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Supporters of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko kept up their siege of government buildings Sunday after pro-government lawmakers blocked election law changes designed to ensure fair balloting in a rerun of the country's presidential run-off.
Thousands of protesters settled in a tent camp on the main square in the capital Kiev have vowed to remain until the laws are passed.
As a motorcade of five police buses and several patrol cars entered downtown Kiev, the protesters scrambled to warn their comrades at the barricades.
After a brief standoff with protesters, the convoy was allowed to proceed.
"This is just a regular rotation and I am urging you to let us do our job, as you do yours," a tired-looking police captain told protesters.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich said defiantly on Saturday he would take on Yushchenko in a new election battle, a day after a court stripped him of his title of president-elect.
A wrangle in parliament divided opposition leader Yushchenko's allies and indicated that his path to the presidency was still strewn with pitfalls.
Yushchenko and the socialist allies who gave him crucial support in the disputed November 21 run-off against Yanukovich, found themselves at odds over proposed reforms that would trim the powers of the next president.
The emergency parliamentary session failed to agree either this measure or reforms aimed at stopping a repetition of vote rigging in the December 26 re-run. It was not immediately clear when a new session would take place.
Outgoing President Leonid Kuchma on Saturday called for holding a new mediation meeting attended by international mediators.
In a press release issued by the president's office, Kuchma made the call after he made a phone conversation with Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, whose country holds the presidency of the European Union.
Kuchma said the reason to hold the meeting is that some articles of the agreement reached by the previous mediation meeting on December 1 have not yet been completely put into practice.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) yesterday welcomed Ukraine's Supreme Court decision to re-run the country's presidential election and said it would try to enlist more observers to oversee the vote.
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Solomon Passy, who holds the rotating chair of the group that runs the world's leading election monitoring body, pledged full support of the OSCE in a new second round of voting and said he would ask its 55 member states for more staff.
"Re-running the second round of the elections will provide an opportunity for Ukraine to demonstrate that its people's undoubted commitment to democracy can be translated into well-organized, free and fair elections," Passy said in a statement on his ministry's website.
"In particular, we expect to see a fair campaign and unbiased reporting in state-controlled media... I call on OSCE participating States and other international actors to launch a major election observation mission in this very short time-frame."
Passy's statement came a day before European foreign ministers were to gather in Sofia for a meeting expected to be dominated by Ukrainian issue.
(China Daily December 6, 2004)
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