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Poll: Montenegro quits Serbia

Crowds celebrate in capital as unofficial results show breakup

Pro-independence supporters celebrate on Sunday night after unofficial poll results were released.

• Weary Serbs watch Montenegro vote

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PODGORICA, Serbia-Montenegro (CNN) -- Voters in Montenegro decided narrowly to sever the country's union with Serbia, a move that would break up the last two pieces of the former Yugoslavia, unofficial poll returns from Sunday's referendum indicated.

The election watchdog group CEMI said late Sunday that 55.5 percent of the more than 410,000 voters who cast ballots supported independence -- just over the 55 percent required for the question to pass.

"I'm sure that tonight a democratic Montenegro will be celebrated," said Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, whose Democratic Party of Socialists had pushed for Montenegro's full independence.

Opposition spokesman Predrag Bulatovic disputed those projections, saying supporters fell short of the required margin of victory. But Predrag Sekulic, a spokesman for Djukanovic's party, said, "There is no doubt we won."

Though official results are not expected until Monday, people began celebrating inside government buildings Sunday night, and fireworks illuminated the center of the Montenegrin capital Podgorica.

Official returns will be released at 10 a.m (0800 GMT) Monday, the head of the state electoral commission, Frantishek Lipka, said, according to The Associated Press.

"With only over 50 percent of the vote counted, I cannot give you preliminary results," Lipka said, AP reported.

At stake is whether Europe will see the formation of a new country. Montenegro would be a small, mountainous nation along the Adriatic Sea with a total population of about 650,000 residents.

Montenegro had been one of six republics within Yugoslavia before the country's violent unraveling in 1991. In 2003, after nearly a decade of war and political upheaval, Serbia and Montenegro replaced what remained of the Yugoslav federation with a loose union.

Djukanovic has pushed for full independence, arguing the country would have a better chance of joining the European Union if separated from Serbia.

That argument was bolstered in the last month, when Serbia's Belgrade government failed to deliver Gen. Ratko Mladic, an indicted Serb war criminal, to a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Once an independent kingdom, Montenegro was erased from the map after World War I and merged into the newly formed Yugoslavia. Many Montenegrins resisted, and a seven-year guerrilla war followed. After World War II, the six-republic Yugoslavia became communist.

During the federation's breakup in the 1990s, Montenegro's leaders sided with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic -- who would later stand trial for war crimes -- in his war campaigns in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia.

-- Journalist Bruce Konviser contributed to this report.