Milosevic Ally Slain as Serbia Killings Continue

In yet another sign of the lethal atmosphere in postwar Yugoslavia, a senior member of Serbia’s ruling Socialist Party was gunned down at a farmers fair Saturday. It was the fourth assassination of a close ally of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic this year.

Bosko Perosevic, who was one of Milosevic’s most senior and influential supporters and a top official in the north of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, was shot in the head at point-blank range in the city of Novi Sad.

Police said that Perosevic, 43, was on a walking tour of the fairgrounds and had stepped away from his entourage to answer his cell phone about 12:20 p.m. when a man approached, pointed a small-caliber pistol at the politician’s head and pulled the trigger.

Police arrested a suspect within two minutes and later identified him as Milivoje Gutovic, 50, a security guard at the fair who was born in Perosevic’s home village of Ratkovo, in Serbia’s Vojvodina province, a police statement said.

That prompted several Serbian opposition leaders to speculate that the suspect might have had a different motive than the killers who targeted Milosevic allies such as the notorious paramilitary leader Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic and Yugoslav Defense Minister Pavle Bulatovic earlier this year.

But a statement from Milosevic’s Socialist Party broadcast on state-run radio and television called Saturday’s killing a “terrorist act aimed against our state and our people, against all of those who are resisting forces of chaos, fascism and treason.”

The party also accused the student-led Otpor, or Resistance, movement--whose peaceful protests present a growing threat to Milosevic’s regime--of involvement in the slaying.

Police took the suspect to a local hospital for urine and blood tests, suggesting that he might have been drunk.

Arkan, who like Milosevic was indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague, was killed by gunmen who opened fire with assault rifles in the lobby of a Belgrade hotel Jan. 15.

In February, a gunman firing an assault rifle killed Yugoslavia’s defense minister while he was eating dinner in a favorite restaurant that was almost surrounded by military and secret police buildings.

Last month, a childhood friend of Milosevic and the head of Yugoslavia’s state-owned airline, Zika Petrovic, was killed with a pistol outside his home in downtown Belgrade.

Many here see the growing list of high-profile victims as warning signs of worse to come, perhaps even civil war, as Milosevic fights to hold on to power.

Milosevic’s regime repeatedly has charged that Western governments are behind the killings. On Friday, Yugoslav authorities charged five members of a Serbian paramilitary unit with spying for the French government during NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last year. When the men were arrested in November, Belgrade accused Jugoslav Petrusic, who has both French and Yugoslav citizenship, of leading a group code-named Spider and planning to assassinate Milosevic for French intelligence. The French government denies that it was involved in any plot to kill the Yugoslav leader.

Milosevic has used the slayings of his allies to justify mounting repression against the widespread opposition that is trying to force him from power with street protests. When activists tried to rally in Milosevic’s hometown of Pozarevac on Tuesday, police arrested opposition members and journalists and turned away busloads of demonstrators. Organizers plan to hold another protest Monday in Belgrade, the capital of both Serbia and Yugoslavia, and hope to draw as many as 100,000 people.

Milosevic’s government also has intensified its propaganda campaign against the pro-democracy movement, which he has called a resurgence of the fascism that destroyed much of Yugoslavia during World War II.

The “evil monster is again giving signs of life and is getting as hungry as before,” Milosevic told war veterans Tuesday during celebrations of Yugoslavia’s victory against the Nazis 55 years ago.

Since last June, about 40,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led peacekeepers have failed to stop shooting and grenade attacks on Serbs in Kosovo, the Serbian province whose majority ethnic Albanian populace the Western allies went to war to protect. And that failure continues to give Milosevic potent ammunition against Yugoslavia’s Western-backed democracy movement.

He told the war veterans, and a national audience watching state-run television, that opposition supporters are “little servants and bloody allies of the [NATO] occupier who explain their treason as patriotic concern and patriotic moves.”

Meanwhile, as the West tries to isolate Milosevic and hasten his arrest with a $5-million reward offered by the U.S. State Department, the Yugoslav president is strengthening ties with other countries, including Russia and China.

Both are members of the U.N. Security Council, and they opposed NATO’s air war to drive Serbian police and Yugoslav army troops from Kosovo. Both also continue to complain that the U.N.’s administration in Kosovo is failing to protect Yugoslav sovereignty over the province, where the ethnic Albanian majority wants independence.

Yugoslav Defense Minister Dragoljub Ojdanic was in Moscow last week on an unannounced five-day visit, during which he reportedly met with his Russian counterpart, Igor D. Sergeyev, and the head of the armed forces’ general staff, Col. Gen. Anatoly V. Kvashnin.

And on Friday, Milosevic met in Belgrade with Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf, whose country also is under U.N. sanctions.