SERBIA might be one of the last eastern European countries to log on to the
Internet, but its pro democracy movement is using cyberspace with a vengeance.
Leading the charge are Belgrade university students, who wasted no time in going electronic when President Slobodan Milosevic annulled a string of opposition wins in local elections held last November.
"The first thing we did after starting our protest was create home pages on the Internet," said Milos Lukic of the Students' Internet Centre, a high tech "trench" in the battle for reinstatement of the opposition victories and sweeping democratic reforms.
Dug in at the university's electrical engineering department, the centre (at http://galeb.etf.bg.ac.yu/protest96 and http:// www.allston.com) received messages from 260 people the first day it went online.
Most came from Belgrade, but the very first email support buzzed in from Vlade Divac, a Serbian basketball star in the US.
"We get hundreds of messages from our colleagues who left the country during the war years in Bosnia and Croatia," Lukic said.
It is estimated that since 1991, more than 100,000 young people, mostly students who did not want to fight in the wars that ripped Yugoslavia apart, have left Serbia.
Once the current political crisis erupted three months ago, the students feared the authorities might try to cut off their electronic contact with the outside world, so they quickly cobbled together their Web pages.
"They can try to disrupt us on the Net, but I don't think the authorities have such educated personnel," said Bojan Bogdanovic, who also works at the student centre.
But he added that the government is not powerless: "The Serbian regime is famous for using force, so they can surely cut us off or confiscate our computers."
The Internet has been an important weapon for both the students and the parallel protest movement led by formal opposition parties, because of the government's tight control over the media, mainly television.
"We are exchanging news, our views on the protests, plans and with the Internet and our Web pages, we don't need newspapers and television," Bogdanovic said. "We can print our own papers in every home which has a computer."
The power of the Internet became apparent early in the crisis when the government, rattled by street protests, closed down Belgrade's only two independent radio stations, B-92 and Radio Index. B-92 is hooked up to the Net, and in a matter of minutes reported the shutdown on its home page (at http://www.siicom.com/b92).
Responses poured in from inside Serbia and abroad.
"The international support was important, but we were more encouraged by numerous requests for our news to be emailed," said Drazen Pantic, a computer specialist at B-92. In the end the government relented and both stations reopened a few days later.
Since December, B-92 has been providing a separate package of free electronic news in Serbo Croat and English three times a day.
Opposition parties have also discovered the ad vantages of the Internet. They started later than the students and independent media organisations, but now give daily coverage of the protests, information about opposition leaders, their political agenda and plans for further demonstrations.
But it is the students who are reaping the most benefit from the Internet.
"This is the only thing the Serbian president can't take away from us," one of them, Milica Lucic, said with a crisp click of her computer mouse to call up one of the students' home pages.
"Students Protest 96-97," it read in a flash of big blue letters.
"There were more than 1,000 hits on our home page just last night," Lucic said, smiling proudly. "This is the beginning of our era in Serbia."