Kosovars began voting in their first parliamentary elections as citizens of an "independent" country on Sunday eager to see the new leaders pull them out of poverty.

Some 1.6 million voters are eligible to vote for 29 political parties, coalitions and citizens' initiatives to enter Kosovo's 120-seat parliament. Ten of those seats are reserved for minority Serbs, some of whom are running in the poll. Polls opened at 0600 GMT and close 1800 GMT .

In the chilly morning, voters trickled to polling stations in Pristina when they opened at seven a.m. but their numbers slowly began to increase.

Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci called upon minority Serbs to break with tradition and vote on Sunday.

"I urge Kosovo's Serbs to take part in this election and build a common future for a European Kosovo," Thaci told the Associated Press minutes after a rally in Kosovo's west.

The vote will be held amid suggestions that Kosovo's northern region, mainly inhabited by Serbs, is heading toward a partition.

U.S. Ambassador in Kosovo, Christopher Dell has warned that such a development could spark renewed ethnic violence across the region, according to a series of secret diplomatic cables, released by WikiLeaks website on Thursday.

"Failure to act soon means losing northern Kosovo and will re-open the Pandora's Box of ethnic conflict that defined the 1990s," Dell said.

The rise in tensions could also cast doubts over upcoming EU-brokered talks between Kosovo and Serbia.

Leading up to the weekend poll, assailants on Wednesday ambushed and killed a Bosniak leader loyal to Kosovo's ethnic Albanian-dominated institutions involved in organizing the elections in the northern town of Mitrovica, which has been divided between ethnic Albanians and Serbs since the end of the 1999 war.

The main contenders in Sunday's vote are the two largest political parties, Thaci's Democratic Party of Kosovo and its former junior coalition partner, Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK.

The polls favoured Thaci's party to win the ballot but without a clear majority, but indicated that he will likely be forced to seek a coalition partner. His main rival, the LDK, enters the election bruised by a power struggle, while the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo is weakened because its leader, former rebel Ramush Haradinaj is on retrial on war crime charges by a U.N. war crimes tribunal.

The election campaign has seen several newcomers, including former student activist Albin Kurti, whose Self-Determination movement advocates Kosovo's unification with Albania and rejects talks with Serbia.

For majority ethnic Albanians, the ballot is held amid hopes that it will inch the struggling country closer to eventual membership in the European Union, even as the 27-member bloc shows a weakened resolve to take in new members dogged by the global financial crisis. Five members of the EU refuse to recognize Kosovo as an independent state.

With an unemployment rate at 40 per cent in a country with the youngest population in Europe and a political leadership tainted by EU police investigations for corruption, many observers believe the chances of moving closer to the EU are slim.

So far, around 70 countries have recognized Kosovo as an independent state, including the U.S. and Japan