Kosovo Opposition Eyes Pristina Poll

Kosovo’s Former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj has announced that his opposition party has an action plan to win Pristina’s local elections.

The leader of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, AAK, hosted a question and answer session at Pristina’s town hall. Haradinaj stated that he has “identified many defects” in Pristina’s governance, stating that there is a “vacuum present between implementation and realisation”.

The AAK has outspokenly appealed for earlier national elections in the past couple of months, a request which has been rejected by the International Civilian Representative Peter Feith, who is responsible for assisting the government in implementing Kosovo's status settlement. 

Elections are due in 2011, while local elections may take place later this year.

Citizens at the debate focused their questions on urban planning issues, unemployment and frequent energy cuts, which Haradinaj promised to solve. “Before the elections they (the current government) offered very ambitious and unrealistic plans. While after the elections, they do not possess any plan whatsoever,” he said. He said the current government is one of  “arrogance, and an extreme scale of corruption”.

A former KLA leader, Haradinaj was elected prime minister in 2004, and held the office for 100 days before being indicted for war crimes charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, which were later dropped for lack of evidence.

(Reported by Shega A’Mula)