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One feels a whiff of that sort of attentive love in Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, where one can find consolation in the fact that phones are tapped, e-mail is read and meetings with political activists monitored. Secret police mingled in with a crowd of a few hundred of Belgrade's intelligentsia Monday night, gathered at the Center for Cultural Decontamination for a ceremony to mark the six-month anniversary of the assassination of independent Serbian editor Slavko Curuvija, shot outside his apartment building when returning from an Easter Sunday walk with his wife Branka.

Among the journalists, artists, writers, professors and secret police was leading opposition politician Zoran Djindjic, as well as his wife and four bodyguards. Djindjic, a German-educated philosophy professor who leads Serbia's Alliance for Change coalition of opposition parties, has good reason to travel with the well-armed and broad-shouldered security guards. Last week, his leading opposition rival Vuk Draskovic narrowly missed being killed in a car accident that took the lives of four close associates. Draskovic, along with most of the capital, considers the incident an assassination attempt by the Milosevic regime (and several details of the accident -- including the fact that in this repressive police state, the police say they have no record of who owns the truck which hit Draskovic's car, and have failed to find the driver -- are very suspicious).

Like the ceremony marking Curuvija's murder, the presumed assassination attempt against Draskovic may prove to be the opportunity Serbia's political opposition desperately needs to reinvigorate its exhausted efforts to oust Milosevic. Over the past few days, street protests in the capital have dwindled to fewer than 10,000 people -- far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of people who regularly turned out to protest the regime in the winter of 1996-1997. The number of street protesters dropped precipitously after dozens of demonstrators were severely beaten by riot police last week.

Draskovic's restoked rage against the regime, together with the dwindling street protests, have together served as a catalyst to unite Serbia's divided political opposition behind the idea of demanding early elections. A final meeting scheduled for Thursday is expected to produce a list of 10 conditions for internationally monitored early elections for the Serbian parliament. After that, the opposition will demand a round-table meeting with the Milosevic regime to negotiate for early elections.

Draskovic's fury at the regime in which he once served as deputy prime minister has driven him closer to the weaker opposition political parties whose supporters are already on the streets. He is expected to decide this week if he will call his tens of thousands of rowdier supporters onto the streets to join in the protests. Even though many political analysts here consider Draskovic a political opportunist who was even willing to join forces with Milosevic to serve his need for power, they acknowledge his support is crucial if the opposition movement is to gain a critical mass. A recent poll shows Draskovic's Serbian Renewal Party to have the single largest constituency among all political parties in the country, leading even Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia, and the far-right nationalist Serbian Radical Party of Vojislav Seselj. In addition, Draskovic controls Belgrade's only independent television station, Studio B, which has provided the only local TV coverage of the anti-government protests on its news broadcasts, and on Saturday aired a long-interview with his long-time opposition rival Djindjic.

Next page | The rest of the loyal opposition