Through the clouds of tear gas, Daniel Lisonek saw his chance. With a decade of frustration boiling in his breast, and half a million fellow protesters heaving at his back, he hurled himself at the line of armed policemen guarding the entrance to the Yugoslav parliament.

The line broke, the police didn't open fire, and Mr. Lisonek raced up the steps, through the door, and then on up into the building's cupola. Flinging open a window, he unfurled the opposition banner in full view of the crowd below. A deafening cheer went up. Hours later, Slobodan Milosevic stepped down.

"The main thing was that we were ready to fight the system, to confront it," Lisonek recalls now. "I was ready even to lose my life that day."

That day, Oct. 5, 2000, crowned years of organizing by opposition groups that had been steadily growing in numbers and shaking the pillars of Mr. Milosevic's regime for months.

It also brought to fruition a three-year campaign by the US and other Western governments to dislodge the Yugoslav leader by strangling his country's economy with sanctions and rocking it with bombs during the Kosovo war.

Above all, Oct. 5, when the Yugoslav leader acknowledged he had lost elections, offered a textbook case of how domestic and foreign activists could unite to effect non-violent regime change in apparently hopeless circumstances.

"We could not have done it without outside aid, and the West could not have done it without us," says Veran Matic, founder of the independent B-92 radio network, which proved a key tool in rallying opposition forces.

Branislav Ivkovic, a minister in Milosevic's last government and former vice president of his Serbian Socialist Party, agrees, though from a different perspective. "The sanctions deliberately impoverished the people, to manufacture discontent," he argues. "Then a huge number of nongovernmental organizations with limitless funds sprang up to feed on that discontent."

None of those organizations was as tenacious as billionaire George Soros's Open Society Institute, which set up shop in Belgrade in 1991, and over the next nine years distributed more than $100 million to foster what institute president Sonja Licht calls "an infrastructure of change."

The money bought newsprint for independent papers, kept publishing houses alive, encouraged artistic and literary groups, and - most notably - funded the growth of B-92 as it set up local stations in towns controlled by the opposition.

These stations, cultural societies, alternative art clubs and other projects were "islands of resistance" to the authoritarian regime in Belgrade, says Ms. Licht, because "they empowered the people themselves."

"We created a possible parallel universe," adds Mr. Matic. "There was permanent support to keep our spirit alive."

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