THE beleaguered Serbian government of President Slobodan Milosevic appeared yesterday to have made another concession to protesters over disputed election results as a second Serbian court upheld an opposition victory in the municipal polls.
The court, part of a judiciary considered extremely close to the Serbian president, recognised the results of the second round of last month's local elections in Smederevska Palanka, 70 km south-east of Belgrade, the Beta news agency said.
The opposition, Together coalition, which made significant gains across Serbia in the polls on November 17th, claimed victory in the town with 25 of the 49 seats on the council.
The ruling came after a similar decision last Sunday by a court in Nis, Serbia's second city, which annulled a self-declared victory for Mr Milosevic's Socialist Party and ordered the electoral commission to look again at how 26 seats were awarded to the ruling party.
The two decisions further boosted the morale of the tens of thousands of anti-Milosevic demonstrators who have protested against moves by the authorities to override the opposition election wins either by holding re-runs or by crude electoral manipulation.
Some 120,000 people, including 20,000 students, took to the streets yesterday at the start of the fifth week of demonstrations.
The opposition leader, Mr Vuk Draskovic, fresh from talks in Geneva with the US envoy, Mr Joh`n Kornblum, on the deepening Serbian crisis, insisted yesterday that the Serbian authorities must recognise all the results of the cancelled elections before any talks can begin to resolve the political crisis.
"There will be no dialogue, there will be nothing while the results of the November 17th elections are not recognised in all towns, in all municipalities," he said.
The Together coalition says it won in 15 of Serbia's 18 major cities and towns - including Belgrade - in the polls, but the results were either not confirmed or simply annulled for alleged "irregularities".
Another opposition leader, Mr Zoran Djindjic, hailed the Nis court ruling as a "concession" and a sign of detente by the authorities".
Crowds of up to 200,000 have been demonstrating daily for almost a month in Belgrade in support of the opposition movement, in an unprecedented challenge to Mr Milosevic.
The EU envoy in the Balkans, Mr Carl Bildt, in Geneva for talks on humanitarian issues concerning Bosnia, urged Mr Milosevic to resolve the crisis peacefully, warning that the country was "headed for disaster".
"Milosevic has to recognise that he has to climb down," Mr Bildt said. "The combination of political, economic and social problems is so immense after the failures of the last few years that it will be really challenging to prevent major problems," he added.
While the US has led calls for Mr Milosevic to climb down, the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, said yesterday the crisis was an internal affair in which Moscow would not interfere.
The French ambassador to Belgrade, Mr Stanislas Filliol, meanwhile told the Montenegrin daily Pobjeda. "As a friend of the Serb people [France] hopes that the wishes of the electorate will be respected."
Later yesterday, a Council of Europe delegation held talks with Mr Djindjic and other opposition officials, and expressed their "support for the democratic process in Serbia".
"The events in Belgrade and other Serbian towns are of utmost interest to Europe," the delegation said in a statement distributed by the Together bloc.