BELGRADE, Serbia, May 20 -- A student movement demanding sweeping political change is surging in popularity and is now a significant target for attack by the government of the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.

The movement, called Otpor, or Resistance, has given fresh energy, insouciance and an arrogant innocence to Mr. Milosevic's political opposition. Otpor has not been shy about criticizing opposition leaders for their lack of unity and credibility.

Loosely organized and without a clear leadership structure that could be subject to arrest, Otpor is intended to be difficult to repress. But it shows few signs of becoming a serious revolutionary organization.

Still, government officials are attacking the group as "fascist hooligans" and "terrorists." The officials are giving strong signals that Otpor will be a prime target of -- or at least the pretext for -- a sweeping new law on terrorism that could be introduced as early as Monday.

The law, said to be largely based on the emergency measures in force here during NATO's bombing war last year, could provide for detention without charges or limitations, restricting the rights of the accused.

At the moment, people can be detained for questioning for 72 hours without being charged, a measure the police have been using liberally against young Otpor activists all over Serbia.

During the war, the police could detain people on national security grounds for up to 60 days without trial, and the police were given the right to search people or property without warrants. The law under consideration would also authorize the police to confiscate all firearms, registered or not.

If passed in such a form, the law would create an informal state of emergency. It could be used against opposition politicians and also against independent journalists, whom the government accuses of working for NATO and the "enemies of the state."

Otpor spokesmen say more than 200 of their members have been detained in the last week throughout Serbia. They are often arrested at home in the early hours, questioned by the police for up to a day or more, threatened and sometimes beaten.

On Saturday another 34 Otpor people and eight opposition politicians were detained, questioned and later released.

"The regime senses the danger, that we don't care a lot about anything else other than taking them down," said Milan Samardzic, 23, a law student with Otpor. "We're not in it for power or money, unlike many of the opposition politicians. We just want change. The idea of resistance itself is very powerful."

Vukasin Petrovic, 23, a political science student and one of Otpor's steadily changing spokesmen, says that about 25,000 people have signed up to become members, and that the organization may be able to call on as many as 50,000 people.

More ask to join every day, Mr. Petrovic says, "and we're getting a little overwhelmed. Things are moving at a very quick pace."

Otpor started as a student response to a restrictive law on universities in October 1998. While many regard it as a movement of arrogant rich youths from nice families, its surge in popularity is a direct result of disappointment with this generation of political leaders, who have failed during the last decade to bring down Mr. Milosevic.

Otpor activists say they want to inspire the population and "guide" the political opposition, as a kind of monitor, to keep them unified.

"The opposition leaders have shown that they are very vain, and that their petty interests are more important to them than our larger interests as a country," Mr. Samardzic said. "We say we've seen through the regime and we're disappointed in the opposition. The opposition leaders don't seem to have a solution, and people don't trust them. But we do deserve the people's trust, at least so far."

During the last large opposition rally in Belgrade, on April 14, an Otpor member was on stage with leaders of political parties and said, "Our task is to secure your victory." He then warned them in vulgar terms: "Gentlemen, this time there will be no betrayal, because whoever betrays now is scum."

At a later rally, on May 15, many leaders including the Democratic Party head, Zoran Djindjic, wore Otpor T-shirts, bearing a fist, though in Mr. Djindjic's case he wore a stylish black sport jacket over it. It was also a gesture of solidarity with two young Otpor activists and a lawyer who had been beaten badly in Mr. Milosevic's hometown, Pozarevac, by bodyguards working for his son, Marko.

The case was important because two local judges and a prosecutor resigned, apparently over pressure from the government to bring charges of attempted murder against the young men, who asserted that they had not begun the fight. One judge who released them quit after they were rearrested.

The government has tried its best to impugn the organization. When Bosko Perosevic, a senior official of Mr. Milosevic's party, was slain in Novi Sad on May 13, the government announced that the 50-year-old killer was an Otpor activist and a supporter of the opposition figure Vuk Draskovic's party, suggesting that both were in the pay of Western intelligence agencies.

Both charges were denied, but the police said they had found Otpor leaflets in the killer's apartment.

"We're kind of like a marketing agency," Mr. Petrovic said, "promoting one idea, the idea of resistance as a habit of mind, a way of standing up in dignity. To me, dignity is very similar to resistance."

Otpor tries to provoke and mock the authorities with sometimes daily happenings and with slogans like "Bite the system." In the last three months, Mr. Samardzic said, Otpor has put up 400,000 posters and handed out two million leaflets and badges throughout Serbia.

Otpor insists that this is paid for solely with donated materials, labor and money from Serbs abroad. But the organization is also getting money and advice from the West through programs to "promote democratization" in Serbia.

After the seizure of the main opposition television station Studio B last week, Mr. Samardzic said he was appalled by the confused reactions of the opposition, especially Mr. Draskovic, the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, who remained in Serbia's sister republic, Montenegro, for two days before returning to Belgrade.

"The silence of the opposition has not just been strange, it's been a disaster," Mr. Samardzic said. "People assume Vuk is afraid. Well, so are we all. But he's not selling popcorn" -- he is a political leader.

Otpor is proposing a program of civil disobedience, of the kind Gandhi used against the British in India. When he is reminded that the Serbian authorities are not British and behave by different rules, Mr. Samardzic only shrugs.

Milan Milosevic, an analyst for the independent weekly Vreme, who is no relation to the president, said: "Otpor is important because they are a litmus test for popular feeling against the authorities. It is true that they are a judgment on the opposition, but no one sees them as a political alternative. They show no leadership or management. People make the Otpor fist to show the political leaders that they're not serious enough."

One opposition leader, Zarko Korac, a psychologist and university professor who heads the Social Democratic Union, says teachers are accustomed to being criticized by students.

Otpor matters, he says. "They have the energy and the innocence of youth, and they are uncompromising and unyielding," he said, noting that the government of President Suharto in Indonesia had been toppled by student demonstrations.

"These students feel they have no future, no employment," Mr. Korac said. "They can't travel and work. So they are fighting for their own future, which is also the future of the country."

Otpor's symbol, the fist, "is a clear, clean message," he said.

So clean that one of Serbia's most influential writers and briefly Yugoslavia's president, Dobrica Cosic, walked into an Otpor office this month and filled out a membership form. Mr. Cosic, a nationalist picked by Mr. Milosevic and then discarded by him, is blamed by some for helping to create the myth of Serbian sacrifices in Kosovo. A drawing by a noted cartoonist, Corax, showed Mr. Cosic scrubbing himself clean in a bathtub using the skeletal fist of Otpor.

Still, with signs pointing toward an attempted crackdown and even a ban on Otpor, the organization will need whatever help it can get.

Mr. Korac says such a crackdown on Serbia's children, like the seizure of Studio B, has cumulative consequences with the public. "It's like insults in a marriage," he said. "It adds up. It may not show right away on the streets, but it's building. People are very angry."

ATLANTA -- After the United Nations peacekeepers proved incapable of handling the chaos in Sierra Leone, Richard Holbrooke, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was one of many to call for changes in the way the organization conducts peacekeeping. But such demands assume that the institution is capable of reform. Unfortunately that may not be the case.

The United Nations does go through the motions. In April 1995, after its failures in Somalia and Angola, a "Lessons Learned Unit" was established to determine why peacekeeping efforts failed. This office of eight people is currently collecting and analyzing information on a peacekeeping operation in Yugoslavia, which ended in 1995, and one in Angola, which ended in 1997. Apparently, the lessons of failure come slowly.

More important than the glacial pace of self-assessment is the nature of the organization. The United Nations serves its 188 member states, which, when determining the organization's policies, largely pursue their national interests.

If no country or group of countries is willing to do a job, it will be handed to the United Nations. That way, if the effort fails, the United Nations, and not an individual country, can assume the responsibility. Since every country wants that option, each respects the other's right to saddle the organization with impossible missions.

A country can also use the United Nations to hide its own foreign policy failures. What is happening in Congo is a case in point. Six nearby African countries sent their armies to fight in Congo's civil war. But in a huge nation with multiple factions and militias, victory is not easy. Rather than admit that this war is their Vietnam, these countries have persuaded the United Nations to commit a small peacekeeping force, hoping that it will grow in the future. This would provide a semblance of order, while the regional countries withdraw, were it not for the fact that the Congolese can't even agree on a place to discuss the country's peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping missions are handled by the United Nations bureaucracy, which has 188 bosses yet no effective oversight. The bureaucracy knows that it can ill afford to anger any of the 188 members. So, it discourages initiative, and avoids measuring its results or honestly evaluating its failures.

Waste and mismanagement are not reported since the bureaucracy is not directly accountable to any congressman, journalist or taxpayer. The organization's internal auditor has only existed for six years, and Madeleine Albright once referred to the office as a "junkyard puppy."

The United Nations is always short of the personnel it needs for peacekeeping operations. First world countries with first-rate armies are usually unwilling to put their troops at risk. Thus, these operations are often left to third world countries, and the United Nations sends some of the worst soldiers in the world off to situations where it can only hope they are not called on to actually do anything.

The same is true of the U.N.'s police monitors, who are supposed to improve respect for human rights. Given an order to assemble a large number of policemen, the United Nations scrambles to round up the bodies. As a result, volunteers have come from China, Nigeria and other countries which have no known association with good police work. In the peacekeeping operation in Mozambique in 1992 to 1994, for instance, the inactivity of the police monitors actually encouraged human rights violations. Some local cops took their lack of comment as a tacit endorsement of abusive tactics.

When peacekeepers perform badly, it is too politically embarrassing to remove them. This is particularly true of senior officials since they were often given their jobs not because of their abilities, but because of the countries they represent. For instance, as the situation in Sierra Leone began to melt down, United Nations officials in New York, who usually micromanage things, began to blame the officials in Africa for the failure. Even if that were true, the political head of the mission is Nigerian, and his country will be crucial if there is to be any solution to Sierra Leone's misery. The military head of the operation is from India -- one of the largest contributors of troops.

Do these inherent institutional problems mean the United Nations will never succeed at peacekeeping? Of the 53 operations conducted since 1948, many were successful. Unlike the border disputes of the past, however, today's conflicts are almost always civil wars. It is much easier to divide territory between two states than to divide political power in one state. So for more successful peacekeeping, either the way the U.N. is used by its members or the performance of its bureaucracy has to improve. Neither is likely to happen.

Letters: A call to withdraw from Kosovo

The conflict between Congress and the president over our involvement in Kosovo, which is related to U.S. actions in Bosnia, was inevitable. The reason is twofold: For the most part, the president acted without congressional approval, and he misled Congress. The president took military action against one party (the Serbs) involved in the Bosnian civil war, and he led NATO into an undeclared war against a sovereign country (Yugoslavia), which had not taken any action against any NATO country or any other country.
The White House, whether under Republican or Democratic leadership, always asserts that the United States cannot have 535 foreign policies, that our Constitution vests the conduct of foreign affairs in the executive branch. By and large, Congress respects that position, but it also points out that the Constitution gives Congress certain powers in foreign affairs, notably the power of the purse.
Defenders of the administration assert that current efforts in Congress to put a time limit on our stay in Kosovo would undermine our program there. But critics in Congress say the president has seriously misled them. For example, in 1995 President Clinton said he was sending American peacekeepers to Bosnia and it "should and will take about one year." Now, five years and billions of dollars later, troops are still there, with no prospect of coming home soon. The troops have similar prospects for an even longer stay in Kosovo.
What is Congress to do? What alternatives does it have? Taxpayers back home are asking how long they will have to continue to pour billions of dollars into holes in an area where U.S. interests are minimal at best. Moreover, members of Congress believe they have a right to ask: What is the end game? What is the administration's plan for winding up our involvement?
Critics in Congress also complain that the other members of NATO are not contributing their share of the reconstruction costs. Our NATO allies are complaining that the United States misled them. They were assured that Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic would cave in quickly and, hence, reconstruction costs would not be excessive. Some of our NATO allies are asserting that they would not have agreed to attack Yugoslavia if they had had any notion that the damage would be so extensive.
The administration does not seem to have any remedies in hand. It expects to keep American troops in place, with the taxpayer footing increasing bills while America's military readiness becomes progressively weaker.

ALEX N. DRAGNICH
Bowie

KOSOVSKA MITROVICA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- A group of Serbs and Gypsies detained in northern Kosovo ended a hunger strike Sunday after a top U.N. official pledged they would stand trial before international judges.

The 41 prisoners, who are mostly Serbs but include five Gypsies -- or Roma -- began refusing food April 12 to protest being held indefinitely with little or no prospect of court action. The men have been detained for months on a wide variety of charges, ranging from petty theft to war crimes.

``We have reached an agreement that the detainees in Kosovska Mitrovica be tried by foreign judges,'' said Bernard Kouchner, the top U.N. official in Kosovo.

The prisoners' strike has touched off daily protests in Kosovska Mitrovica, a tense, ethnically divided city and one of the few in Kosovo where a significant Serb population remains.

The top Serb leader in the town, Oliver Ivanovic, confirmed the Serbs had ended their hunger strike.

It was not immediately clear where Kouchner would find judges to try the men. So far, only a single international judge has taken up his post in Kosovo in the 11 months since the U.N. took over administration of the province.

U.N. officials took up civil administration tasks in Kosovo after NATO completed a 78-day bombing campaign to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to end his crackdown on ethnic Albanians. They have struggled, however, to establish a viable judiciary.

Some suspects must wait for months before court action. Others are routinely released within days after being arrested even on charges of serious criminal offenses.

Friends and families of the detainees also said they would end their hunger strike, begun in solidarity with the detainees.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) _ A few thousand Belgraders gathered Sunday to protest the government's clampdown on nongovernment media, while police arrested more opposition activists throughout the country.

At least three activists of the pro-democracy student group Otpor, or Resistance, were detained, in addition to dozens arrested in previous days.

In Smederevo, 20 miles southeast of Belgrade, activist Marko Markovic was charged with "violating public law and order" after police arrested him for walking in the street wearing a T-shirt with the group's emblem, a clenched fist, the independent Beta news agency reported.

In Belgrade, about 3,000 opposition supporters gathered to listen to journalists from the banned Studio B television, whose reporters, after being kicked out of their premises by police on Wednesday, have begun reading their news from an open-air, make-shift studio in downtown Belgrade.

The latest crackdown against government opponents follows the recent assassination of a close aide to President Slobodan Milosevic. The government accused Otpor and a top opposition party of being behind the killing.

Otpor and the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement have denied the charges, but the regime ignored their pleas, closing down the opposition-controlled, Belgrade-based Studio B television as well as the popular B2-92 radio station.

The move triggered protests in Belgrade, which quickly erupted into violence, leaving more than 150 people injured and landing a few dozen in jail.

A top official from Milosevic's ruling Socialists, Uros Suvakovic, reiterated on Sunday the regime's pledge to "fight against terrorism" and opposition parties accused of working in the interests of NATO and other perceived Milosevic foes in the West.

"We must not be soft," Suvakovic declared.

The Socialists and their neo-communist allies, the United Left, which is led by Milosevic's wife Mirjana Markovic, have said they will introduce legislation in the coming days aimed at giving the regime even broader authority in suppressing opponents.

The opposition, which maintains contacts with west European countries and the United States, is now trying to secure some support from Moscow, which has traditionally been inclined to back Milosevic.

Yugoslavia on Sunday demanded that the European Union lift sanctions against it, expressing particular anger at the EU's selective approach to punish the Serb republic while sparing pro-western Montenegro, both of which are part of Yugoslavia.

The official Tanjug news agency on Sunday carried a message the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry sent to Brussels, protesting the ban on trade, financial and most other links between EU member countries and Yugoslavia, imposed for Milosevic's belligerent policies.

"This is continuing pressure aimed to destabilize Yugoslavia," which has "also inflicted great losses to Yugoslavia's neighbors," the statement said.

CERNICA, Yugoslavia (AP) -- The way he sees it, U.S. Sgt. First Class Jerry Boden is helping to rebuild Kosovo.

That's because he and the other men of 2nd Platoon, Alpha Company, First Battalion 187th infantry stationed in this village 45 miles southeast of the capital, Pristina, are working to keep the peace -- a tough enough task in this tense province.

``The people themselves are slowing starting to rebuild,'' Boden said from an observation post overlooking a half-dozen locals putting a roof on a gutted building. ``We can just provide the environment where they can rebuild.''

NATO-led peacekeepers from many countries are doing more than simple soldiering. While they aren't picking up hammers, soldiers are helping rebuild through tasks that civilians are usually expected to do -- like scouting out likely road projects, organizing town meetings and becoming intermediaries in disputes.

``For every mission, there are specific tasks and implied tasks,'' said Lt. Scott Olson, spokesman at the U.S. Army base in the eastern Kosovo city of Gnjilane. ``Because of that, it is inherent in the process that ... we look at the full picture.''

Even before U.S. soldiers eased into some responsibilities civilian agencies usually handle, Congress was becoming anxious about the U.S. presence in Kosovo. The Senate narrowly rejected a measure this week that would have set a deadline for the removal of U.S. troops from the province.

The Clinton administration argued the bill would have been a blow to U.S.-NATO relations and the hopes for peace here. The debate, however, reignited an argument over whether European nations are paying their fair share.

Maintaining peace in Kosovo has proven expensive. The European Union took on reconstruction efforts after NATO moved in to end President Slobodan Milosevic's 18-month crackdown on ethnic Albanian militants.

Once it got here, though, the EU realized that damage from NATO's 78-day air war was only part of Kosovo's troubles. The province's entire infrastructure had been disintegrating during years of neglect under Milosevic's rule. Big-ticket items like the power plant and roads needed extensive repair.

EU officials say departing Yugoslav forces took every bit of civic equipment it could carry -- right down to Pristina's snow plows. The departure of Milosevic's government also forced Western organizations to start institutions like courts and banks from scratch.

The EU is waiting for its donors to ante up the money pledged at the height of the crisis last year. Less than half of the $1 billion promised for Kosovo has arrived, and EU fund-raiser Roy Dickinson said it may be tough to collect the rest.

``Kosovo isn't nearly so sexy as it was last year,'' he said. ``It's going to be a challenge.''

In places like Cernica, 45 miles southeast of Pristina, people aren't waiting for help. There wasn't much damage -- relatively speaking -- in this village of 486 houses and 750 people. Boden estimates that no more than 10 percent of the homes were destroyed during last year's conflict.

U.S. military officials helped coordinate the reconstruction of a Serbian Orthodox Church that was vandalized. After that, they tried to deal with the resentment that followed from the ethnic Albanian community, and they listened to appeals to improve electrical service and build a landfill.

Boden and the rest of his platoon are working on other kinds of village building in an area that is 40 percent Serb.

Boden, who at 42 has been nicknamed ``grandpa'' by his troops, talks about having a cool drink in the shade or lunch in the garden with locals to win their confidence. Unless people learn to trust his soldiers, they won't be able meet his ultimate goal: to persuade the Serbs and the Albanians to talk to one another.

``I'm not a politician. We're giving these people stability. We're giving them the ability to walk the streets.'' he said. ``Just our presence -- just our being here -- that gives us satisfaction.''

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, May 21 (Reuters) - The political party which emerged from the Kosovo Liberation Army voted on Sunday to change its name at its first congress.

Delegates at the conference decided on the name Democratic Party of Kosovo, rather than the more cumbersome Party for the Democratic Progress of Kosovo chosen by leaders when the party was set up in October of last year.

The party sees itself as the natural political home for former fighters in the KLA, the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group which fought for more than a year to end Serb rule in Kosovo.

The three-day congress, which began on Saturday, was the first held by a major political party in post-war Kosovo.

Delegates also elected the party's president on Sunday. Results had not been announced by mid-evening but Hashim Thaqi, the party's current leader and former political chief of the KLA, was the strong favourite to be confirmed in the post.

BELGRADE, May 21 (Reuters) - Yugoslavia has asked the European Union to lift sanctions against it, saying they are worsening the country's economic and humanitarian situation and destabilising the region, Belgrade media said on Sunday.

"Yugoslavia demands that the EU immediately abolish all sanctions imposed on it so far," pro-government daily Politika quoted a Memorandum of the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry as saying.

"The sanctions are unfounded, are worsening the economic and humanitarian situation in Yugoslavia, contributing to the instability of the region which cannot be in the interest of the EU or Europe as a whole," the memorandum said.

It was handed over to EU representatives in Belgrade who were summoned to the Foreign Ministry.

"EU sanctions against Yugoslavia and the policy of constant pressures on economic, political, media and other levels is part of continued efforts to destabilise Yugoslavia," the memorandum said.

The European Union last April tightened financial sanctions against Yugoslavia to increase pressure on President Slobodan Milosevic, who is viewed as the main obstacle to democracy.

The EU has pledged to keep selective sanctions hitting the Milosevic's regime as long as he stays in power but has promised to maintain support to the democratic opposition.

Independent economists and opposition leaders have also criticised the sanctions saying they hit ordinary people much harder than the government.

The memorandum said the exemption of Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, from EU sanctions was a "direct attack on Yugoslavia's constitutional order and the unity of the people and leadership of the country."