For journalists, life in Belgrade has become a chancy business at best, squeezed between government expulsions and NATO explosions. Even the old hands are genuinely nervous, though as PNS commentator Terence Sheridan reports, a little humor sometimes helps things along. Sheridan, a former reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been living and writing in the former Yugoslavia for the last eight years.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- People can be kind and I, an American in the wrong place at the wrong time, have been especially fortunate.

When NATO air strikes began, a Serbian friend, an anti-government journalist, called and offered to "hide" me. I thought not -- and, besides the next day at 3am, one of his cop friends came to his apartment and told him to beat it, that he was about to be arrested. In the end, no one came for either of us.

Still journalists are on edge, particularly those from the West. Already under an expulsion order, the last thing 30 of them needed was to hear an infamous local legend -- gangster, warlord and businessman -- mumbling "I want to kick some ass" as he walked through their hotel lobby. Some decamped immediately, a few not stopping until they reached Hungary. But most them are still here, defying the expulsion order and filing daily.

The baby-faced legend's name is Zeljko Raznatovic -- called "Arkan" -- and he was recently indicted by the Hague Tribunal for war crimes allegedly committed in 1992, when his paramilitary army, "the Tigers," roamed bloodily through eastern Bosnia.

There were reports that Arkan and his Tigers were wreaking havoc in Kosovo. Actually, he hadn't left Belgrade. He can be seen in very public places, including a recent music concert on the town's main square starring his third wife, the phenomenally popular singer Ceca.

Compared to new guys in town, my life here is a piece of cake. I've had a big head start. I've been kicking around the Balkan Peninsula for six years, loitering without intent, but I know Belgrade streets and can order a beer in Serbian, in bars where, before the war, strangers were welcome.

But now it's nice to be around old friends. While having coffee with one of them in a downtown cafe, a surly Montenegrin at the next table demanded to know who I was and why was I taking notes. Montenegrins, it is said, consider themselves Serbs -- but taller, handsomer, braver, and smarter Serbs. This one was big enough, but he was as ugly as sin and as dumb as a stone. And angry.

In the last 72 hours NATO ordnance had destroyed a city police station, an air force headquarters and a power plant, and hit the airport. The cafe's windows were taped, a large X, to keep glass from becoming shrapnel.

My friend, a Serbian Jew (father Jewish, mother Serbian), bought a round of drinks and assured the big Montenegrin that I was a "dobar momak" -- a good guy. But I don't know how long he'll be able to run stylish interference for me, since he is busy getting Jewish relatives, women and children, out of the country.

There is, he said, a quiet evacuation of Jews. The Jews are a small but tightly knit community in a city of nearly 2 million. There is a large monument on the Danube quay commemorating their losses in WW II when the community was virtually wiped out. Amazed, I asked, "Jews fear Serbian police?" "No," he laughed. "Jews fear NATO bombs."

Another part-Jewish friend will be on a bus leaving for Hungary. She is getting her four-year-old son out. Her grandfather, the poet Oskar Davico -- a Jew arrested in the 1930's for communist activity -- later wrote a poem beloved by Serbs, with the lines "Ah, Serbia, born to become/Rebel among the nations of earth."

So, Western reporters are not the only ones on edge. Nearly everyone is.

My friend Marija, another anti-government journalist, lost it during a phone call from the British Broadcasting Corporation, which had been calling her regularly for reports: she speaks impeccable English with a high-toned British accent. But when Belgrade structures became torches with windows, and BBC called, she screamed, "You bomb me at four in the morning and then call at six to ask how I like it?" and slammed down the phone.

She and other anti-government reporters, whom the government constantly denounces as "traitors," think that NATO has effectively broken the back of the opposition, creating a situation where Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, a former Communist Party functionary, could be crowned czar for life.

Why, she asks, can Americans rally around their president as he bombs a small nation -- spending $500 million in less than 10 days -- and yet have difficulty understanding why the small nation being bombed rallies around ITS president, though many of them loathe him?

I may have had something to do with her frayed nerves. When I learned over the Internet that NATO declared the presidential palace off-limits to air strikes because it is a historically important building and because it has a Rembrandt hanging, I called Marija, who lives with her husband and two young daughters near the palace. I told her, "The good news is you live near the palace; the bad news is you don't have a Rembrandt." She hung up on me.