Fewer than 1,000 of Kosovo's Serbs will be able to take part in the province's municipal elections tabled for the autumn after violent intimidation by hardline Belgrade Serbs prevented them from registering to vote.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, responsible for overseeing Kosovo's elections, announced yesterday at the close of registration that less than one in 100 of the estimated 105,000 Serbs in the province would be eligible to vote.
Over a million Kosovo Albanians have registered, out of an estimated 1.2 million people of all ethnicities on the electoral register, said the OSCE.
"This kind of intimidation is very difficult to reach," said Mr Jeff Fischer, head of the OSCE Joint Registration Task Force.
Potential Serb voters were threatened with a variety of measures, he said, including long-term retaliation should they return to Serbia, arrest on charges of giving information to foreign authorities, and random violence.
Hardline Serbs, acting on orders from President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, were present in all Serb-dominated areas of Kosovo, spreading messages of intimidation during the whole registration process.
"It is obvious," said one international legal official, "that Milosevic is categorically against anything that could be seen as assisting democracy in Kosovo."