NEWS ANALYSIS : Strongman Milosevic Tightening Grip on Emerging ‘Greater Serbia’ : Balkans: The henchmen of Seselj, his turncoat lieutenant, are being arrested and accused of heinous crimes.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia —  To ensure that he retains absolute power over the emerging state of Greater Serbia, President Slobodan Milosevic has rounded up the gunslinging supporters of his rival Vojislav Seselj and positioned an Interpol fugitive to succeed his disloyal lieutenant.

As Milosevic maneuvers in advance of a Dec. 19 election date, he has used state-run media to discredit Seselj by airing eyewitness accounts of gory war crimes allegedly committed by militants in the Chetnik Movement, the armed wing of Seselj’s Serbian Radical Party.

Twice in the past week, armed security forces at Milosevic’s command have arrested Seselj’s henchmen and accused them of rape, murder, torture and looting.

The crackdown and apparent efforts to offer up Seselj as a scapegoat to an international war crimes tribunal might suggest that Milosevic fears confronting a desperate electorate after two years of bankrolling the Balkan war and shrugging off U.N. sanctions that have destroyed the Serbian economy.

In Serbia, there is no gasoline, no heat, little food and less security; inflation is now estimated at an unfathomable 700 quadrillion percent annual rate.

Yet Serbs show no sign of connecting their leader with their misfortune and are expected to return his Socialist Party to office for another term of self-destruction.

Hyper-inflation has transformed the economy into one now completely conducted in German marks and has made even the most basic foods unaffordable for the majority of rump Yugoslavia’s remaining 10 million citizens.

Almost daily, newspapers report suicides by desperate pensioners, and grim images of hungry orphans and mental patients tied to their beds for lack of sedatives reinforce the regime’s claims that sanctions are needlessly hurting the innocent.

But in Serbia and Montenegro, where state control of the media has allowed blame for all Serbian hardships to fall on foreign doorsteps, Milosevic looks to most political analysts to be poised for his biggest victory yet.

“His theme is, ‘Stay with me, because without me the world would have crushed the Serbian people and dismembered the Serbian state,’ ” said a Western diplomat in this internationally shunned capital now controlled by armed gangs. “I have every expectation that he will win an outright majority this time.”

In this fourth parliamentary vote in little more than three years, Milosevic is seeking to rid himself of the shaky partnership he created with Seselj, whose name has been forwarded for investigation of war crimes.

Seselj, a paramilitary warlord whom Milosevic described only a year ago as his favorite “opposition politician,” has disappeared from the limelight and 40 of his followers have been arrested on charges of terrorizing civilians.

Last week, Belgrade newspapers offered shocking stories of his forces’ excesses, including one journalist’s claim to have witnessed Seselj warriors playing soccer with the head of a decapitated victim.

The crackdown on Seselj supporters followed a Milosevic master stroke in late October in which he simultaneously disbanded the Serbian republic’s Parliament, paralyzed the work of the federal legislature, sidestepped a no-confidence vote that Seselj had called against his prime minister and ordered fresh elections to seat a more malleable Parliament.

Seselj has fallen out of favor with Milosevic for siding with renegade nationalists in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Croatia, where Serbian gunmen who were armed and encouraged by Belgrade have seized huge swaths of territory and refuse to consider compromises that might lead to lifting the sanctions beggaring Serbia.

Renowned for brandishing weapons in public and for threatening to gouge out his enemies’ eyes with rusty spoons, Seselj is believed to have been made a fall guy for war crimes allegations directed at more influential Serbian leaders like Milosevic himself, his Bosnian proxy, Radovan Karadzic, and the fiery commander of Bosnian Serb forces, former Yugoslav army Gen. Ratko Mladic.

Seselj and his radicals won nearly one-third of Serbia’s 250 parliamentary seats a year ago, thanks to unhindered access to the TV Serbia network that is most people’s sole source of information.

Since the disbanding of Parliament, however, he has disappeared from public view and lacks the political organization to mount much of a campaign without backing from Milosevic.

Ever defiant, despite Milosevic’s considerable armed clout, Seselj warned after the latest round of arrests Thursday that Serbia’s jails are not big enough to hold all of his thugs.

Democratic opposition parties have responded to the new election call with traditional infighting and one-upmanship, demanding fairer access to state-controlled broadcast media and threatening a boycott if they fail to get it.

Former federal Prime Minister Milan Panic, the Orange County pharmaceuticals magnate who was ousted last December after an unsuccessful run against Milosevic for the Serbian presidency, plans another attempt at uniting the opposition. But his campaign workers concede that it will be an uphill battle even to maintain the 20% of parliamentary seats they now collectively hold.

“We are more divided now than a year ago,” said Violetta Krasnic, campaign coordinator for Panic’s as-yet-unsecured coalition.

Serbian Renewal Movement leader Vuk Draskovic, once the articulate firebrand of the opposition, has withdrawn from open confrontation with Milosevic since his monthlong jailing in June, when he was severely beaten.

Ethnic Albanians who make up almost 20% of rump Yugoslavia’s population have already announced they will take no part in the vote because they refuse to acknowledge Belgrade’s authority over the southern province of Kosovo, in which Albanians are a 90% majority.

“The Albanians have their own elections and their own opinion on the Kosovo issue,” Ibrahim Rugova, head of the Democratic League of Kosovo party that unites the province’s Albanians, told journalists after the announcement that the citizens of Serbia were being summoned to another vote.

Kosovo Albanians have declared autonomy from the rest of Serbia and held an election in May, 1992, during which Rugova was elected president. Belgrade denounced the vote as illegal and has deployed security troops to prevent its secession.

With the democrats in disarray, Seselj in disgrace and the largest bloc of potential anti-Milosevic votes planning to boycott, the Serbian president has already apparently secured the majority he needs to control Parliament.

But in an effort to retain a fall guy after sacrificing Seselj, Milosevic has brought another accused war criminal to the political fore.

Zeljko Raznjatovic, the notorious “Arkan” tracked by Interpol and the head of an elite paramilitary force known as the Serbian Tigers, has formed the new Party of Serbian Unity that seeks to absorb the ultranationalist vote previously controlled by Seselj.

Already entrenched as the nationalist standard-bearer in Kosovo, Arkan sought at his first-ever news conference here in early November to cast himself as the defender of Serbian interests throughout the Balkans.

He waved off suggestions that he might one day be brought before an international war crimes tribunal being set up by the United Nations to consider allegations of murder, torture and rape against civilians ousted from Croatia and Bosnia during “ethnic cleansing.”

Milosevic was elected last December to a five-year term as president, and he controls the large Yugoslav federal army and Serbian Interior Ministry forces through proxies.

With a parliamentary majority, diplomats point out, he would wield absolute authority over the most unstable and heavily armed state in the Balkans, raising the prospects for further territorial aggression and a spread of the war.