoslav government in Belgrade on the province.

While official election results were to be released Monday, a respected non-governmental organization monitoring the vote, Kosova Action for Civic Initiatives, said late Saturday that its exit polls showed that the party of pacifist leader Ibrahim Rugova took 44.7 percent of the vote.

The party of former rebel leader Hashim Thaci, the Democratic Party of Kosovo, finished second with 23.7 percent while Alliance for the Future of Kosovo finished third with 8.3 percent of the vote, Kosova Action said.

A handful of smaller parties got the remainder of the vote, including 10.1 percent that went to a coalition of Serb parties.

Polls opened with international and local police officers stationed at every polling station door. NATO peacekeepers patrolled the nearby areas, stopping cars leading to some stations and parking armored personnel carriers in front of others for extra impact.

Voters were electing a 120-seat national assembly that in turn will choose a president and form a provincial administration to govern alongside the U.N. officials and NATO-led peacekeepers who drove Milosevic's forces out of Kosovo in 1999.

Serbs are guaranteed at least 10 seats in the future parliament, but can get 20 seats if their turnout is high.

However, by the close of polls, turnout among eligible Serb voters was only 46 percent, compared with 65 percent among the province's ethnic Albanians, said the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which was monitoring the election. In Serbia and Montenegro, home to about 200,000 Kosovo Serbs who fled after the war, turnout was higher at 57 percent, OSCE said.

NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson called the elections "a remarkable step forward toward normality" in the Yugoslav province.