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BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Opposition leaders say NATO forces in Kosovo help Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic keep his iron grip on power when they allow kidnappings and killings of Serbs to go on unstopped.
"Milosevic is the luckiest man alive," said Vuk Draskovic, the leader of the Serbian Renewal Party, which has wavered in its support for massive street demonstrations aimed at overthrowing the regime. "After he accepted the ultimatum to surrender, I expected that NATO would follow its rules and implement European-style democracy in Kosovo. That would have meant the political death of Milosevic. But instead NATO is giving more ammunition to Milosevic every day."
Draskovic stands to suffer more than other Serbian opposition members from failures in Kosovo. He joined Milosevic's ruling coalition before the NATO bombing campaign but was removed from his ministerial post after he accused his own government of lying to the Yugoslav people by saying it could defeat the Western military alliance.
Draskovic later reassured a key session of the Serbian parliament that NATO would protect Serbs in Kosovo as though they were citizens of a Western democracy. "I have no argument anymore," he says now.
Some 150 Serbs have been killed in Kosovo since NATO troops arrived in mid-June. Fear of revenge attacks at the hands of ethnic Albanians has led to the exodus of an estimated 80 percent of the more than 200,000 Serbs who once lived there.
Draskovic and other opposition leaders say NATO's failure to create safe and secure conditions in Kosovo has stolen the wind from their sails.
To illustrate the problem, Draskovic, a writer known across Serbia, points to a visit he paid a group of villagers during the NATO bombing campaign in a remote central region where Serbian peasants saved the lives of dozens of American airmen during World War II.
"They said, 'Mr. Draskovic you must address our nation and explain to Serbs that Milosevic is producing lies on his TV and in his newspaper that the United States and France are bombing Serbia. We know this is a lie and that the Germans are bombing us.' "
"I thought about what I could possibly say and decided to lie to them for the first time in my life and I said, " 'Dear brothers, you are right, it is the Germans.' "
This week, Draskovic returned to the same village and found the people there more distressed than on his first meeting. "They said, 'maybe, maybe it was the Americans who bombed us because they are now in Kosovo with the Germans, standing by as Albanian terrorists are committing atrocities everyday against Serbs.' "
Ivica Dacic, the spokesman for Milosevic's Socialist Party, deflected criticism of the regime's surrender in Kosovo this week by accusing U.S. forces of hiding evidence of a massacre of 15 Serbs in the village of Ugljare.
The bodies of Serbs kidnapped after NATO entered Kosovo were found in late July but not handed over for international forensics testing until the middle of August. Since then, Serbian officials have continued to complain that Serbian forensics experts and family members have been denied access to the corpses.
"When 15 Serbs are killed, there is silence but they still insist that 10,000 Albanians were killed by our forces during NATO bombing when the best evidence they have is pictures of Albanian women standing on graves," he said. "These are the same people saying we couldn't keep the security in Kosovo with 25,000 of our own forces, and now they have 40,000 to 50,000 or their own, and they can't do it either."
Dacic, often referred to as the reclusive Milosevic's "spin doctor," is trying to isolate the regime's opponents as part of the NATO camp and brand them as traitors. "There are no other divisions in Yugoslavia other than those who are for our nation and those who are for NATO, which has allowed ethnic cleansing of Serbs to go on under its eyes," he said.
Yugoslav political analysts say Milosevic is again thriving as a "political Houdini," a master of getting out of a mess he has created for himself.
"He is the master of illusions and deceit," said Stevan Lilic, the vice president of the Democratic Center in Belgrade.
Rather than attempting to use the failures of the current regime in Kosovo to their advantage, the Serbian opposition is now shying away from an issue that the West hoped would lead to the final defeat of Milosevic.
"We are all losers in Kosovo," says Goran Svilanovic, president of the Civic Alliance of Serbia whose founder and former candidate, Vesna Pesic, recently went into hiding in neighboring Montenegro.
Svilanovic is trying to help six families, all his own relatives, who were expelled from their homes this summer from the American zone in Gnjilane, Kosovo. "I warned people in my own party that if we try to make this an issue, Milosevic will say, 'I told you so: it was not possible to live together with the Albanians in Kosovo.'"