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Milosevic becoming

stronger every day: UN

UNITED NATIONS: Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is becoming stronger every day because of foreign assistance he is receiving to rebuild the country's bomb-damaged infrastructure, Jacques Klein UN envoy to Bosnia said.

He's also becoming stronger in terms of restructuring the Yugoslav army and police forces, said Jacques Klein on Tuesday. Klein is an American diplomat with long experience in the region and is Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative in Bosnia.

While Serbs dislike Milosevic for crippling the economy and isolating them, the Yugoslav leader still has no credible opposition.

And Klein said he has gained some political points by securing foreign aid to repair the electricity grid and other infrastructure components damaged in last year's 78-day Nato bombing campaign, launched to force Yugoslavia to stop its crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

"With the foreign assistance he's received, he's actually becoming stronger by the day," he told a news conference before meeting the secretary-general, stressing that this was a personal assessment.

Klein refused to say who was providing such assistance. Diplomats said Yugoslavia is believed to be receiving some aid from Russia and China, its closest allies on the UN Security Council.

Klein suggested Milosevic is going to be more difficult to deal with because he is on the defensive about his image.

"He sees himself now as wounded, trapped, leaving the stage in a very negative sort of way," he said.

While Klein praised the democratic changes in Croatia, which he predicted will have a positive impact on Bosnia, he said there will be no real peace in the region because of Milosevic.

"Until Serbia is reintegrated into Europe, until Serbia has a democratic government and moves in the direction that Croatia is moving now, the region will remain perennially unstable," he said.

His assessment echoed that of Carl Bildt, the UN envoy to the Balkans, who told the Security Council on Monday that peaceprospects in the Balkans are virtually nonexistent until the Yugoslav government in replaced.

Klein recalled that since the 1995 Dayton peace agreement was signed ending the war in Bosnia, UN officials have said that democratic governments in Croatia and Yugoslavia were critical to Bosnia's future.

The recent election of a pro-Western democratic government in Croatia which wants to become part of Europe quickly is important for Bosnia because Bosnia and Croatia "have almost a symbiotic relationship," he said.ÑAFP