There were strong indications yesterday that the international community would intervene in Serbia's southern province of Kosovo to head off a second Balkan war.
Britain and the US want the United Nations Security Council to authorise the use of force against Yugoslavia for its attacks on ethnic Albanians, according to diplomats.
The British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, meanwhile, warned Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, the EU would not let him get away with ethnic cleansing. That, he said, would create a new South Africa on the EU's doorstep.
In the Serbian province yesterday, the underground Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) appealed to ethnic Albanian men to join the battle for independence. The call came as evidence surfaced of widespread Serb harassment of ethnic Albanians and a big exodus of refugees flooding into Albania. The KLA also urged men who have fled with their families to neighbouring Albania to return to fight.
Violence in Kosovo - ruled by the Serbs but populated almost entirely by ethnic Albanians - has claimed about 250 lives since February and sparked fears of outside countries being dragged into a wider Balkan war.
Pope John Paul yesterday added to the calls for intervention. In his weekly address in St Peter's Square, he said the international community "could not stay inert before the violence, repression and fleeing of the population in Kosovo".
"These are episodes which recall the Balkans' recent tragic history," he added.
At the United Nations, Britain and the US were said by diplomats to be contemplating a document this week which would authorise "all necessary measures" against Belgrade to prepare the legal groundwork for any NATO action.
A similar phrase was used in November 1990, when the US succeeded in getting the 15-member body to approve its military action to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait.
British ambassador Sir John Weston, said the council would be "actively seized of the subject in the next few days. Kosovo is very much in our minds. All of us in the United Nations need to consider the implications of current events in Kosovo because we cannot allow President Milosevic to seek a military solution".
In London, Mr Cook said: "President Milosevic over the past week has crossed the threshold. The use of tanks, of artillery, of the might of the military army against civilian centres of population is wholly unacceptable within the modern Europe."
He told a meeting the EU could not tolerate a confrontation which was so explicitly ethnic in its motivation and in its objectives.
With an eye to President Nelson Mandela's invitation to attend the next EU summit in Cardiff on June 15th, Mr Cook said one of the great achievements of the present generation has been the end of racial segregation in South Africa.
"We are not going to celebrate the ending of apartheid within Africa in order to see a new apartheid created by ethnic cleansing within our own continent," he added.
EU Foreign Ministers are likely to reinforce the mood today by banning investment in Serbia because of the Kosovo conflict, diplomats said.
The last week of violence in western Kosovo has left dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people dead and their villages destroyed after Serb security forces began an operation to reopen roads once controlled by the KLA.
The clashes have brought a tide of refugees who trek across the mountainous border into Albania with harrowing accounts of bombings, bombardments and massacres.