COLUMN ONE : A People Poisoned by Chaos : In what remains of Yugoslavia, a sense of injustice is pervasive and violent crime is skyrocketing. Experts fear that what is also growing is a dangerous national psychosis.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — Plainclothes police burst into Zeljko Radovanac’s apartment late one recent night, accused him of listening to Croatian pop music and hauled him off to the station, where he was kicked and beaten for more than an hour.

It was during this “interrogation” that it became clear to the 36-year-old doctor that the real reason for his arrest and mistreatment was that he is a homosexual. The authorities demanded the names of other Serbian gays and stomped him all the harder when he refused to comply.

Even their pretext--that Radovanac had been basking in enemy culture--provides a glimpse into the paranoia and intolerance infecting Serbs and Montenegrins, citizens of the brother nations of rump Yugoslavia, Europe’s pariah state.

“This is a police state now, and there is nothing any of us can do,” says Radovanac, who, unlike other victims, has chosen to speak out against rising bigotry and repression. “Being different is dangerous now. This is our national psychology as a result of the war, and every minority is vulnerable.”

With no end in sight to either the deadly Balkan war or the crushing poverty it has inflicted, psychologists and social observers warn that the 10 million people still left in what remains of Yugoslavia are in the grips of a dangerous erosion of morality and collapse of order.

Here, police and politicians are openly collaborating with organized crime. Wanted war criminals sit in Parliament, where they enjoy political immunity while directing paramilitary forces waging war in other republics. Rightist thugs and social rejects, emboldened by the regime’s example, have banded together in powerful gangs that terrorize minorities and government opponents.

Banks are collapsing for the second time in as many years, robbing the masses of the last means of scraping by amid mind-boggling hyper-inflation that is running somewhere around 1,000,000%. Two of every five workers are unemployed, and more are sent on indefinite leaves with each passing day.

Ration coupons are being printed for sales of oil, flour and sugar, heralding black markets for even basic commodities. Dumpsters have become the main source of food for hundreds, if not thousands, of Belgrade’s elderly whose pensions often fail to cover even a daily loaf of bread. Ragged children fight for control of key downtown intersections where they can wash car windows at stoplights in exchange for a few thousand dinars to put toward lunch.

Belgrade streets, once traffic-clogged, are almost empty of vehicles except for smoke-spewing buses, bicycles and packed trams. Private cars that were almost as plentiful among capital residents as among American and German peers have been indefinitely garaged in deference to a biting gas shortage inflicted by U.N. sanctions.

Violent crime also is skyrocketing in Serbia, with dramatic increases in rapes, murders and muggings. And among all the hardships and degradations mounting on war-weary Yugoslavs, it is the explosion of random crime and official enforcement squads that frightens people the most.

Psychologists say a collective sense of injustice and the leadership’s message that it’s every man for himself have led to a breakdown of order and morality that experts fear is feeding a dangerous national psychosis.

“We are in a macho, war culture, in which to be good is a sign of feebleness, to be tolerant is traitorous,” says psychiatrist Milan Popovic, a former dean of Belgrade University’s philosophy department.

“It is very important that people at the top be tolerant, humanistic and so on, at a time like this, and that is not the case here,” he says. “During the past two years, politicians have achieved a cohesion of the people and the nation with paranoid anxiety, creating a self-image among the Serbs as a group in danger from outside enemies both real and imagined. If there are not sufficient enemies outside the country, you can find them in your own circles--people who think or act differently.”

This officially sanctioned odd-man-out philosophy is blamed for the sharp increase in attacks on non-Serbs, critics of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and anyone whose behavior is seen as different and undesirable.

Official statistics are unreliable, although even they concede the murder rate has at least doubled in the last year. Now-common bombings, shootouts and “recreational” discharges of firearms also ratchet up the tensions, keeping city dwellers on edge.

A few social commentators, like writers for the independent weekly magazine Vreme, have criticized the recent spate of crimes of intolerance as expressions of a neo-fascism putting down roots in Serbian soil.

Irfan Mensur, a prominent Muslim actor, fled Serbia after police claimed to have no leads in finding the nationalist thugs who grabbed him from his seat in a crowded restaurant and beat him up because he isn’t a Serb.

Several murders of Muslim Slav residents of Belgrade likewise remain unsolved and largely un-investigated, and police have made only the most casual of inquiries into the disappearance of dozens of minority citizens abducted by nationalist gunmen while traveling on state-run trains.

Foreigners and suspected gays have also become targets, with the former seen as representatives of governments that have turned against Serbia and the latter considered deviants who threaten the image of Serbs.

A fledgling association of Western journalists counted 27 incidents of vandalism and attacks against its ranks in a single month last year.

“I’m very worried about our society. If the police can attack gays without consequences, other, more dangerous elements will be encouraged to do what they want,” says Radovanac, who described Belgrade as the most open-minded and liberal of Eastern European cities in the 1980s.

The unraveling of public security throughout impoverished Serbia is a consequence of links between those in power and the country’s thriving networks of organized crime, says Dobrivoje Radevanovic, director of the Belgrade Institute for Criminal and Sociological Research.

Rapes, murders and beatings have been growing at alarming rates because of the war psychosis and “the collapse of political, legal and moral systems,” says Radevanovic, a psychologist by training.

Although hesitant to name names for fear of reprisal, he accuses some in positions of power of cloaking their crimes with a mantle of Serbian patriotism.

“They explain away criminal acts as part of the fight for the Serbian people. They seek to legitimize their behavior, both morally and sociologically,” he says of the political factions now controlling trade in high-profit commodities such as guns and gasoline.

Among those profiting from the public’s plight are convicted criminals and reputed mobsters who have penetrated Belgrade’s inner circles and gained monopolies in selling scarce goods.

Zeljko (Arkan) Raznjatovic, who openly runs a massive operation speculating in oil and convertible currencies, was elected to the Serbian Parliament in December, despite being wanted by Interpol for bank robberies and assaults in Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands. He was also named by the U.S. State Department as a suspect for war crimes charges because of atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina attributed to his heavily armed private militia.

Vojislav Seselj, the ultranationalist leader of the unruly Chetnik paramilitary forces, is the second-most-popular politician in Serbia after Milosevic, although he too stands accused of war crimes.

Both of these members of the Serbian Parliament, Western diplomats say, are active in fuel rackets that earn smugglers and their bosses an estimated $30,000 for every tanker load delivered in defiance of international sanctions.

Private banks that vacuumed up the hard-currency savings of Serbs by offering unfathomable high interest rates have closed their doors or frozen withdrawals since Jezdimir Vasiljevic, who owned the Jugoskandic bank and had close links to the leadership, skipped town earlier this month.

Western diplomats suspect that the departure of Vasiljevic--who sponsored last year’s chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, drawing charges of sanctions-busting but conferring a degree of glamour and legitimacy on his shunned homeland--had the blessing of the Belgrade leadership.

Vasiljevic reportedly left Yugoslavia with a fortune, in exchange for serving as fall guy for what was the inevitable collapse of a giant pyramid scheme. Jugoskandic’s apparent failure robbed 4 million depositors of their life savings and has caused a run on other private operations like the larger Dafiment bank chain, whose owner is closely allied with Milosevic.

The banks offered interest rates of 15% per month on dollars and deutschemarks, which gave many Serbian households enough hard-currency income to scrape by despite hyper-inflation and worthless dinar salaries from their regular jobs.

“The state has stolen so much from us already that if they want this, they are welcome to it,” restaurant cook Mira Pavlovic says of the $400 she lost to Jugoskandic. “I only kept it in the bank to prevent robbers from finding it.”

Resignation to the multiple disasters stripping Serbs of their prosperity is epidemic, but so is a bitter resentment that prevents sober analysis of the national plight.

The tumble in living standards in Serbia and Montenegro began three years ago with a military buildup in preparation for the current war and the excessive printing of Yugoslav dinars to bankroll Milosevic’s determined quest to stay in power.

But the U.N. Security Council’s imposition of sanctions last May to pressure Belgrade to cease support of those waging the Bosnian war has accelerated economic chaos and given the regime a foreign scapegoat for the homemade crisis.

As conditions deteriorate, the Milosevic forces blame U.N. sanctions and bolster the already firm belief that the West has caused their problems.

“People have this feeling of injustice because of the sanctions, which has led to a sort of erosion of ethics,” says Popovic. “It is wartime, and the rules have changed. . . . Soldiers had permission to kill on the front lines and found they could do the same just as easily when they got home. If you are without the means to survive, it somehow becomes justified to steal.”

The academic observations are validated on the streets of this tense city every day. Robberies have become so common that almost no one walks alone at night. Smuggling is socially acceptable--even admired as an act of patriotism--as goods brought in keep this ostracized country afloat.

Mila Cukic is a 23-year-old hairdresser struggling to care for her husband and son on a salary reduced by hyper-inflation to about $45 per month. In a city where families routinely took home at least $1,000 monthly three years ago, her sporadic paychecks now buy little more than survival rations.

“We cannot do anything about what is happening in our country. We’re helpless,” says Cukic, who believes Serbs have done nothing to deserve the global scorn they endure.

“American politics is responsible, and German politics, like always,” she says, adding with unacknowledged contradiction that Serbs will never cease support for their brethren at war against government forces in Bosnia and Croatia.

While dispassionate observers have no trouble identifying the frightening social trends afflicting this state, none dare predict how Serbs will arrest their slide toward deeper isolation and destruction. The democratic opposition is judged hopelessly weak, and there are no signs whatsoever that a popular revolt is brewing.

“People here have a moral blind spot the size of Oregon regarding this war,” says Milos Vasic, a senior editor at Vreme magazine. “They feel it is wrong, but the usual attitude is to try to ignore it out of embarrassment.

“On the other hand, the disastrous situation in Serbia, without an alternative to Milosevic, terrifies those who are suffering so much that no one wants to rock the boat,” he says, explaining the Serbian president’s tenacious hold on the reins of power. “If the world is waiting for the Serbian opposition (to halt the war and bring an end to U.N. sanctions), then we will see Milosevic in power until he dies in his bed of a very old age.”

A Western diplomat here with long experience in the Balkans sighs dejectedly while predicting much the same.

“The people who would be expected to lead the resistance have mostly left the country,” he says, estimating the war-related brain drain at 200,000 professionals and intellectuals. “The nationalists have effectively won because no one in the international community was willing to challenge them. . . . At some point, Milosevic will have to implement stricter measures to keep things under control, a kind of martial law. . . .”

BOSNIA TRUCE: Under pressure, Serbs agree to cease-fire in Bosnia. A12