Rage against the regime

As Serbia's political opposition devises a more concrete, even legalistic strategy of using elections as a vehicle for ousting Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader seems to be increasingly relying on mobster tactics to maintain power.

"This regime acts more like a mafia than a state," said one pro-democracy activist who asked not to be identified. "The reason Curuvija and Draskovic were targeted for assassination attempts was because they were insiders who betrayed Milosevic. And that Milosevic cannot forgive."

The surface normalcy of Belgrade, a faded but elegant city of 2 million people, is permeated by an atmosphere of intimidation and the suggestion of potential violence. The regime's power to intimidate is enhanced by the Machiavellian selectivity of its repression, its semi-totalitarian nature, its unpredictability. It's the kind of place where one instinctively starts to censor oneself when talking on the phone, where one is warned to delete files off hard drives, write only the most cryptic e-mail messages to activists so as not to endanger them, where people talk about having "problems" with the police, and everybody knows what they mean.

"I was visited by the police twice just this week," complained Slobodan Djinovic, a leader with the student activist group "Otpor" or Resistance. He and other student activists ducked out of the Curuvija memorial Monday night in order to avoid more encounters with the police mixed in with the crowd. "Never let them think you're friends with them," Djinovic advises. "Don't give them an opening. Just talk about wanting a lawyer present."

Srdjan Popovic, a student leader, and at 26, the youngest member of Belgrade's city parliament, talks passionately about wanting to change the culture of fear which stifles Serbian politics. He talks about a population that fears change will only bring something worse, and which has therefore consistently voted over the past decade for the status quo -- Milosevic.

"We want to generate the idea within individual people to resist," he said at a meeting Sunday at a cafe downstairs from Otpor's downtown offices. "We want to build a completely new political generation in Serbia."

Police beatings have driven some of Popovic's friends to stay away from the demonstrations for the past week.

"I asked one, 'Are you frightened?' And he said, 'No, it's just that walking and whistling aren't working for me. I'm waiting for something more radical. I am not Gandhi. I've got bruises, and somebody is going to pay for that,'" Popovic recounted.

Zarko Korac, a Belgrade University psychology professor who leads a coalition of democratic parties, spoke about fear, and the chilling effect it has on the opposition movement, at Curuvija's memorial service Monday night.

As Korac and I sit at a downtown cafe Monday afternoon, a man in a warm-up suit approaches him, spits on the ground, gives Korac a long look, and then walks on. It is a kind of threat.

"He doesn't like me," Korac says, as Belgraders stream by, past the antiquarian bookshops and delicatessens and kiosks that give an illusion of calm to this city charged with a sense of imminent violence.

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