Is the beginning of the end now facing Milosevic?

Milan Petrovic has turned cursing Slobodan Milosevic into a fine art. He is not alone. In his great grey tower block in the heart of New Belgrade, his neighbours have too.

At all hours they will vilify the Serbian strongman for all the woes he has visited upon their country. Woes that have worsened considerably with the onset of the brutal Balkan winter.

"I'll be sitting in front of my computer shivering because the authorities have turned off the heating and then there'll be a power cut," says Petrovic, an amiable television screenwriter. "It may happen several times a day and when it does we all rush onto our verandahs, beat our chests, and scream Slobo you bastard, go."

This is a demand that is gradually being echoed like a mantra through most of Serbia. Even in towns such as Pancevo, where the pensioned classes have long been some of the leader's hardiest supporters, there is growing desperation and despair.

Mention Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia or Macedonia, the four republics lost under Milosevic, and people mixing melancholy with nostalgia, anger with pain, will often launch into a paneygric of Tito's old Yugoslavia - pre-shrinkage, pre-sanctions, pre-night patrols.

"We don't live anymore, we just survive," says Bojana Dukic, a grandmother in the dismal confines of her dark, damp, dead home. "The major," she says, alluding to the indicted war criminal, "is to blame. He has broken up our country, pauperised our people and even lost Kosovo, the cradle of our civilisation."

Six months after NATO troops marched triumphantly into Kosovo, Serbia is suffering. Shortages are mounting, poverty is rising and jobs are fading fast.

After seven solid years of sanctions - an embargo that has enriched the mafia around Milosevic, exterminated the middle class and brought untold misery to the masses - half of the population lives beneath the poverty level.

"Heroic reconstruction" on the part of the regime has done little to hide the ruinous state of the economy. The shattered shells of bombed-out facilities stand as stark testimony to the lack of productivity in the wake of NATO's 78-day bombing campaign.

"We are living in a society that is so isolated it is now very surreal," says Borka Pavicevic, a theatre director who heads the popular Centre for Cultural Decontamination. "You cannot compare what we see on [state] television - the heroic reconstruction of our country post-Kosovo, the building of bridges, the men in Versace suits, the BMWs and fantastic-looking ladies - with the real squalor of life around us."

The economy, say analysts, will get worse. Yugoslavia - once the richest nation in the former Eastern bloc - is now poorer than Albania, Europe's economic blackspot. Salaries have plummeted 13 times since Milosevic pushed the country into the abyss by discarding his communist mantle for the clothes of a nationalist crowd-pleaser in 1989. Only the note-printing industry is said to be working to full capacity alongside a flourishing black market run by government cronies.

"Serbs have stopped smiling," says Gen Vuk Obradovic, the former soldier who heads the opposition Socialist Democratic party. "Two-thirds of the population wants political change. It is tired of seeing one defeat after another being turned into so-called victory."

The Serbs, it is true, do a tough talking act. Their criticism of the regime can be as biting as the icy winds that cut through the capital. Like the black humour that has become an essential part of their pact with survival - as treasured as smuggled gasoline, sugar and oil - the dissent has grown in leaps and bounds.

In recent weeks, thousands of Belgraders have packed theatres to gawp at plays lampooning the autocratic leader and his wife Mira Markovic, head of the Yugoslav United Left party (YUL).

Not so long ago, Vesna Pecic, a prominent opposition leader, even went so far as to pronounce that the only way out of the Milosevic cul-de-sac was via the "Ceausescu route". Get ordinary Serbs onto the subject of their president's removal and the executed Romanian dictator's name will often crop up.

"This is no ordinary tyranny, its very subtle," says one western ambassador. "People have access to the foreign press, they can read Croatian papers and as Vesna Pecic recently showed, they can and do speak their minds."

But the battle to dislodge the Serbian president stops there. Stoney-faced peasants may trudge through sombre villages, Sajkaca hats pulled tightly around their eyelids, as if in silent protest at their plight. Yet, even in the depths of misery - in those dark, dark spots where elderly men and women are forced to survive on pensions of $40 a month - there is little talk of rebellion.

Public apathy, say sociologists, has been tinged with the fear of change. The Serbs' almost innate penchant for Balkan fatalism has left few believing that they can ever extricate themselves from the toxic cycle of hate and destruction that has come to be associated with their leader. Fearing the worst, an estimated 500,000 of the most energetic and talented Serbs have already sought asylum abroad.

"Our society has become very disoriented," says Snjezana Milivojevic, who taught cultural theory at the University of Belgrade before being expelled in a government purge this year. "Yugoslavia has collapsed and no one knows what to identify with any more. There is no expectation that change will bring anything better which partly explains the poor support for the democratic opposition."

Indeed. Slobodan Milosevic may be the most unpopular politician in the country - opinion polls show that 32 per cent of the population dislike him intensely - yet set against an opposition that is as divided as it is self-seeking, he is also, paradoxically, the most popular.

No other man has been able to capitalise on his failings, and no other can cull the 15 per cent of personal support that he does.

The street protests that started off with the aim of ousting him in the autumn are often noisy affairs in the heart of Belgrade, but they attract crowds of fewer than 100 men, women and teenagers armed with little more than whistles and goodwill. The poor turn-out has caused many to throw up their hands in despair. "It's a hopeless situation because all our leaders hate each other and that's made us very disunited," said Mira Saric attending a rally organised by the Alliance for Change, the main opposition grouping. "Back in 1996 we had a lot of determination and we saw results," said the retired singer, referring to the mass demonstrations that made the regime accept major opposition victories in local elections three years ago.

"This time round people are scared. The police have beaten demonstrators. An [opposition] newspaper editor has been killed and there's the fear of civil war, of the regime killing many more to hold onto power."

As a master of political strategy, the NATO bombing campaign has also allowed Milosevic to play skilfully on the Serbs' time-honoured sense of victimhood - martyrdom their epic poetry celebrates so well. By association, the opposition parties which depend on support from the West, are widely perceived as paid-up traitors.

"The economy will not be a reason for Milosevic's fall," insists Antic Srbolub, an independent economist. "Whatever problems we will face this winter he will blame on the West because of the bombing campaign."

To make matters worse, dissidents say, Serbia is cursed by its rich, fertile land. "There's not going to be starvation here, there's just going to be shortages," says Gen Obradovic. "People don't tend to revolt on full stomachs."

Already there are signs that Milosevic is mapping out his survival strategy. The sudden announcement that his socialist party will be holding an extraordinary congress in two months has fuelled speculation that he is preparing the ground for early elections.

"Recently, there's been renewed repression, a tightening of control in all areas of civic life," says Zoran Spremo, an editor of the main opposition newspaper in Pancevo town. "That makes us think that elections could be on the way."

But few would bet that this is not the beginning of the end; that Europe's last autocratic leader is not now in the midst of the greatest fight ever for his political life.

"This is the beginning of the end; businessmen and politicians around him, people who are sick of being outcasts, want to jump ship," says Gen Obradovic. "Will he go peacefully or violently - that is the question?"