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| Sunday, 5 December 2004 |
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Kiev parties as court orders re-run of rigged poll KIEV, Saturday (Reuters) Ukraine begins preparing on Saturday for a new election after its highest court annulled a rigged poll, breaking a political deadlock and triggering a night of ecstatic street celebrations in Kiev. Liberal opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko appeared well-set for victory in the new ballot on Dec. 26 after emerging triumphant from a 12-day "people's power" campaign to overturn the results of a presidential election he had hotly disputed. In the centre of the capital a boisterous party erupted after Yushchenko told his supporters the court ruling had been a victory for their "orange revolution". "Ukraine is henceforth a true democratic state," he declared to a crowd on Kiev's Independence Square, where his supporters, clad in his orange campaign colours, have thronged for the past 12 days. Thousands of his jubilant supporters roamed Kiev late into the night, chanting his name, blowing horns, hammering on metal drums and dancing to music from loudspeakers in a deafening carnival atmosphere. The crisis, following a bitter November election battle between the Western-oriented Yushchenko and Moscow-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, plunged the ex-Soviet state into turmoil and set Russia at odds with the West. Supreme Court judges, after five days of deliberations that had kept Ukraine on tenterhooks, agreed with Yushchenko's allegations that the Nov. 21 run-off vote, officially handed to Yanukovich, had been rigged. It said it should be played again on Dec. 26. Parliament was scheduled on Saturday to get down to work to amend laws to provide a legal framework for the new round. Deputies were also to start putting together a new government. The court ruling was a crushing defeat for Yanukovich, bereft of a power base since being sacked by parliament on Wednesday, and placed a question mark over his sponsor, outgoing President Leonid Kuchma. It also dealt a slap in the face to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who only on Thursday met Kuchma and supported him in opposing a repeat of the run-off. Putin had campaigned for Yanukovich. Ukraine, after Georgia a year ago, is the second ex-Soviet state in a year to see mass unrest over vote-rigging. In Georgia it quickly led to the replacement of veteran leader Eduard Shevardnadze by Western-leaning Mikhail Saakashvili. |
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