NEWS ANALYSIS : Milosevic’s Regime Slips Toward Dictatorship : Yugoslavia: Opponents still willing to criticize the Serbian president say it is up to the West to save the federation.

In a country where the Parliament is packed with gangsters and avowed fascists, it came as little surprise when an opposition legislator was knocked out cold by a fellow deputy after speaking irreverently of the Belgrade regime.

The blow that flattened federal deputy Mihajlo Markovic was the first provocative punch in what many opposition leaders expect to be a deadly civil war to rid Serbia of an entrenched, ruinous ruler.

But it may be months--some fear even years--before the victims of the increasingly authoritarian leadership here dare to even consider fighting back.

The attack on Markovic nearly a month ago by a former boxer with a criminal record and parliamentary immunity sent a message to those Serbs who have begun to fear their fate under Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic: They, too, face bodily injury, if they challenge Milosevic’s power.

Most opposition leaders and the few urban Serbs still willing to criticize Milosevic and his proxies say it is up to the democratic bastions in the West to save what is left of the federation of Yugoslavia, which now includes just Serbia and Montenegro of the six former republics.

“The people can’t do anything. This is a dictatorial government--they’re going to kill them” if they confront the leadership, insisted former Prime Minister Milan Panic, the California pharmaceuticals magnate and sometimes-politician who spent time here recently to consult with frightened, nearly paralyzed opposition forces. “The West told me for 50 years that communism was so bad, so tell me now what is so good about democracy? This is its greatest test and it may not survive.”

Panic and others trying to organize the minuscule, fractured opposition contend that protests and strikes are too risky under a heavily armed, internationally ostracized leadership that has no honor or standing to lose.

If the warning to Milosevic critics was not clear from the apparently spontaneous attack on Markovic, it was hammered home the same day with the Parliament’s ousting of federal President Dobrica Cosic and the arrest, beating and detention of Serbia’s most prominent pro-democracy activist, Serbian Renewal Movement leader Vuk Draskovic.

Draskovic and his wife, Danica, also detained and severely beaten, have been charged with attempting to overthrow the government, an offense that the politically controlled courts and legal authorities say could send them to prison for up to 15 years. The Draskovics are being held under police guard at a Belgrade clinic where they are being treated for head and spinal injuries inflicted by police.

As the first political prisoners of the post-Communist era, their plight might be expected to rally the people here, where living standards have plummeted from a level that was the envy of Eastern Europe a few years ago to a degree of despair approaching that of Albania, a country whose poverty rivals that of undeveloped Africa.

But the fierce crackdown on opponents has induced the opposite reaction, driving Milosevic’s detractors into cowering retreat, while the regime systematically dismantles all vestiges of an open society.

The media here are strictly controlled to nurture a national mind-set--that it is the rest of the world gone wrong, not Serbs. Wages now averaging $10 per month ensure that few can venture abroad for an alternative viewpoint.

Demonstrations organized to demand the release of the Draskovics have been declared illegal by the authorities, prompting opposition leaders to call them off.

The as-yet-unscheduled trials of the Draskovics threaten to produce an eerie flashback to the days of Communist dictatorship, when alleged “enemies of the state” were brought before corrupt jurists for prosecutions that served more as a validation of the regime’s brutality than an exercise of justice.

Abuses like those committed against the Draskovics and Markovic have provided a gauge for Western monitors to measure the rump Yugoslavia’s drift toward dictatorship. But it is the lawlessness and poverty consuming the isolated country that threaten to ignite a passive society.

Hyper-inflation in Serbia and Montenegro has soared above any recorded and beyond economists’ ability to measure it, though at last guess the annual rate was 63 million percent.

The economic catastrophe that has reduced the Balkan heartland to a barter state was triggered by money-printing to pay for military outlays for the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Harsh U.N. sanctions, imposed to punish Belgrade for its violent instigations, have exponentially worsened the crisis by cutting off trade and oil imports, putting at least half the people out of work.

Markovic, 36, from the industrial city of Kragujevac, accuses the European Community and the United States of unwitting complicity with the forces repressing his country.

The sanctions have provided Milosevic with a scapegoat for every social ill afflicting Serbia.

But international mediators seeking to end the war in Bosnia have treated the Serb strongman and his nationalist proxy warlords as respectable partners in negotiations, the legislator said.

“Every contact with Milosevic and his proxies on the diplomatic level prolongs the political life of the regime,” Markovic complained, reserving special scorn for EC mediator Lord Owen and U.N. envoy Thorvald Stoltenberg.

“They are naive in believing that by allowing Bosnia to be partitioned that will calm down the war,” he said. “They are not conscious of the fact that in a few months or years there will be another war in the Balkans because the Milosevic regime is based on war, clashes, the destruction of everything.”

Markovic fears the repressed resentment of many Serbs will eventually explode into widespread rioting or revolution but has no idea when that will occur. “Riots will at some point break out, but they won’t be controlled by anyone. They will be spontaneous and wild,” he warned, predicting vastly more bloodshed than during the Romanian revolution in 1989 in which more than 1,000 died.

Vesna Pesic, leader of the pro-democracy movement Citizens Union, likewise offers no predictions of when fellow Serbs will break out of the nationalist spell. Like Panic and Markovic, she is outraged over the West’s handling of the Bosnian crisis and expressed fiery anger at democratic leaders to which Serbia’s fledgling opposition looked for moral guidance.

“I don’t think that, after the decision by Lord Owen to divide Bosnia to satisfy its predators, that the real opposition here has any chance,” she said. “Whatever we had to say about democracy and the need to punish ‘ethnic cleansing’ is defeated. The extreme nationalists are celebrating their victory over Western values.”

Although numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions and European accords prohibit territorial and population shifts achieved by armed might, Owen and Stoltenberg--at least in the view of dissidents here--have been forced to negotiate Bosnia’s carve-up with the rebel leaders because no Western power was willing to take the military steps they had threatened to force the Serbian nationalists to comply with a more equitable plan.

“He, too, should go to an international tribunal for accepting genocide in Bosnia,” Pesic said of Owen, who has been overseeing negotiations on an ethnic partitioning. “How do I advocate democracy here when ‘democratic Europe’ is accepting genocide?”