How the Balkan strongman was toppled

For most Otpor members, "the essential condition for success was the feeling that we didn't have anything to lose," says Milja Jovanovic, a founder of Otpor. "Dealing with Milosevic was an urge that had been building up for 10 years."

But the money from abroad was "a tremendous support," she adds. "The only illegal thing that we did was to receive foreign funds through accounts around Europe," she says. "Eighty-five percent of our funding came from the United States," through bodies such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute, as well as USAID.

That money paid not only for stickers and T-shirts and badges, computers, offices, and administrative costs, but also for training abroad in how to develop a political strategy, and how to organize a door-to-door campaign.

At the same time, the European Union kicked in over the winter of 1999 with several million dollars' worth of heating oil for towns under opposition control. The program, called 'Energy for Democracy,' bypassed the Yugoslav government, and was meant to show voters that Western governments took the opposition seriously as a partner.

SOMETIMES, Western officials involved themselves in the nuts and bolts of resistance. When the government shut down B-92's main transmitter during mass demonstrations in December 1996, for example, Matic persuaded the BBC to take his feed over the internet and then beam it on a BBC satellite down to B-92 network stations around the country.

It was the British ambassador, carrying the diplomatic bag, who smuggled into Yugoslavia the devices needed to decode the BBC signal.

At other times, the West simply bought the equipment that the opposition needed, such as satellite phones, so that opposition leaders could communicate among themselves even if the government shut down the national phone system after the Sept. 24, 2000 elections.

By then, the pieces of the opposition puzzle were in place. "An electorate for the opposition existed," says Mr. Simic. "A civil society had emerged from the depths of the Serbian spirit." Civic activists had worked hard to get out the vote, boosting turnout by the critical margin that defeated Mr. Milosevic in the polls.

On the front lines of the street protests against Milosevic's refusal to accept that defeat, Daniel Lisonek and his fellow soccer fans, who often made up the shock troops of the opposition, "all fed from each other's energy and strength," he remembers.

The police did not shoot as Lisonek and his friends charged past them, because by then the Army and police chiefs had decided that the game was up, and abandoned their supreme commander.

"It was not one thing that brought Milosevic down, it was lots of things," says Korac. "It was death by a thousand cuts."

And while outsiders helped to mobilize and organize opposition forces, raising their spirits and their profile, says Ms. Licht, the decisive thrust came from inside. "In the end," she says, "the seed of resistance must come from the people themselves."

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