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"The French military is openly pro-Serb. French officers have fathers and grandfathers who were killed fighting side by side with Serbs on the Balkan front in Thessaloniki," said James Lyons, a Balkan expert at the International Crisis Group in Sarajevo.

"The incidents of French complicity with the Serbs are so numerous, it must be defined as something like a trend," said Dominique Moisi, one of France's preeminent foreign policy experts, in a telephone interview Monday. "Clearly, the French as a nation feel we have helped build the Serbian nation, and that a privileged relationship existed between Serbia ... and France. [Former French president Francois] Mitterand said at the outbreak of Yugoslavia's dissolution in 1991 that we would never fight against the Serbs."

Another historical link between the French share with the Serbs, Moisi added, is fear of Islam. "The less obvious factor is the Western Christian logic against Islam. The Serbs and French feel their main adversaries are mainly Muslims -- the Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo and the former Ottoman empire."

But traditional French-Serb affinity has been shaken up in recent months by Bernard Kouchner, the Frenchman who serves as the chief U.N. administrator in Kosovo. Kouchner, who championed military intervention against the Serbs in order to halt mass atrocities against the Kosovo Albanians, has infuriated Belgrade by taking a number of steps that Serbia fears will lead to Kosovo's independence, including the adoption of the German deutsche mark as the official Kosovo currency and refusing to allow even a symbolic number of Serbian police and Yugoslav soldiers to return to Kosovo. Belgrade's fury seems fueled in part because these outrages against its national pride are coming from a Frenchman. Whatever Gormillon and Bunel did to warm Serbs' hearts to the French, Kouchner may have undone.

Belgrade has retaliated against Paris for sending the freethinking Kouchner to Kosovo with a recent string of vicious anti-French propaganda. Serbia's information minister Goran Matic recently revealed that Serbian police had arrested five Serbian paramilitaries who were members of the "Spider" gang, which Matic said was controlled by the French intelligence service and committed atrocities in Srebrenica, Kosovo and Zaire.

In fact, French and Balkans analysts concede that there may be more truth to these allegations than most proclamations of Serbia's information ministry: Western sources have confirmed that Serb paramilitaries were recruited by the French intelligence service to fight with Zaire's former dictator Mobutu Sesi Seko against the American-backed Laurent Kabila.

"This propaganda about the Spider gang is a message for domestic consumption to the Serbs: We are not guilty," explained French journalist Florence Hartmann. "The people committing atrocities in the name of the Serbs were being run by foreign intelligence services."

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