Milosevic funeral a battle between past and future

BELGRADE, Mar 18 (Reuters) Slobodan Milosevic will be buried today in a funeral that is shaping up as a contest to settle who really represents Serbia - his diehard nationalist followers or the pro-Western democrats who ousted him in 2000.

The former strongman was denied the state funeral his supporters said he had a right to. But they made sure he lay on public display in Belgrade since Thursday as if lying in state.

His opponents say this ''celebration'' of Milosevic has gone too far and aim to prove once and for all that they outnumber his dwindling loyalists - except perhaps in years of age.

Milosevic's once mighty Socialist Party is today a shrunken faction. But it predicts that 200,000 Serbs will turn out to pay their last respects when the coffin is put out in central Belgrade before burial, a show that could boost their place in the polls.

They plan to place the coffin on a podium on the sidewalk outside the federal parliament, where huge crowds of fist-waving Serbs brought him down in October 2000, yelling their slogan ''He's finished!'' GARDEN TOMB Milosevic, who died in detention at the Hague war crimes tribunal last Saturday of heart failure, aged 64, is to be laid to rest in the afternoon in the garden of his provincial home in Pozarevac, east of Belgrade.

''I'm sorry he's gone. No nobler man will ever be born in Serbia,'' declared a young Pozarevac housewife. Others in the town were more pragmatic.

''He should be buried in the Avenue of Heroes in Belgrade, but maybe it's for the best that it's here, where people can't vandalise his grave,'' said pensioner Radisa Stakic.

The Serb Orthodox Church, which never wavered in its support for Milosevic's hardline brand of nationalism, is on the Socialist side and will administer at the burial, something of a surprise for a man who was a lifelong communist.

The grave lies under an old lime tree where Milosevic is said to have first kissed Mira Markovic, the childhood sweetheart who became his wife and partner in power.

She and their son Marko fear arrest or worse if they return to Serbia and have chosen not to, Socialist Party officials said yesterday. They said threats had been made against them.

At the same hour as the interment, organisers of the street protests which ousted him following a botched Socialist effort to steal re-election, plan to hold an anti-Milosevic rally in the capital, complete with party balloons.

So far there has been no sign of the city authorities stepping in to pre-empt a possible confrontations.

Yesterday, opponents published a hard-hitting memorial to counter diehard loyalists lauding him as fallen hero who ''battled like a giant'' and would ''sleep with the angels''.

''Thank you for the deceit and theft, for every drop of blood shed by thousands, for the fear and uncertainty, for the failed lives and generations, the unfulfilled dreams, for the horrors and wars you waged in our name, without asking us, for all the burdens you've placed on our shoulders,'' they said.

''We remember tanks on Belgrade streets and blood on the pavements. We remember Vukovar. We remember Dubrovnik. We remember Knin and Krajina. We remember Sarajevo. We remember Srebrenica. We remember the air strikes. We remember Kosovo.

We'll be remembering that one for a while. And dreaming of it.'' The former anti-Milosevic resistance movement Otpor criticized the government and media for acquiescing in ''celebrating the name and deeds of Slobodan Milosevic''.

''All of us citizens of Serbia must resist the hysteria that threatens to make a leader and a saint out of Milosevic... he's finished, but his cohorts are trying to make a comeback.'' REUTERS VJ RAI0455