Milosevic

BUDVA, Yugoslavia - Faced with the strongest challenge in his 13 years in power, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is fighting for re-election in tomorrow's election amid Western and opposition fears that he will win the only way the polls say he can: through widespread vote fraud. Milosevic is losing his hold on most Serbs, who had previously revered him as a national hero. A relentless effort to silence opposing voices has left Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic, with almost no independent broadcasters, a constantly harassed and splintered opposition and leading politicians who fear for their lives.

THERE IS a whiff of quagmire coming from the Balkans. The flashpoint is the divided Kosovo town of Mitrovica, just a few miles south of the border with Serbia proper. The prospect of NATO troops -- Americans in particular -- getting bogged down in a Belfast-type cycle of ethnic terrorism during an American presidential election year has raised alarm in Washington. The mining town of about 80,000 is divided by a river. The Serbs are north of the river, the Albanians south, with French peacekeepers in between.

PARIS - The United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague, Netherlands, has published its second indictment of the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, charging him yesterday with war crimes in Croatia, including the persecution, deportation, torture and murder of civilians in 1991 and 1992. A tribunal official said the document was to be presented promptly to Milosevic in the tribunal jail, where he has been since June, awaiting trial on earlier charges that he committed war crimes in Kosovo.

SERBIA'S ADVANCE into the community of nations was improved by the flight of the former Bosnian Serb president, Biljana Plavsic, to The Hague to face a war crimes indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The sea change in Serbia's attitude toward world opinion was made clear by the Yugoslav Justice Minister Momcilo Grubac. He urged all Yugoslav nationals indicted by the tribunal to emulate Ms. Plavsic and face the charges. That seemed to explain the sudden flight to Moscow of Mirjana Markovic, the wife and political partner of the deposed Serb-Yugoslav dictator, Slobodan Milosevic.

WASHINGTON -- The deal that Slobodan Milosevic reached with European and Russian envoys yesterday omits any mention of his indictment for war crimes, effectively keeping him safe from international prosecutors for as long as he remains the No. 1 power in Yugoslavia."

THE OVERDUE indictment of Slobodan Milosevic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is based on facts and law. It also disturbs the peace process that must come in Kosovo.The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide became world law in 1951. It outlaws acts with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.This is not a meaningless gesture. A war crimes court sitting in Tanzania last September sentenced a former Rwandan prime minister to life in prison.

ENDGAME is a term in chess for the final stage of a match when most of the pieces have been removed from the board. But the struggle over Kosovo is no game. Real people are being killed, raped and left dispossessed. NATO can't afford to lose in the endgame the future for Kosovars that it won through military and diplomatic action.This means no bombing pause that allows Serbia's forces to regroup or complete ethnic cleansing while the United Nations Security Council stalls over a resolution.

REPORTS of troop mutinies in Serbia and the quickened diplomacy over Kosovo suggest that NATO bombing is producing results. The campaign should be halted when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic ends his terror against Kosovars and agrees to Yugoslav troop withdrawal, the return of refugees, a NATO-led international force to ensure the security of all Kosovars and a political settlement.While NATO's unity behind the bombing campaign and the five conditions remains strong, some of its members dilute the cause by making unilateral noises for home consumption.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- He gave them back their independent radio stations. He promised them money. He even watched as they took the first step to possibly regaining their election victories.But can Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic peacefully persuade a determined army of demonstrators to leave the streets for good? That question hung over Yugoslavia last night as Milosevic made his first moves to quell weeks of protests that have seen tens of thousands of students, pensioners and the unemployed take to the streets to topple the regime.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Under pressure from Washington and the fizzling of protests against President Slobodan Milosevic, the weakened democratic opposition in Serbia united yesterday in demanding early elections under the eye of foreign monitors.In a setback for the Clinton administration, such elections would not remove Milosevic, who was elected in 1997 to a four-year term by the Yugoslav Parliament and controls a government considered unlikely to call parliamentary elections, due next year, before spring.