Paranoid city

"I am going to postpone my trip to Spain," said one engineering student. "My mother is here, my sister is here. I can't leave them when there's going to be a war."

"NATO is going to bomb again," cafe owner Milan Potrebic said, "and people are going to take to the streets here with machine guns. Is that what America wants? We are in a concentration camp here, and we are waiting for the gas."

Albanian rebel incursions into southern Serbia have escalated fears that NATO could intervene in Serbia on behalf of the ethnic Albanians. Rebels killed one Serbian policeman and wounded one United Nations worker, sparking outrage at the perceived assault on Yugoslav sovereignty.

U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin fueled that outrage by criticizing Milosevic for beefing up Yugoslav military forces on the Montenegrin border with Albania, the border that pro-Western Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic had tried to open last week.

Opposition leader Vuk Draksovic has added to dark speculation that Serbia will descend into civil war. His political party controls independent Belgrade television station Studio B, which was raided, along with several other independent media, by police last week. "If the regime attacks and closes down Studio B and takes the eyes and ears from Belgrade ... it will bear all the consequences that may follow, because this city and this country will be defending Studio B," Draskovic said Thursday.

In this opposition lies a real threat of civil unrest. Over the weekend, in the town of Pozega, 2,000 people attacked a police car after officers closed the town's independent television station.

While Draskovic has emerged from the regime's assault on his television station appearing ready for a fight, other pro-democracy forces in Serbia have suffered stepped-up arrests, beatings and police harassment in the atmosphere of growing repression Milosevic has created.

In February, Milosevic held the Socialist Party of Serbia convention, in which he declared a new "development plan" that the student opposition leaders argue serves, in effect, as a declaration of a state of emergency. Suddenly police are arresting students, confiscating their posters and forcing them to sign papers stamped with "on the orders of the development plan."

Unshaven and haggard, a prominent student activist said he expected that the regime would take full advantage of the escalating panic overtaking Serbia. More than 100 activists in his student group, Resistance, have been arrested in the past month.

At a recent meeting, the student activist and his colleagues could not conceal their sense of doom. They fear that the sharp rise in arrests and beatings of student activists will be followed shortly by trials and prison sentences.

Approximately 2,000 NATO troops from six countries are scheduled to take part in maneuvers in Kosovo later this month. The student leader said those maneuvers will only make things worse for his group.

"NATO could not have planned the timing of its exercises more cynically," he said. "It comes right on the anniversary of the bombing. And everyone is expecting that it is just the prelude to new bombing again." Because the student groups are considered pro-Western by most Serbs, any action they take this month could end up playing into Milosevic's hands. "The opposition can't even choose a day to hold a peace rally during those maneuvers without seeming like complete NATO stooges and traitors."

A mutual fear of assassination seems to be the only thing uniting opposition leaders and regime officials.

"We all know he is going to be killed," one law student half-joked about the student leader. "We all know that."

But some in Belgrade are determined not to let the fear get to them. Psychology professor and leader of the Social Democratic Party Zarko Korac was beaten up by someone waiting in front of his apartment when he returned last week from the inauguration of Croatian President Stipe Mesic. But Korac said he refuses to submit to this obvious effort by the regime to intimidate Serbian democratic forces.

"That is what the regime wants, for us to be afraid," he said this week. "And I refuse to show it."

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