Not USA's flavour of the month.

Vojislav Kostunica is a lawyer committed to peaceful resistance and Slobodan Milosevic looks mortally wounded. EVE ANN PRENTICE reports

Vojislav Kostunica cuts an unlikely figure as hero and prospective saviour of Yugoslavia. While despairing Serbs and Western leaders looked the other way in search of a Balkan braveheart to rise up and cut the chains that have kept Slobodan Milosevic in power for the past decade, the quietly spoken rival for the presidency slipped under the ropes and, possibly, felled him at the ballot box.

Voting in Yugoslavia's presidential election could run to a second round on8 October, but Mr Milosevic looks mortally wounded after Sunday's vote. Even if he manages to hang on to power a little longer, his authority seems fatally undermined by Mr Kostunica's strong showing.

Soon after the end of the Nato bombing campaign in 1999, many war and sanctions-weary Serbs looked high and low for someone to lead them against the regime. The political options were bleak: the maverick fence-sitter Vuk Draskovic and his Serbian Renewal Movement on the one hand, and the Democratic Party leader Zoran Djindjic on the other.

Mr Djindjic's error was to leave Belgrade at the height …