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BELGRADE, Oct 8, 1999 -- During the NATO air war against Yugoslavia, Mahatma Gandhi and the Eiffel Tower graced Belgrade's billboards. Now Madeleine Albright and 10 riot policemen are the stars in an increasingly bitter and personal poster war between Slobodan Milosevic's government and the opposition parties trying to force it out.
The Yugoslav authorities made up for an inevitable lack of Western advertising revenue during the air strikes earlier this year by commissioning anti-NATO posters.
Among the more striking images, Gandhi was used to portray Belgrade as a passive victim of the air strikes, launched over the government's repression of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Paris' Eiffel Tower, shown as if crippled by a NATO missile, had an English caption aimed at foreign television crews.
Many billboards have since been reclaimed by the foreign manufacturers and different sets of propaganda have sprung up on the city's walls, fences and smaller advertising hoardings.
People regularly plaster parts of Belgrade with posters, and cover up, tear or deface those posted by the other side.
Riot police accused
The latest ones show riot police beating up a demonstrator at a rally in Belgrade last week, part of a campaign of nightly street protests which are showing signs of running out of steam after just over two weeks.
The posters are anonymous, but nobody is fooled.
"They're put up by the opposition parties," said Sasa, selling badges of cult rock stars like Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison in front of a wall covered with the latest offerings.
In one the beating is shown alongside a picture of Milosevic and his wife under Milosevic's famous 1987 pledge to Kosovo's Serbs: "No one will dare to beat you."
Another is lined by close-up portraits of 10 riot police.
"These people beat up children, old people and the defenseless," says the caption.
Sasa thought the opposition's apparent aim of shaming the police, who have shown restraint since the clashes in which they said bricks, sticks and stones were thrown at them, was risky.
"It might just make them angrier," he said.
Opposition radicalizes in order to keep momentum
The opposition parties have declined to comment on the posters, but Zoran Djindjic, leader of the biggest opposition party involved in the protests, said officials should be named.
"We must begin defining personal responsibilities. Let's see who is beating us, who is lying to us, who is taking our money," he told a rally on Wednesday evening, signaling a radicalization of a campaign that has yet to gather steam.
"I propose that we make public the names of the editors of the previous day's state television news, to make public the names of directors of public firms which take our money. So we know who is the ruling class.
"There has been enough anonymity - we will name them and they will no longer be able to shield themselves behind official organs and cordons," he said.
Djindjic's own portrait appears widely, attached to the body of a child seated on U.S. President Bill Clinton's shoulders.
The posters, also unsigned, are crudely made. It is Madeleine Albright, Clinton's Secretary of State, who stars in the most professionally produced of the anti-opposition crop.
She is shown seated in front of a line up of opposition leaders, who the government says are U.S. puppets bent on destroying Serbia and then handing it over to foreign occupiers.
While they are clearly playing an active part in the poster war, the authorities appeared unconcerned by the latest offensive in the opposition's so far ineffectual campaign.
Ivica Dacic, spokesman for Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party, dismissed the riot police posters as a desperate and one-sided ploy.
"I didn't see any posters of demonstrators attacking police," he said, referring to stones thrown by some protesters.
"When someone sees they are losing they are ready for anything."