By Michael Dobbs

Washington Post Foreign Service

Monday, April 12, 1999; Page A1

BELGRADE, April 11 – Masked gunmen shot and killed one of Yugoslavia's most prominent independent journalists outside his apartment here today, just days after a pro-government newspaper accused him of supporting the NATO bombing campaign.

The killing of publisher Slavko Curuvija, which bore the hallmarks of a professional assassination, came as the country celebrated Orthodox Easter – the most important event in the religious calendar of the Serbs, Yugoslavia's dominant ethnic group. The Easter celebrations were more subdued than usual, with many people staying away from the traditional midnight service in Belgrade, partly in fear of NATO bombs and partly to save gasoline.

NATO rejected calls by politicians from other Slavic Orthodox Christian countries for an Easter truce, and bombing continued in Kosovo province, but the rest of the country escaped much damage overnight. NATO said it had curtailed its air offensive somewhat out of respect for the religious observances.

The killing of Curuvija (pronounced Choo-ROO-vee-yuh) added a frightening new factor to the unequal struggle underway between the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic and the dwindling number of independent journalists and intellectuals here with pro-Western views. While there have been several high-profile assassinations in Belgrade during the past two years, this was the first in which a representative of the independent media has been targeted. Belgrade generally has escaped the political violence that has become routine in Kosovo, where Serb-led security forces have waged a brutal military campaign against ethnic Albanian separatist guerrillas and civilians, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes.

Curuvija, 51, was best known as publisher of the mass circulation Daily Telegraph and the weekly magazine European. The Telegraph was the first private daily newspaper established in Serbia, the larger of the two republics that constitute Yugoslavia.

Last December, Curuvija visited Washington and told Congress's Helsinki Commission that questioning Milosevic's rule here had become tantamount to "treason." Last month, he was sentenced to five months in jail for "spreading false information" but had not begun that sentence.

The killing took place in the heart of Belgrade, a few hundred yards from the Yugoslav parliament building. Curuvija's girlfriend, Branka Prpa, said she and Curuvija were returning home from a walk at 4:40 p.m. when they were accosted by two young men dressed in black with black face masks in a narrow tunnel leading to their apartment building.

"They were obviously professionals," she told journalists and friends who gathered at her apartment on Belgrade's Lola Ribar Street. "One of the men hit me across the back of the head with his pistol and pushed me aside. They then shot Slavko several times in the head." As she spoke, blood seeped through her blond hair from the wound at the back of her head.

Prpa interrupted her description of the slaying with sobs, murmurs of "Oh my God" and bewildered speculation over the motives of the killers. Curuvija "was not that dangerous to the state," she declared. "He was a man who just did his work and nothing else."

Plainclothes policemen cordoned off the crime scene as they cleared the pool of blood at the entrance to the building, but then they permitted Curuvija's friends and colleagues up to the apartment.

Six days ago, a commentary in the pro-government Belgrade newspaper Politika Express accused Curuvija of urging NATO to bomb Yugoslavia and warned that "people like him" would neither be "forgiven nor forgotten."

It was unclear what the paper's accusation was based on, but after it appeared Curuvija told friends that "any fool now has a license to kill me." Even so, he took few steps to ensure his security and was not accompanied by his customary bodyguards today. Although the killing was reported by Studio B, a Belgrade radio station, there was no immediate reaction from government officials.

At one time, Curuvija was close to Milosevic's politically influential wife, Mira Markovic, who heads a party known as the United Yugoslav Left, a successor to the Communist Party. But Curuvija told friends that their relations had been effectively broken off because of anti-Milosevic commentaries published by his newspapers, which received subsidies from democratic advocacy groups in the West, such as the National Endowment for Democracy.

Until the NATO bombing campaign began on March 24, the independent Belgrade media were seen as one of the best hopes for Yugoslavia's fledgling democracy in the absence of a real political opposition to Milosevic. But they have largely fallen silent over the past three weeks, chastened by fears of retribution and by official censorship and harassment.

At the traditional Easter midnight mass at Belgrade cathedral, the crowd was much less dense than in years past. The mood was somber and restrained, in contrast to the exuberant displays of anti-NATO defiance at rock concerts in Belgrade's central square and the "human shield" demonstrations on city bridges.

"What we most need now is not noisiness and pride but calmness and rationality," said Milovan Stojanovic, a producer of religious movies, as he waited for the diminutive figure of Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle to emerge from the cathedral.

A man selling candles outside the cathedral, Zarko Sarcevic, said that business was way down from last year. "People are frightened. There was an air raid siren earlier this evening. In addition, there is a shortage of gasoline, so people don't want to use their cars."

A delegation of Russian Cossacks, who have been touring Yugoslavia over the last few days to demonstrate pan-Slavic brotherhood, was busy denouncing the NATO bombing campaign as "an attempt to open up a military corridor to Russia through Serbia and Ukraine." After a meeting earlier this week with Milosevic, they told journalists that the Yugoslav leader was preparing for "a ground war" with NATO.

Under attack by the West and anxious to break out of its international isolation, the Belgrade government has been reaching out for support from other countries in the Orthodox Christian world, such as Russia, Greece and Cyprus. The Yugoslav parliament has even announced plans to consider some kind of political union with the Slavic states of Russia and Belarus, a romantic idea but one that may be too far-fetched for Serbs or Russians to rally behind.

"It's just a bluff," said Yevgeny Barganov, a Russian television reporter on assignment in Belgrade. "We can't even unite with former Soviet republics, so the idea of uniting with Yugoslavia is ridiculous."