BELGRADE (AP) – Serbia’s President Boris Tadic said yesterday that Serbs should not take part in the first vote to be held in Kosovo since it declared independence from Serbia last year. Tadic says that “conditions have not been met” for Serbia to encourage some 100,000 Serbs in Kosovo to vote in the local elections in November. He did not elaborate. Xhavit Beqiri, spokesman for Kosovo’s President Fatmir Sejdiu, said the move was “a wrong call” from Serbia. Beqiri declined to comment on the effect it would have on Serb voters, but told The Associated Press the Serb minority “must vote in the elections... and have representatives in governing authorities.” Belgrade’s call not to vote in elections is likely to add to simmering ethnic tensions in Kosovo. Sejdiu has set November 15 as the date for voting for municipal leaders and local councils. The poll will lead to the creation of five Serb-dominated municipalities as part of an international plan that gave Serbs broad rights in exchange for Kosovo’s independence. Senior government official Oliver Ivanovic said yesterday that the vote is not valid for Serbia because it will be held in line with an international plan which Belgrade rejects.

TIRANA (AFP) – Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha’s center-right coalition claimed victory yesterday after closely fought weekend legislative elections contested by the left-wing opposition. With the counting of ballots almost complete, official results gave Berisha’s Democrats a slender lead of one percentage point ahead of its strongest rivals, an alliance headed by the Socialists. Although it was unclear whether the center-right had enough seats to form a government alone, Democrats spokeswoman Majlinda Bregu said it “won the parliamentary elections on Sunday.” “The party now has a second mandate for the next four years,” said Brega. She said the right had secured 71 places in the 140-seat parliament. However the Socialist Party of Tirana Mayor Edi Rama accused the Democrats of election fraud. “The Democratic Party is in the process of manipulating the victory of the Socialist Party,” the latter’s spokesman Ditmer Bushati said. “We are gathering all information confirming the manipulation of the results and we will not allow this process to be terminated until all fraud and manipulation” is revealed, he said. Official results based on 98.2 percent of the count showed the center-right won 46.81 percent against 45.42 for the main opposition bloc, and 5.59 for former Prime Minister Ilir Meta’s center-left Socialist Party for Integration.

THE HAGUE (AFP) – The war crimes trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is unlikely to start before September, UN judge Iain Bonomy said yesterday. “This trial is unlikely to start prior to September,” the judge told a preparatory status conference held before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. “Even the pretrial conference will not be before September.” The pretrial conference, the last step before trial, had initially been scheduled for July 20. Karadzic objected to the possibility of a September start, saying: “The material I have requires months and months just to look at.” The judge expressed concern about time constraints, with the prosecution case alone expected to take “significantly more than a year.”

Bosnian officials say the Balkan country has confirmed its first case of swine flu in a 24-year-old woman who arrived from South America. Amela Lolic of the Bosnian Serb Health Ministry said yesterday that the woman arrived in Bosnia on June 26 to visit her family in Banja Luka. She would not reveal from which country in South America the woman came. (AP)

Romania’s Health Ministry confirmed two new cases of swine flu yesterday in two British students visiting the country, taking the total number of confirmed cases to 35. The two teenagers were part of a group of British students who arrived a week earlier to take part in a social project in Iasi, in northeastern Romania, the ministry said in a statement. Six members of the group, which included 19 students and three teachers, were already hospitalized Tuesday after they were found to be infected with the H1N1 virus. (AFP)