SERBIA'S Supreme Court, in a decision that renewed three weeks of street protests, gave control of Belgrade City Council to President Slobodan Milosevic yesterday despite opposition charges of election rigging.
But the struggle for power between Mr Milosevic's ruling socialists and the Zajedno (Together) coalition of opposition parties appeared unresolved after the city election commission submitted further appeals.
Opposition officials said Mr Milosevic, under heavy US led Western pressure to honour democracy, could be trying to engineer a complete rerun of the November 17th local elections which have embroiled him in crisis.
More then 100,000 demonstrators, accusing the court of rubber stamping socialist election fraud, thronged Belgrade yesterday. In the southern industrial city of Nis, up to 50,000 people jammed the central square, smashing a television set in protest against biased coverage by state run media.
The court reversed the initial outcome of the elections and gave the socialists and their allies 66 of the 110 seats in the Belgrade city assembly.
The Zajedno coalition's lawyer, Mr Goran Draganic, said: "It is now clear to both the foreign and domestic public that what the Supreme Court did last night was founded on politics, not law."
. President Milosevic tore up a draft memorandum on press freedom presented to him to sign, an envoy of a US based journalists' rights group said yesterday.
Mr Milosevic subsequently signed a shortened statement but that version stopped short of ruling out state censorship, Ms Katie Marton, visiting head of the USA' Committee for the Protection of Journalists, said.