The Balkans Truce So what sort of peace will it be?: Future Of Milosevic - Serbia's hard man could live on

"WE'LL DIG up our dead and take them with us," a Kosovo Serb from Pristina said yesterday, on hearing the terms of the peace plan. "There's no chance the Serbs will stay."

The sight of Serbs in Kosovo exhuming their ancestors may bury Slobodan Milosevic. When the Serbian leader overthrew his predecessor, Ivan Stambolic, in 1987, it was for being "soft" on the Kosovo question, and he became the idol of Serbia with his pledges to crush the Albanians' hopes of taking Kosovo out of Serbia. Now he has to sell his people a peace plan that "soft" old Mr Stambolic would never have dreamed of swallowing.

Milosevic has performed U-turns before - after the humiliating defeat of the Croatians Serbs in 1995 and the subsequent Serb exodus from Sarajevo. He may pull it off again, using his grip on Radio Televisija Serbija to hammer home the message that only his stubborn resistance saved Serbia from occupation by Nato. Out in the provinces they may even believe it.

But Milosevic will have to reconfigure his regime. The ultra-nationalists of Vojislav Seselj's Radical party and the Serbian Orthodox Church must go. But new partners must come on board. Step forward the secular socialists of YUL (United Yugoslav Left), a party run by Milosevic's wife, Mirjana, and maybe even Vuk Draskovic, the eccentric leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, chucked out of the Serbian government at the start of the war for his doveish statements.

For all the rumours of military coups and talk of popular disillusion, there is no obvious replacement for the man whose 12 years as leader have seen Serbia dragged ever deeper into an abyss. His rivals inside Serbia are a group of envious, quarrelsome political dwarfs, and while they complain about his disasters, none ever suggested following a different course in Croatia, Bosnia or Kosovo.

Don't expect a revolt from within the ranks of the security forces either. The army may be seething but the real power in Serbia is Milosevic's large, well-armed paramilitary police. This is the regime's Preatorian guard and it will sink or swim with its paymaster.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Milosevic comes from the unlikely quarter of Montenegro, Serbia's junior partner in Yugoslavia. He ought to have crushed that nut when he had the chance. Now he must endure Montenegro's youthful president, Milo Djukanovic, lecturing him about how stupid he was to take on Nato in the first place. Djukanovic plays with the idea of taking Montenegro out of Yugoslavia. But he may decide the stay, now the Serbs are humbled, and angle for the post of Yugoslav president himself.