How the Balkan strongman was toppled

That universe existed, Matic points out, in the political space that Milosevic left to the opposition. "Opposition political parties may have been weak, disorganized, and infiltrated, but they had a place here," recalls Zarko Korac, one of the leaders who called the demonstration on Oct. 5 and who is now a deputy prime minister of Serbia. "Milosevic allowed this because we are in Europe, and because he was popular."

Indeed, opposition parties ran all the country's major towns and cities after municipal elections in December 1996; independent radio and TV stations managed to broadcast; opposition-leaning dailies and weeklies published. The government harassed them, and sometimes closed them down for a while, but Milosevic never resorted to dictatorial repression of his political opponents at home.

This was partly because he feared Western retaliation, suggests Predrag Simic, a former opposition leader who is now President Vojislav Kostunica's top foreign-policy aide. But it was also, he adds, because Milosevic "was not a great villain, he was a small party apparatchik."

Though Serbian troops committed atrocities in the field against their Bosnian and Croatian enemies, the secret police in Belgrade allowed remarkable latitude to the opposition. "At the demonstrations against him we shouted 'Slobo-Saddam' and it was a good slogan," recalls Slavoljub Djukic, author of several hostile books about Milosevic. "But there were really no similarities between them at all."

The opposition may have existed, but it failed repeatedly to take advantage of Milosevic's weaknesses because of its own internal divisions born as much of personal rivalries as from ideological debate. At the same time, anti-Milosevic leaders were dispirited by Washington's continued reliance on the Yugoslav president as a guarantor of peace, especially after the Dayton accord in 1995. "We could not win until the West decided that it was not going to negotiate any more with Milosevic," says Professor Korac.

Only when Western governments gave up on Milosevic after the 1999 war over Kosovo did they make a serious investment in the opposition, such as the $100 million that the US Congress approved in assistance to antiregime forces, coming on top of private aid such as Mr. Soros's funds.

More critically, say former members of the fractious 18 party 'Democratic Opposition of Serbia' (DOS), US diplomats knocked their heads together until they formed a cohesive and united coalition.

"The pressure on us to unify was the most important thing," argues Korac. "There was a credible alternative." And that alternative was given a face when the DOS chose Vojislav Kostunica - untainted by any dealings with Milosevic, reputed to be honest, and sufficiently nationalistic to broaden the opposition's appeal - as its candidate in the 2000 presidential elections.

At the same time, western money funded the development of Otpor, meaning 'Resistance,' a student movement using sophisticated marketing techniques and edgy, hip mobilizing tactics that added street pressure onto the government.

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