Conciliatory Serb Leader Meets With Student Protesters

In a move to deflate and divide his formidable opposition, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic struck a conciliatory pose Tuesday and met with students who had walked 150 miles to protest his regime’s alleged electoral fraud.

Milosevic, seeming to admit for the first time that some misconduct occurred in Nov. 17 municipal elections, assured the students from the southern city of Nis that their claims will be investigated.

“There is no danger that the truth will remain hidden,” he told three students who met with him in his office as tens of thousands of their contemporaries protested loudly outside.

The session was taped by state television and included in its nightly news broadcast. Other journalists were not permitted into the meeting--the first by the Serbian president with opponents who have been part of the greatest challenge to his nine-year rule.

At times, Milosevic could barely be heard over the anti-government raucousness outside his windows.

The students, who marched for 48 hours in shifts, presented Milosevic with copies of vote tally sheets from Nis that seem to substantiate fraud. One of the students, Predrag Cveticanin, said that Milosevic promised to investigate the students’ claims.

But Nis is a moot point: On Sunday, the government conceded opposition victories there, after mounting protests against the Milosevic regime. On Tuesday, the Serbian supreme court also upheld opposition victories in the Belgrade suburb of Savski Venac.

The Serbian leader, who seemed short-tempered during his meeting with the Nis students, also warned that what he called the foreign influence within the opposition movement will not be tolerated.

“We have to be completely clear . . . as your leaders go to embassies and send envoys and travel to world capitals, a foreign hand shall not rule Serbia,” Milosevic said of the republic, which, with tiny Montenegro, makes up the rump Yugoslavia. “We are our own masters in Serbia, and we have to resolve our problems within our own institutions.”

His comments coincided with the regime’s campaign to emphasize opposition use of American, British and German flags in daily protest marches--and with opposition leaders’ return in the previous couple of days from meetings with Western officials in Washington, Geneva and elsewhere.

Milosevic’s meeting with the students who walked from Nis to Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, appeared to represent a classic tactic of his, aimed at co-opting part of the opposition that has staged demonstrations ever since opposition electoral victories were annulled a month ago. In 1991, during the last major anti-Milosevic demonstrations, he ended the protest by meeting behind closed doors with students.

Tuesday’s move came as pressure from within Milosevic’s ruling Socialist Party mounted. Analysts in Serbia believe that any credible threat to Milosevic is more likely to come from discord within his own party and within the state apparatus than from street demonstrations by a disparate opposition coalition.

Milosevic used a closed party meeting last week to blame three senior party officials for botching the Nov. 17 elections, Serbian sources said.

Now, the Socialists have decided to stage counterdemonstrations to show what one party official described as “the other Serbia”--the majority, in the Socialists’ view, that still supports Milosevic.

The first such demonstration was held Friday in the eastern city of Majdanpek. Hundreds of people waved posters of Milosevic along with Serbian flags and chanted “Serbia! Serbia!” and “Long live Slobo!”

In a day of surprisingly conciliatory statements, Zoran Lilic, the president of Yugoslavia, said election abuses will be punished.

“The government and the ruling party, where there are irregularities, must . . . open the question of responsibility of its members,” he said.

Milosevic has also invited the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to send a team to verify the election results.

The OSCE in Vienna said Tuesday that the mission will be led by former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez and will travel to Belgrade in the next few days.