Serbian Regime Accepts Some of Protesters’ Demands : Yugoslavia: Opposition leader is freed from jail. A military crackdown is possible.

Confronted with growing unrest that threatens to escalate into revolution, Serbian Communists on Tuesday held out the possibility of a military crackdown while giving in to some key demands of the protesters who have besieged the Yugoslav capital for four days.

The Serbian republic leadership--one of Eastern Europe’s last Communist regimes--appeared to be gripped by indecision over how to restore order amid its worst political crisis since World War II.

One of the concessions made by the government was the release from jail of Serbia’s leading opposition figure, Vuk Draskovic.

The demonstrators had demanded an end to Communist manipulation of the mass media, release of all 200 people--including Draskovic--who were arrested after anti-Communist riots on Saturday, and the firing of Serbian Interior Minister Radmilo Bogdanovic. Protesters blame him for provoking the weekend violence.

The official Tanjug news agency announced that five senior officials with Belgrade Television had been asked to resign.

In central Belgrade, demonstrators’ loudspeakers blared Janis Joplin songs as anti-Communist activists addressed tens of thousands of young people, swaying and singing amid a sea of orange peels and fast-food wrappers.

The crowd in Terazije Square swelled to more than 40,000 when Draskovic, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, delivered an impassioned speech after his release. He told the crowd that they had won the confrontation with government hard-liners.

“All those responsible for the bloodletting on March 9, including members of the government, should be held accountable. The Communists never said in their election campaign that they would send in tanks to run over our children,” Draskovic said.

“Despotic and undemocratic Serbia has lost all of its friends in Yugoslavia and in the world. But now the world is supporting us.”

Two people died and more than 100 were injured in the unrest that began Saturday, temporarily diverting concern over Yugoslavia’s inter-ethnic crisis to the struggle for power in Serbia between Communists and reformers.

Authorities conceded to demands to dismiss top executives at Belgrade TV, a mouthpiece for Communist propaganda. Then they used their influence with the collective federal presidency to call an emergency session to consider a military alternative.

Borisav Jovic, Serbia’s representative on the presidency and a close ally of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, announced in a terse, televised address that he was summoning the presidency, “in its capacity as commander of the armed forces,” because the security of Yugoslavia had been endangered by the unrest.

The presidency issued a statement saying it had considered the current crisis but failed to reach agreement on suggestions for resolving it. Another session is expected later in the week.

Although no forceful attempts were made to disperse the demonstrators, the emergency session appeared to be a warning to government opponents that a martial-law crackdown might be invoked to end the protests disrupting traffic and business in the heart of Belgrade.

Despite the two key concessions to the protesters, the occupation of Terazije Square and Marshal Tito Street, a main thoroughfare, continued. There were also anti-Communist actions in other major Serbian cities.Opposition politicians called another anti-Communist rally for today.

The recent unrest is the result of a deepening economic crisis in Serbia, where many of the republic’s 9 million people have gone without paychecks for weeks as the government grapples with insolvency and wary creditors.

Milosevic and his renamed Socialist Party of Serbia won easy reelection only three months ago, when Serbia submitted to a multiparty ballot for the first time in more than four decades. But Serbian voters are increasingly coming to the conclusion that they were duped with empty promises of economic and political stability.

Staunchly nationalist publications like Serbia’s main Politika daily helped ensure the Communists’ reelection, and they have also played a key role in whipping up hostility between Serbs and Yugoslavia’s other ethnic groups.

Serbia’s Parliament, in which the Communists hold a vast majority of the 250 seats, met in emergency session late Monday but bogged down in an overnight marathon of name-calling. Opposition deputies stormed out at midday Tuesday after it became clear that the ruling party was using the session as a platform for accusing them of inciting the unrest.

“Let them have their one-party Parliament. Let them have their Communist democracy,” opposition deputy Milan Piroski said after leaving the session and joining the demonstrators, who are mainly students and intellectuals.

Belgrade schools have been closed for two days because of the disturbances and heavily armed guards remain posted in front of strategic buildings throughout the city, which is both the Serbian and the federal capital.

The unrest has further undermined the ability of Milosevic and other Communist leaders to negotiate a new relationship with the five other republics comprising Yugoslavia. Slovenia and Croatia, which have already begun the process of secession, condemned the Serbian Communists’ use of force against peaceful demonstrators and have refused further negotiations with Serbia until the political tensions ease.

Slovenian President Milan Kucan warned that the Serbian Communists are seeking to impose a state of emergency in the republic and said Slovenia would take no part in such an extreme action.

Neither of the two northern republics responded to Jovic’s appeal for an emergency meeting.

In a worrisome sign that federal authority has been further eroded by the waves of nationalism lapping Yugoslavia, federal Prime Minister Ante Markovic said he had not been informed of the presidency’s decision to call in the army on Saturday and that he considered that move excessive.

Markovic has tried to preserve a semblance of unity among the six republics divided by ideology, religion, language, alphabet and history. But his pan-Yugoslav party fared badly in last year’s elections.

As federal authority has crumbled, the individual republics have cut back or ceased making contributions to the federal budget. About two-thirds of the federal funds go to support the 180,000-member army, which is commanded predominantly by Serbs and has made clear its loyalty to Communist doctrine.