BELGRADE - Students and political protesters by the tens of thousands peacefully demonstrated their defiance of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in the streets of Belgrade yesterday despite exceptionally tough police tactics earlier in the day that injured dozens of people.
The massive peaceful turnout appeared to have pumped new life back into the tired ranks of students and other protestors who daily for 11 weeks have demanded Milosevic reinstate the victories of the Together opposition in Belgrade and 13 other cities in the Nov. 17 municipal elections. Symptomatic of the renewed defiance was the march of as many as 20,000 Belgrade University students through the city and their massive presence later at a Together coalition rally.
With nary a traffic policeman in sight, the students purposely walked across the Brankov bridge linking Old and New Belgrade where hundreds of security forces Sunday night fired water cannon and used truncheons against protestors staging a sit down. Among those beaten was veteran human rights campaigner Vesna Pesic, who heads Civic Action and is one of three Together leaders. Only brief late afternoon scuffles broke out yesterday when riot police reappeared in large numbers to prevent protestors attending the daily opposition rally from marching home.
Why the embattled Serbian president resorted to violence early yesterday - the most serious involving uniformed security forces since 1991, according to many Serbs - remained unclear. Together leaders and ordinary citizens produced widely differing evaluations.
Opposition sources said as many as 100 protestors were treated overnight in hospitals and clinics for everything from broken limbs to chipped teeth after riot police equipped with shields, batons and in some cases automatic rifles began swinging into action shortly before midnight.
After yesterday's brief skirmishes, four students and three other demonstrators required medical attention.
Aleksander Tijanic, a veteran journalist who resigned as Information Minister in protest against the regime's refusal to accept Together's municipal election victories, said in an interview "it's a big mistake to look for sense in all this."
"What we are seeing is not Frank Sinatra strategy but Doris Day," he said. "This is not 'I Did It My Way,' but 'Que Sera Sera.' Milosevic is not willing to give the opposition anything - he's got no political answers, he's just playing Russian roulette and playing for time."
To the delight of the large crowd at the afternoon rally, Democratic Party chief Zoran Djindjic, one of the three Together coalition leaders, said "Milosevic first lost the elections, then his sense of measure, then he lost face and yesterday he lost his nerve."
In the face of Milosevic's continuing silence about the crisis diplomats were at a loss to explain what he hoped to accomplish by using such diproportionate means Sunday night to stop Vuk Draskovic, one of Together's co-leaders, from leading some thousand followers across the Brankov Bridge over the Sava river from New Belgrade to Republic Square in the capital's center.
Milosevic did make a relatively rare television appearance to congratulate Interior Minister Sokolovic, State Security boss Jovica Stanisic and Public Security chief Radovan Stojicic for successful "anti-terrorist" activities last week in the volatile, predominantly ethnically Albanian province of Kosovo.
Milosevic's appearance in such company struck political observers as seeking to convey an image of control over the security forces who are reported to be as tired of the continuing Serbian political crisis as the protestors themselves.
Milosevic's handling of the crisis has struck political observers, diplomats and ordinary citizens as increasingly erratic. For example, only last week Igor Ivanov, deputy foreign minister pro-Serb Russia, spent three days here and left for Moscow assuring reporters Milosevic would come up with a political solution to the crisis.
The security forces's behavior provoked strongly worded formal denunciations from the United States, Britain and Germany. France, a traditional ally of Serbia's dating back to World War One, in a significant policy switch officially recognized the Together coalition leaders and invited them to Paris.
"This invitation," Foreign Minister Herve de Charette said in a Paris statement, "amounts to recognition by the French government of the leaders of the Together opposition coalition which in the past weeks has proved its political maturity."