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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (212387)	11/29/2004 3:20:31 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1578297

Yushchenko wants new election held, with observers By Knight Ridder Newspapers and Los Angeles Times MOSCOW — Ukraine's defiant opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, insisted yesterday that a new presidential election must be held soon to rectify Sunday's disputed balloting, which has left Europe's second biggest country on the brink of anarchy. The Western-leaning Yushchenko met face to face yesterday with his presidential rival, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, but rejected Yanukovych's proposal to let the courts settle any election irregularities. The government declared Yanukovych the winner Monday, but official U.S. and European observers said the election was deeply flawed by widespread fraud, and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell termed the result "unacceptable." Yushchenko told tens of thousands of his supporters last night in Kiev's Independence Square that he would hold talks only on staging a new election. He did not give details of what was discussed in the talks, but said he was insisting on a rerun of the voting, which he said he wanted to be held Dec. 12 under the observation of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign minister, was among top officials who met with the presidential rivals late into last night, and afterward he said a new election was a "possibility." Outgoing Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma joined Solana in meeting with the two presidential candidates to try to resolve the crisis. The talks also included Russian envoy Boris Gryzlov and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski. A working group for further talks was set up, Kuchma said, adding that both men vowed that demonstrations by their followers would remain peaceful. Yushchenko reportedly was smiling broadly after the meeting, and Yanukovych was not. Yanukovych, meanwhile, rallied some 2,000 supporters waving his blue-and-white campaign flags in front of Kiev's train station. "I don't need power at the cost of spilled blood," he said. The British Broadcasting Corp. reported that a state-run TV channel, UT1, announced live on an evening newscast that its news team was going to join the protests in the square. A UT1 correspondent said their message to the protesters was: "We are not lying anymore." The station's sign-language presenter said she had junked the approved, pro-government script during an earlier newscast and told viewers instead about the charges of vote-rigging. Government buildings were blocked and barricaded yesterday, and squads of blue-coated police cadets marched and chanted in favor of the challenger. At one point, a full-dress military chorus took the stage to serenade the huge pro-Yushchenko crowd in Independence Square. "The situation is teetering on the brink," Moscow political strategist Sergei Markov said in a commentary in the Russian newspaper Izvestia. "The first side to use force will lose. ... So the regime is waiting it out." Earlier yesterday, the Unian news agency quoted Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko as saying that Moscow regarded the potential revote favorably — an apparent significant retreat from its earlier insistence that the elections were fair and valid. Russian President Vladimir Putin had all but publicly endorsed Yanukovych, and underlined his support by visiting Ukraine on the eve of both the initial vote and Sunday's runoff. He has twice congratulated Yanukovych on his victory but on Thursday said the election dispute should be settled in the courts, not in the streets. Ukraine is a former Soviet republic, and Moscow clearly sees the election crisis as a Western attempt to encroach further on Russia's traditional sphere of influence. Ukraine's economy holds huge promise, especially in agriculture and mining, although its position at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, as well as at the crossroads of numerous oil and natural-gas pipelines, is its true geopolitical allure. The Kremlin was humiliated a year ago when a popular uprising in neighboring Georgia overturned a rigged presidential election there. Since then, Georgia has tilted toward the West, and the Kremlin seems determined not to let Georgia's "Rose Revolution" duplicate itself in Ukraine. Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company seattletimes.nwsource.com