World leaders conferred about the growing crisis in the Serbian province of Kosovo yesterday as a former Balkans mediator said hostilities over Kosovo could be worse than the Bosnian war.
The Russian and US Presidents and the British Prime Minister discussed the crisis by phone. Pope John Paul II added his voice to those calling for a peaceful solution in Kosovo in his weekly address in St Peter's Square. He said the world must intervene in the conflict, which he called a reminder of the "Balkans' tragic history".
President Yeltsin of Russia spoke by telephone with the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, a Kremlin statement said. Mr Blair asked Russia to help end the "barbarism" in Kosovo. Mr Blair also discussed Kosovo with President Clinton. They agreed to send a "strong message" to President Slobodan Milosevic that "the activities of the Yugoslav forces (in Kosovo) were totally unacceptable", said Mr Blair's spokesman.
Mr Yeltsin and Mr Blair, whose country currently holds the EU presidency, agreed that efforts to defuse the crisis should not lead to violation of Yugoslavia's territorial integrity.
Russia, a traditional ally of fellow-Orthodox Serbia, is wary about NATO becoming directly involved in Kosovo, where about 250 people have died since February in clashes between the province's ethnic Albanian majority and the Serbian authorities.
The Western military alliance is weighing up the possibility of intervening in Kosovo to avert another Balkan war. Diplomats say Britain and the US want the UN Security Council to authorise the use of force against Yugoslavia for its attacks on the Albanian community.
In Luxembourg today, the EU Foreign Ministers meet and are expected to ban investment in Serbia. When they last met on May 25th, EU ministers agreed to keep on ice their threat of cutting off new investment to Serbia in the hope peace talks would take hold. However, with one voice after another from within the 15nation EU backing a military response to escalating violence in Kosovo, diplomats said the ban was likely to move ahead in view of "the lack of substantial results to date".
Meanwhile, Mr Richard Holbrooke, the US negotiator who helped resolve the Bosnian conflict, warned that full-scale war in Kosovo had the potential to develop into a region-wide conflict. "If it explodes, it could be even more dangerous than Bosnia because it could unravel the international boundaries in the area, with Albania, Macedonia, perhaps even Greece," he told BBC radio.
Meanwhile, western Kosovo was relatively quiet yesterday following the major Yugoslav military operation against suspected separatists which saw more than 10,000 Kosovo Albanians seek shelter across the border in Albania, according to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).