The Economist

Kosovo, Organs of state

Dec 15th 2010, PRISTINA

A SUCCESSFUL referendum on Kosovo’s European future was how Hashim Thaci (pictured), the prime minister, described Kosovo’s general election on December 12th, its first since independence in 2008. Mr Thaci’s Democratic Party of Kosovo (PDK) claims to have won the election, with 33.5% of the vote. But the news since the polls closed has been so bad that this future cannot be taken for granted.

Almost immediately, election observers said there had been widespread electoral fraud. Just two days later, a draft report was released by the Council of Europe implicating Mr Thaci in drug smuggling and murder. The report, compiled by Dick Marty, a Swiss politician and former prosecutor, is explosive. Much of the ground it covers is familiar, but Mr Marty claims to have found corroborating evidence for stories that had previously been dismissed for lack of solid evidence.

The most devastating claim is that Mr Thaci and his group of former guerrilla commanders from the central region of Drenica were responsible for the murder of Serb and other prisoners for their kidneys in Albania in 1999. Since then, says the report, several foreign agencies dedicated to combating drug trafficking have identified Mr Thaci as having exerted violent control over the region’s heroin trade. America and Kosovo’s other foreign friends have tolerated this nastiness, Mr Marty argues, for the sake of stability.

The report will not necessarily impede Mr Thaci’s attempts to form a new coalition. Such slanderous allegations have been investigated before, says Kosovo’s government, and found to be baseless. It has accused Mr Marty of working on behalf of Serbia, a claim many Kosovars will believe. Mr Thaci may even try to turn the affair to his advantage by taking the nationalist high ground, arguing that this is not a good time to be squabbling at home, since Kosovo’s enemies are on the attack. Still, notes one diplomatic source, the claims have sapped the prime minister’s authority, especially with foreigners.

Mr Thaci may find the claims of electoral fraud harder to shrug off. By far the worst cases came in the PDK’s heartland of Drenica, where one observer denounced what he called “industrial-scale” cheating. Petrit Selimi, an aspiring PDK deputy, retorts that although he regretted the fiddling, his party would have won the vote anyway. Not so, say opposition parties. Some 171 appeals have been launched, postponing the formation of a new government. Arber Gashi, a senior figure in the Democratic League of Kosovo, the main opposition, says that a new election should be held. Without it, he argues, a Thaci-led government will have no legitimacy. But a fresh poll is extremely unlikely.

So Mr Thaci may be able to form a coalition government with one or more small Albanian parties and the support of Kosovo’s minorities, including small parties representing the few Serbs who voted. But the allegations of fraud, organ-harvesting and drug-trafficking will hamper any government’s attempts to set Kosovo on the path towards the European Union. They will also make it harder for the EU to begin a dialogue between the authorities in Kosovo and Serbia, which it is keen to do as soon as possible. “It was bad before,” says Arber Gorani of the Kosovar Stability Initiative, a think-tank. “Now it is worse. Kosovo can’t afford this.”

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