Huge win for Yushchenko

2004-12-29 10:08

Kiev - Final preliminary results showed opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko had won Ukraine's drawn-out and divisive presidential election, while pressure built on his opponent, Kremlin favourite Viktor Yanukovych, to concede and abandon his vow to challenge the rerun election.

Yushchenko won 52% to Yanukovych's 44.2% in the court-ordered rerun of the vote, according to a final preliminary vote tally released on Tuesday - a difference of about 2.3 million votes.

"In principle, we have the result," said Yaroslav Davydovych, the head of the Central Election Commission. "I don't know who can doubt it."

Yanukovych, who returned to work Tuesday as prime minister, has refused to concede defeat and said he will challenge the results of Sunday's rerun in Ukraine's Supreme Court.

He said his campaign team had nearly 5 000 complaints about how the voting was conducted and claimed that 4.8 million people.

Bid to prevent fraud

More than double the margin of Yushchenko's victory had been unable to cast ballots, among them disabled and elderly voters.

Ukraine's parliament approved restrictions on voting at home in a bid to prevent fraud, but the Constitutional Court threw out the restrictions on the eve of the vote.

Yanukovych's campaign said many people, however, were unaware of the ruling.

Yanukovych's vow to challenge the results echoes Yushchenko's successful move following the fraud-tainted November 21 runoff, which the court annulled, leading to Sunday's revote.

But, that ruling came amid widespread complaints from foreign monitors that the November 21 vote was unfair; this time, monitors have said they didn't see mass violations.

Yanukovych's team has yet to file an appeal, and the Central Election Commission's Davydovych said many of the complaints they had received, purportedly from individual voters, were "printed on the same computer, with the same text, the same envelopes."

Davydovych said: "This is on the conscience of those who do that."

President Leonid Kuchma, in the runup to Sunday's vote, urged both candidates to accept the official result and not appeal.

Protracted election campaign

The Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog, also called on Yanukovych on Tuesday to accept defeat.

Terry Davis, the council's secretary general said: "I call on all parties to accept the verdict of the ballot box and to refrain from rhetoric, which may fuel division in Ukraine."

Ukraine's east-west divide has deepened during the bitter and protracted election campaign.

The Russian-speaking, heavily industrialised east backed Yanukovych, while cosmopolitan Kiev and the nationalistic west supported Yushchenko.

The bitterly fought campaign also frayed ties between the west and Russia.

The Kremlin is nervous about the eastward expanding EU and Nato, and Russian President Vladimir Putin personally campaigned for Yanukovych in the first two rounds of voting in November.

- AP