Over 5,000 Join Anti-Milosevic Rally in Serbia

Testing postwar Yugoslavia’s tolerance for political dissent, thousands of Serbs gathered Tuesday in this war-ruined city in the first major public protest against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s rule since NATO ended its 11-week air war.

A crowd estimated at more than 5,000 chanted “Resign! Resign! Resign!” as a succession of speakers from small Serbian opposition parties stood atop a makeshift stage of coffee tables in the central square to blame the Yugoslav leader for a war that has left the nation’s economy in shambles, severed the country from a province sacred to its history and tarnished the Serbian name throughout the world.

“The responsibility for the tragedy that happened to our people lies with a man who has this name: Slobodan Milosevic,” declared Vuk Obradovic, a former Yugoslav army general who heads the Social Democratic Party. “Kosovo at this moment is so much further from Serbia than ever before in the past. And the man who is guilty of that is Slobodan Milosevic.”

At a rally sponsored by Serbia’s multi-party Alliance for Change that was ignored by most of the media here--and dismissed by the large, sometime opposition Serbian Renewal Movement as insignificant--several speakers even broached subjects that many had said were too sensitive for Serbs to air in public: Milosevic’s indictment by an international tribunal last month on war crimes charges and the Kosovo atrocities behind those charges.

“The indictment against Milosevic is big, it’s long, and it’s black,” shouted Alliance for Change President Goran Svilanovic, predicting that Tuesday’s rally would be the first of many. “He protected Serbian interests by committing crimes.”

In Kosovo itself, less than 100 miles south of here, even harsher criticism of the Yugoslav president came from an unexpected quarter.

Crown Prince Alexander, heir to Yugoslavia’s exiled monarchy, also called on Milosevic to step down. He described the Yugoslav president as a “monster” during a visit to the devastated city of Pec in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s main republic, Serbia.

“Milosevic must go for the sake of Yugoslavia,” said the British-born Alexander at Pec Patriarchy, the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church, which has also issued a call for the Yugoslav president’s resignation.

During a brief meeting with reporters, Alexander said he has no ambitions to replace Milosevic and return to rule over his homeland. His only goal, he said, is to encourage democracy in postwar Yugoslavia.

His more immediate goal Tuesday was to lend his voice to that of Patriarch Pavle, prelate of the Serbian Church, in encouraging Kosovo’s dwindling Serbian community to remain in the province.

Officials in towns throughout southern Serbia say that nearly 80,000 of Kosovo’s ethnic minority Serbs have fled since the war ended amid a wave of revenge killings and arson by ethnic Albanian refugees who have returned by the tens of thousands to looted and gutted homes of their own.

In Pec alone, it is estimated that less than 100 of the area’s 20,000 prewar Serbs remain--most of them in the monastery that is the heart of the Orthodox faith--as Kosovo continues to empty of a Serbian minority that represented about 10% of the province’s 2 million people before the war.

NATO and the KLA Take Further Charge

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the ethnic Albanians’ Kosovo Liberation Army continued to consolidate their hold on the province Tuesday. But British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, commander of the NATO-led peacekeeping force, told reporters that he was “broadly satisfied” with the first stage of demilitarizing the KLA, whose guerrilla war against minority rule led to Yugoslavia’s military crackdown on the province.

As of Tuesday morning, NATO-led peacekeepers said that 3,745 of the KLA’s nearly 20,000 soldiers had turned in their heavy weapons.

It was the image of the Yugoslav prince in Pec, however, that many analysts said had the strongest potential resonance for pro-democracy forces in Cacak and other opposition-held southern cities and towns, which have been led by home-grown leaders from a patchwork of parties since 1996 elections.

Although the cornerstone of the Cacak protest was the opposition’s call for parallel pro-democracy local governments throughout the country, few Serbs heard about that.

Serbian state television ignored the rally, and it merited just two sentences on the alternative station Studio B in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. The city-run station is controlled by sometime opposition leader Vuk Draskovic and his Serbian Renewal Movement. It estimated the Cacak crowd at 2,000.

Instead, state television featured Milosevic’s meeting Tuesday with the leaders of the Serbian republic, at which the president stressed his postwar priorities: reconstruction and reform, restoring economic and cultural ties with all nations, and the “reaffirmation” of a free-market economy in Yugoslavia.

The demonstration began with a deafening blast near the stage, apparently from a concussion grenade meant to frighten the crowd. Party leaders said federal police had stopped several convoys of their supporters from entering the town, and some foreign journalists said they also were turned back.

Speaker Warns of Backlash by Public

But Svilanovic of the Alliance for Change asserted from the stage: “The people shouldn’t be afraid of those in power. The time has come for the regime to be afraid of the people.”

But Vladan Batic, who heads the alliance’s Christian Democratic Party, told the audience that the process will take time.

“We’ll go from town to town, from house to house, from man to man, and light the torch of democracy in Serbia,” he said.

There also were more subtle messages aimed at weary Yugoslav army troops who have returned en masse from the brutality of Kosovo to the rest of the devastated republic. For several days last week, angry reservists used tanks to block major roads in this region in a protest to gain war wages, and there were reports here Tuesday that some of those reservists had been arrested.

Former Gen. Obradovic, who took pains onstage to thank the Yugoslav troops for their courage both here and in Kosovo, called on the federal police to end all torture and oppression, warning, “Don’t play with our patience.

“Today in Cacak,” the retired general declared, “rises the bird of a new democratic Serbia that will fly throughout this great land.”

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Times staff writers Julie Tamaki in Pec and John Daniszewski in Pristina, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.