Serbian Interior Ministry forces have arrested several members of an anti-war movement in the central Serb city of Cacak, Montenegrin state television reported yesterday.
Meanwhile, residents in two southern Serbian towns said a couple of thousand peace demonstrators had taken to the streets there at the start of a second full week of protests, repeating their demands that reservists serving in Kosovo be called home.
The region has witnessed the first serious rallies against the Kosovo policy of the Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, since the start of the NATO bombardment and senior army officials have been dispatched to the area to try to placate the angry locals.
Hard on the heels of the demonstrations, two Serbian opposition parties urged the Yugoslav government to break the deadlock in the talks. The Christian Democratic party urged the Belgrade regime and the UN, NATO, Russia and international mediators to end the Kosovo crisis quickly.
The head of the National Peasants Party, Mr Dragan Veselinov, urged the government to take urgent measures to stop further suffering among the people and to prevent the destruction of the economy.
The bold and rare opposition statements came after three days of NATO attacks that have blacked out most of Serbia and drastically hit water supplies.
Most of Belgrade was reported yesterday to be without electricity and only 40 per cent of the capital had water. And the oil refinery at Novi Sad was attacked yesterday for the fifth time by NATO.
Montenegrin television said leading members of a so-called "citizens' parliament" in Cacak were detained in the morning and had been charged with taking part in an illegal meeting.
The group will be sentenced today. The television named four people known to have been seized, but said a number of others were also taken in for an "informative conversation" and then charged.
The peace movement emerged last week when the Cacak mayor, Mr Velimir Ilic, a Milosevic critic, inaugurated the parliament and called for an end to the NATO attacks and the return of all ethnic Albanian refugees to their homes.
Mr Ilic has now gone into hiding and is being sought by the police.
Montenegrin television said the arrested group said they had been well treated by the police. "But they also say that this situation is counter-productive and will make members of the citizens' parliament work more intensively," a reporter in Cacak said.
It is not clear how much support the citizens' parliament enjoys in Cacak. However, anti-war sentiment in the southern Serbian towns of Krusevac and Aleksandrovac remained strong yesterday.
Local residents said some 2,000 reservists and residents gathered in the old industrial town, Krusevac, during the day to call for an end to the Kosovo war. The residents added that demonstrators have been warned they risked losing their jobs if they continued their rallies.
In the nearby town of Aleksandrovac, a few hundred residents protested against sending local reservists to the front.
The independent Vijesti daily reported earlier yesterday that "several thousand" protesters in Krusevac had demonstrated in the town on Sunday. It said local men had vowed to ignore a recent call-up and would refuse to go back to the front.