Even before NATO launched air strikes against Yugoslavia, the authorities in Leskovac and Vranje, two towns in southern Serbia, were notorious for the way in which they stamped out dissent. But the NATO campain amplified the repression in these towns, particularly against independent journalists, activists, and politicians who dared criticize the Milosevic regime.

In the wake of the bombing campaign, large numbers of men were mobilized and all potential opposition silenced -- and it will take more than the end of the war for a more open environment to prevail.

Vranje and Leskovac are two of the poorest towns in Serbia -- their residents' average salary before the war was a meager 50 German marks (US$27) a month -- and state television has always been the principal, if not the only, medium. The circulation of independent newspapers in the region is minimal when it exists at all.

In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the region's majority has voted for Slobodan Milosevic's ruling Socialist Party in every election since 1990. Moreover, anybody daring to oppose the local authorities has risked interrogation by the secret police, dismissal from employment, and even incarceration.

In silencing opposition, the authorities have made the most of the peacetime law limiting outside control of public information, and stepped up retribution against dissenters under the extraordinarily censorious wartime decrees from the Serbian government.

The most prominent victim of the clampdown has been Dobrosav Nesic, editor of an independent monthly magazine called The Rights of Man, and chairman of the Committee for Human Rights in Leskovac. He was imprisoned for a month and the Committee was fined 17,000 German marks (US$9,140).

Upon his release, Nesic said: "Even in the prison, I continued to speak out against the regime of Slobodan Milosevic who is destroying the future of the entire people. They put me into solitary confinement and forced me to do the most difficult jobs. Once they beat me up. I received blows to the stomach and head, and spat blood. I told them that they had taken away my freedom, but not my dignity. I won over to my views many inmates who live in cruel conditions and who are treated in a bestial manner."

Independent observers view the fine and Nesic's prison term as punishment for human-rights advocates' attempts to organize an Albanian-Serbian dialogue on Kosovo. The authorities interpreted such a dialogue as a "betrayal of national interests."

In the wake of the fine and the imprisonment, The Rights of Man ceased publication. Nevertheless, Nesic says that he is now preparing a new issue "in order to inform the citizens in the south of Serbia about what the authorities are doing in their name and the tragic consequences that this entails."

Meanwhile, the independent press in Vranje disappeared with the first NATO bombs. All male members in the newsroom of the weekly Novine Vranjske were immediately drafted and, despite the peace agreement, are yet to be demobilized. As a result, the paper has not been published for the past three months.

Another of the Serb government's targets is Vojkan Ristic, a long-time journalist of the former independent weekly Nasa Borba,and after it was closed, Vranje correspondent of the Belgrade daily Glas Javnosti. Ristic also had been critical of the Milosevic regime in the independent press.

Ristic spent the month of May in Vranje prison on charges that his place of residence did not match that listed on his Yugoslav identity card. In sentencing Ristic, the municipal magistrate said that, in addition to the police report and wartime legislation, he had taken into consideration "the interests of the security of the country."

Independent observers suspect that the real reason for Ristic's imprisonment is his year-long investigation into and reporting of the corrupt practices of the local branch of the ruling Socialist Party, headed by Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Dragomir Tomic. The most avid readers of his articles, it seems, were the secret policemen who interrogated him in February for 15 hours and "gently" advised him to "stop writing about Tomic." The prison term was presumably punishment for not heeding the advice.

Upon his release, Vojkan Ristic refused to talk about his treatment in prison, but vowed to continue his investigative reporting as soon as the wartime legislation curtailing media freedom was lifted.

In addition to hassling and drafting journalists, the authorities have systematically drafted leading members of opposition parties into the Yugoslav military, threatening them that they would be sent to the front.

Members of the Democratic Party have had most difficulties, especially after the regime media accused their leader Zoran Djindjic of being "a traitor and a foreign mercenary."

A senior member of the party's executive committee in Leskovac, who wished to remain anonymous, said that he has had been receiving threatening phone calls and had been insulted by Socialist Party activists in the street.

"When the war started, the regime decided to move against us. The director of the institution where I work, who is in the top leadership of the Socialist Party, gave me my notice and left me without any means to make a living.

"Similar things have happened to other opposition activists and to members of our families. We are living in fear from yet more reprisals," he said.

At the end of May, several dozen protesters gathered to demonstrate against the conscription of men of all ages from Leskovac and the surrounding area . The police broke up the demonstrations using batons and detained several of the protesters, interrogating them to try to find out who organized the protest.

The demonstrators believe that the leading Socialist Party politician from this region, Zivojin Stefanovic, had ordered conscription of as many as 50,000 people from Leskovac and the surrounding area in the hope that he would be rewarded with the post of Yugoslav ambassador to Bulgaria.

Stefanovic now regularly surrounds himself with bodyguards from the debt-collection agency that belongs to the notorious war-crimes suspect and gangster Zeljko ("Arkan") Raznatovic. Even if the war is over, the structures of power within Serbia remain in place.

The author is an independent journalist from southern Serbia whose identity has been withheld.