Serbia's opposition launches second day of blockades

Yugoslavia's army chief has been negotiating into the early hours with miners taking part in nationwide protests calling on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to admit electoral defeat.

Yugoslavia's army chief has been negotiating into the early hours with miners taking part in nationwide protests calling on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to admit electoral defeat.

General Nebojsa Pavkovic's unprecedented efforts to resolve the impasse at the Kolubara mine complex, where 7,500 miners have been on strike, came as a second day of blockades, strikes and walkouts gripped Yugoslavia. Three military armored carriers also took positions outside the mine as talks went on, the independent Beta news agency said.

The talks came one day after Slobodan Milosevic lambasted opposition leaders, labelling them puppets of the West. The Yugoslav president's challengers held strikes, road blockades and demonstrations around the country to press him to concede defeat in recent elections. The demonstrations represent the most serious challenge yet to Milosevic's 13-year reign.

The waves of civil disobedience, involving hundred of thousands of people across Yugoslavia, even reached his home town of Pozarevac, where 20,000 gathered on main roads to hald traffic after many public workers went on strike.

Convoys of trucks and private cars cut off traffic for two hours at a northern intersection just out of Belgrade. Traffic policemen did not prevent the blockade but moved in to take several licence plates off the parked vehicles.

A main highway in central Yugoslavia was also blocked and the state bus company rerouted regular bus lines in Belgrade in the wake of other planned blockades. Police are reported to have arrested two union workers in Belgrade's bus company.

Strikes and blockades have been widespread to the north and south of Belgrade, but appeared less effective in the Yugoslav capital, where the authorities have shut down independent media, hampering opposition attempts to coordinate actions.

The opposition have called for people to converge on Belgrade in a final push to drive Milosevic from power. In a sign of the government's growing concern for stability, military police sent reinforcements to special police troops surrounding the Kolubara mine complex. Shortly after, Pavkovic, entered the mine in the company of government officials to negotiate with the strikers until the early hours.

Local radio in the nearby town of Lazarevac, 25 miles south of Belgrade, reported that the general and the officials threatened the miners to start work immediately or they would be issued compulsory work orders. The miners refused to give in, the radio said. The mine is important because it supplies coal to a key Yugoslav power plant Obrenovac, just southwest of Belgrade.

Vojislav Kostunica, the opposition leader who claims he won the Sept. 24 election, has also visited the Kolubara strikers, urging them to hold out against Milosevic.

"You are the ones who ignited the flame of democratic change in Serbia," Kostunica told hundreds of cheering workers and their families. "Just hold on and we will finish this struggle together."

In his first television address to the nation since the election, Milosevic remained defiant, accusing his opponents of seeking to plunge the country into chaos and "foreign occupation" in which "Yugoslavia will inevitably break up."

In a veiled threat to tens of thousands of strikers, Milosevic said that "Serbia is obliged ... to defend itself from the invasion prepared through various means of subversion." But he opposition characterized the speech as bluster from a desperate man.

Dozens of strike leaders have been arrested according to opposition sources. Spokesman Cedomir Jovanovic reported several incidents, including a clash with police in Surcin, about 12 miles west of the capital, in which four people were injured.

In Yugoslavia's second largest city, Novi Sad, protesters broke into the state television building, interrupting programming. In Prokuplje, protesters seized a local TV station under Milosevic's control, prompting authorities cut electricity to the station in the southern town.

After blockades and a student rally in Belgrade during the day, about 10,000 people assembled in the city center in what participants called a spontaneous protest.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has resisted Western calls for Milosevic to accept defeat, offered to mediate between Milosevic and his challenger at a meeting in Moscow. There was no immediate response to Putin's offer.