President Clinton, who received a hero's welcome from ethnic Albanian refugees yesterday, urged them to wait for a new NATO peace force to make Kosovo safe before they returned home from refugee camps.
Mr Clinton struggled to hold back tears as he ran a gauntlet of hugs, kisses and heartbreaking tales of Serbian persecution from the refugees at the Stankovic camp in Macedonia.
However, he also implored them not to exact revenge on Serbs after they went home for the sake of lasting peace in Kosovo.
As Mr Clinton arrived near Kosovo for the first time since NATO halted its air strikes on Yugoslavia, the NATO supreme commander, Gen Wesley Clark, said it might need more troops in the province than initially planned.
Kosovo is littered with mines, booby traps and live NATO ordnance after the Serb withdrawal.
Britain yesterday confirmed that two of its soldiers killed in Kosovo on Monday had been trying to detonate unexploded NATO cluster bombs.
Mr Clinton, accompanied by his wife, Hillary, and their daughter, Chelsea, spent two hours at Stankovic camp, which at its peak held some 30,000 refugees.
He appealed to refugees not to rush home before the danger of mines had been removed.
"You have suffered enough. I do not want any child killed by a mine when you get back there. Please be patient with us. Give us a couple more weeks to take the land mines up because you are going [to be able] to go back in safety and security."
Western officials and aid workers have warned refugees against going home before mines and booby traps are cleared and food and shelter supplies ensured. The warnings, however, have largely fallen on deaf ears.
Mr Clinton also urged returning refugees to be tolerant to Serb civilians still in Kosovo. "No one ever should be punished and discriminated against and killed or uprooted because of their religious or their ethnic heritage."
He later walked within the crowd, shaking hands, embracing people and getting hugged in return by people chanting "USA, USA" and "Clinton, Clinton".
The Clinton family spoke with refugees about their ordeals. Mr Clinton would break into smiles when children mobbed him but turned sombre each time a refugee family spoke to him.
The foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Italy will visit Kosovo today, the French Foreign Ministry said yesterday. It will be the first visit by senior Western politicians to Kosovo since the end of NATO bombing.