LONDON - The man who would be king of Yugoslavia, Crown Prince Alexander, is a man without a country in more ways than one. 

He says that President Slobodan Milosevic is an evil dictator who has systematically destroyed Yugoslavia, its economy, and the dream of a multiethnic nation in the Balkans, making it the pariah of Europe. He condemns unreservedly the forced expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, and the terror used by Milosevic's forces. 
And yet the exiled 53-year-old prince, who has visited Yugoslavia only a handful of times since the communists abolished the monarchy in 1945, says he believes equally strongly that NATO's bombing is immoral, killing innocent civilians, and has only consolidated Milosevic's grip on power. 

''It is human nature,'' he said, sitting in his office across from Hyde Park. ''When the Germans bombed London in the Second World War, it only brought the British people closer together and made them rally around their leaders. Why wouldn't it affect Serbs the same way? Most of them don't like Milosevic, but they like the people who are bombing them even less.'' 

In simultaneously opposing Milosevic and NATO's bombing, Prince Alexander finds himself increasingly isolated among the royal families of Europe, many of them his relatives. Fluent in six languages, he is the great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria and the cousin of King Juan Carlos of Spain. Queen Elizabeth II is his godmother. 
He has a special fondness for Britain, where his parents, King Peter II and Princess Alexandra, settled after fleeing the Nazis in 1941. According to tradition, the heir to the Karadjordje throne must be born on Yugoslav soil. When Prince Alexander was born July 17, 1945, in Suite 212 of Claridge's Hotel in London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared the hotel room Yugoslav territory for the day to provide for a legal succession should the infant or his father ever return to take the throne. Dirt from Yugoslavia was sprinkled under his bed. 

Prince Alexander was educated in Scotland and England, as well as the United States and Switzerland, and was commissioned in the British Army in 1966. After leaving the army, the prince used his contacts to build an advertising career, jetting between London, New York, and Rio de Janeiro. He later worked as an insurance broker in Chicago and New York, before settling again in London. He serves on several corporate boards. 
It pains him to criticize his home in exile, and the United States, for which he has a singular admiration and where his father is buried - in Libertyville, Ill. But he insists that the bombing has done more harm than good and has pushed back, not sped up, the day when there will be stability in the Balkans. 

''If the West had put just a fraction of the money they have used to drop bombs on Yugoslavia into promoting democracy and building up the regional infrastructure, we wouldn't be where we are today,'' he said. 
He said the Western allies have paid lip service to bolstering democracy. For example, he said, it would have been simple, ''and a lot less expensive than cruise missiles,'' to take the independent journalists who were tossed out of jobs by the Milosevic regime and give them the technology to launch a Serbian version of Radio Free Europe. 
''Most people only know what Milosevic wants them to know,'' he said. 

He also accused the Western allies of preaching democracy and practicing something else. The Rambouillet talks in France that sought to avoid a military confrontation over Kosovo ''were a disaster,'' he said. 

''First, the one person who needed to be there, Milosevic, wasn't,'' he said. ''But it wasn't really a set of negotiations. They imposed a solution. They put a gun to Milosevic's head and said accept this or else. They did not use democracy.'' 

He blames both the West and Milosevic for sidelining Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate ethnic Albanian leader in Kosovo, saying both sides paid too much attention to the Kosovo Liberation Army, which he considers ''a bunch of terrorists.'' Milosevic overreacted to the threat posed by the KLA, launching a scorched earth policy that killed and displaced civilians; the West, meanwhile, courted the KLA, basically disenfranchising Rugova and all moderates. 
He says Milosevic, for selfish reasons, passed up the chance to steer Yugoslavia toward the Western model of a free-market democracy after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. 

''Milosevic used to hoard power under communism. When communism failed, he turned to nationalism. He has used negative nationalism and negative religion to build up his power base.'' 

The Yugoslav leader has also used old-fashioned terror and intimidation, embodied by his massive secret police, to silence or co-opt the news media, opposition parties, intellectuals, and dissidents. 

''Consider that Milosevic spends $7 billion a year on his Interior Ministry and only $1 billion on the army,'' the prince said. ''That tells you where his priorities are and how he controls every facet of society.'' 
The prince rejects suggestions that people get the leaders they deserve. First, he says, Milosevic and his cronies stole the last election, which was canceled when the voting did not go the regime's way. Beyond that, the democracy-oriented opposition could have been stronger if the West had given it more support, instead of spending a decade courting Milosevic. And the West has done far too little to go after Milosevic's assets, he says. 

In the short term, he says, the bombing must stop and the United Nations must take the lead role in policing a settlement. The prince says that restoring a constitutional monarchy to Yugoslavia, with him ascending to the throne that his father never abdicated, is part of the long-term solution. He said that in the two centuries of his family's dynasty, they championed equal rights for all ethnicities and religions. 

''The monarchy is above politics. It is about values,'' he said, borrowing a phrase that President Clinton and NATO general secretary Javier Solana have used to justify the bombing. 

He says Serbian people have been demonized by the West, portrayed as the bogeymen in a conflict that has no shortage of victims and perpetrators. He says no sector of people has escaped ''ethnic cleansing,'' including the 800,000 Serbian refugees in Serbia who were driven out of other parts of the Balkans. 

His biggest fear is that the NATO attacks have alienated Serbs who want democracy as much as he does. In the past decade, he says, up to 350,000 college-educated people who would have been the backbone of a democratic Yugoslavia have emigrated. Those left behind are embittered by NATO. 

''There are many people in Yugoslavia who aspire to be like the 19 NATO countries, with their democracies and strong markets. But ask yourself, what would you think if the people you aspired to be like bombed you?'' he said. ''As I said before, this is human nature. And Serbs are human, too. Sometimes I think people in the West forget that.''