BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — At least 100,000 people jammed sunny central Belgrade Friday for an opposition rally demanding early elections to oust the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
It was the first opposition rally in many months, and the first since 1997 that brought together the two rival leaders of the main opposition parties, Vuk Draskovic of the Serbian Renewal Movement and Zoran Djindjic of the Democratic Party, who even shook hands on stage, although gingerly.
The rhetoric from the various political leaders was sometimes uninspiring, and they provided no clear strategy to bring about early elections on all levels, which the traditionally fractured opposition has agreed upon as its goal.
But the real message to Milosevic came less from the speakers than from the size of the crowd.
The turnout, which some estimated at 150,000, will be registered by Milosevic, who said in mid-February that Serbia did not have "a real opposition" but only traitorous politicians in the pay of the same Western countries that bombed this country a year ago.
But it will also oblige the opposition, which will take heart from the size of the crowd, to work harder not to dissipate this new energy and superficial unity in further squabbling and dissension.
In his first major public speech since August, Draskovic caught the mood of the crowd when he said he knew why they had come in such numbers. "It's because the life we are leading is not a life any more, because we are being killed, beaten, arrested, because we live in misery, humiliation and sorrow," he said. He then listed a catalog of ills from high emigration and unemployment to a low birthrate, the loss of Kosovo and attacks on the opposition and the independent media.
Milosevic and his "gang of killers" is "the only chief of state in the world who calls more than half of his people enemies," Draskovic said.
Djindjic told the crowd that the whole country was watching and asking, "Are we united enough to carry out change? And we will answer: 'Join us and we will be united enough.' "
No speaker gave the listeners any notion of what they could do except vote when the time comes. But for some of those who came Friday, the rally itself was motivation enough.