UAS professor helped with Kosovo elections
A few weeks ago University of Alaska Southeast Professor Jonathan Anderson was in Prizren, the second-largest city in Kosovo, supervising ballot-counting in the country's second municipal election since it became free of Serbian occupation.
Anderson was selected as one of 150 American election supervisors who joined supervisors from Europe in an effort to ensure fair democratic elections in Kosovo. He will give a lecture about his experiences at noon Thursday in Room 104 of the UAS Egan Library.
"I was totally inspired by the effort of the international community to jointly come together to try to build a democracy in a country," Anderson said.
Anderson's lecture will be broadcast statewide as part of the UAS Public Administration master's program, which is offered across Alaska with televised courses. In Juneau, the lecture will be on cable Channel 18.
Kosovo, populated mostly by ethnic Albanians, is part of the former Yugoslavia. Until 1999, Kosovo was part of Serbia. Separated from the Serbians by culture and religion - Kosovars are Muslim and Serbians are Christian - Albanian Kosovars were a persecuted minority under the rule of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Though there were democratic elections in Serbia, Kosovars were too small a group to impact election results.
"There was no sense that there was government by the people," Anderson said. "The Serbians, they had elections too, but Milosevic always won."
In the late 1990s Kosovars began to agitate for independence, Anderson said. Milosevic directed a harsh military response - 400,000 people were forced from their homes, towns were burned and witnesses reported mass slaughter of women and children by Serbian troops.
United Nations-led forces, concerned with the atrocities committed against the ethnic Albanians, bombed Serbia and occupied Kosovo in 1999. Milosevic is being tried for war crimes.
In an effort to rebuild Kosovo, the international community began to hold supervised, democratic elections in 2000. Anderson applied to be a supervisor and was selected based on his experience as a public administration professor, an American poll worker and a member of the Foreign Service, he said.
In the most recent municipal election, 1.25 million or about 58 percent of eligible Kosovars voted, according to Anderson. With the help of an interpreter, he directed the vote count. The ballots had to be counted by hand, he said.
"One of our goals was to get people in a country that is not used to democracy to believe the process is fair," Anderson said.
Anderson said he felt generally safe while in Kosovo, which is occupied by U.N. troops, but said the country has not completely recovered from political unrest.
"The day after the election, one of the newly elected municipal leaders was assassinated," Anderson said. "It is not like it is totally safe and calm."
In his lecture, Anderson said he plans to cover concepts of democracy, different electoral systems and his personal observations.
Julia O'Malley can be reached at jomalley@juneauempire.com.