Protests Mark Daily Life in Yugoslavia

From Kosovo’s streets to Belgrade’s halls of power, Serbian opposition leaders were targeted Thursday as “bums,” “thieves” and “traitors,” but a threatened clash with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s supporters was averted at the eleventh hour when his ruling party canceled a counter-rally in one of its traditional bastions of support.

An opening salvo of harmless gunfire from pro-government bystanders failed to deter the latest pro-democracy rally in Prokuplje, a southern Serbian town of 35,000, where disillusioned army veterans from the Kosovo war gathered with several thousand relatives, neighbors and friends.

“We will stay until he goes,” declared rally leader Zoran Djindjic, the president of Serbia’s Democratic Party who has called for daily protests to drive Milosevic from power.

“It’s now or never,” said Sasa Ilic, 29, an unemployed technician. “I support all the demands of this protest. . . . I can’t live this way anymore.”

Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia canceled a counter-rally in Prokuplje, apparently to avoid a violent confrontation. But party activists showed up anyway, peppering the crowd with stones and unfurling banners calling the opposition leaders traitors.

Dusan Veljkovic, 73, a retired electrician, condemned Djindjic as a tool of the U.S. and other nations that had bombed Yugoslavia. “I just came here to listen to these fools. They’re going against the people and against the state. Djindjic betrayed Kosovo, but Milosevic is still defending Kosovo.”

Djindjic heard the same accusations earlier in the day on a tour of Kosovo, a Serbian province in name only thanks to the presence of about 30,000 NATO-led peacekeeping troops. Djindjic was heckled and jostled by about 100 embittered Serbian villagers, who branded him a traitor for fleeing Serbia for Yugoslavia’s other republic, Montenegro, during the war.

“Get out of here!” they shouted, along with a barrage of obscenities. “Where were you one month ago?”

It was not clear whether the villagers represented spontaneous opposition to Djindjic or, as he alleged, were paid hooligans sent by Milosevic to disrupt his visit.

At a medieval monastery outside Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, Djindjic met with other opposition leaders as well as Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic of the Serbian Orthodox Church and issued a joint statement expressing Serbian remorse for 16 months of atrocities in Kosovo. However, the statement said, “the responsibility lies on the Belgrade regime and Albanian extremists.”

But in Belgrade, Djindjic’s party failed to win a vote in the opposition-held City Council calling for Milosevic’s resignation, after a session that ended in pandemonium, walkouts and name-calling.

A deputy from the ruling Socialist Party accused Djindjic of “high treason,” and even the anti-Milosevic factions turned on each other.

“You, you bum! You thief! You corrupted person! . . . You are ordinary rotten trash,” Vojislav Seselj, leader of the ultranationalist opposition Serbian Radical Party, shouted at Belgrade Mayor Vojislav Mihailovic, handpicked by sometime opposition leader Vuk Draskovic. Seselj’s party then stormed out of the session.

On this day that defined the deep divisions within the opposition against Milosevic after a war that has left Serbia in ruin, humanitarian officials declared that it will take years to rebuild Yugoslavia, regardless of who runs it.

In Kosovo, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees released its first major survey of the bombed and burned-out province. The study concluded that 60% of the schools have been damaged or destroyed, 88% of villages lack health-care facilities, 35% have no wheat for bread, and 40% have no clean drinking water because wells and other water sources have been tainted by human and animal corpses.

“Hopes that the humanitarian situation may not be as serious as initially feared seem to be over-optimistic,” said the report, based on a detailed study of 141 of Kosovo’s 2,000 villages.

Fineman reported from Belgrade and Daniszewski from Pristina. Times staff writer John J. Goldman at the United Nations and special correspondent Ivan Markov in Prokuplje contributed to this report.