Ethnic Albanians agreed yesterday to sign the Rambouillet accord to end the war in Kosovo, increasing the pressure on Belgrade to do likewise and accept NATO troops on Yugoslav soil.
"The Kosovo Albanian delegation has decided unanimously to say Yes," said Mr Hashim Thaci, chairman of the ethnic Albanian side at peace talks that had just resumed in the French capital.
But the Serbian President, Mr Milan Milutinovic, played down Mr Thaci's announcement. "There must be two parties to sign, and a unilateral signing does not mean anything," he said. "We are still working on a political agreement."
The accord in question, hammered out at intensive negotiations at Rambouillet chateau near Paris last month, is an 82-page document that would grant self-rule to Kosovo's 90 per cent ethnic Albanian majority.
But the Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, is set against a key part of the peace plan, the deployment of 26,000 NATO-led troops to keep order in the Serbian province.
In Brussels a NATO source said the organisation was awaiting a "Serb move" after the Kosovars' decision to sign the peace accord.
The Serb side was also rejecting a section that would end Belgrade's domination of the much-distrusted Serbian police, held responsible for village massacres and other atrocities in the year-old conflict, sources said.
"The most important thing is that Milosevic and the Serbs must sign," said President Clinton after the Kosovo Albanians made their announcement. "If he shows intransigence and aggression. . . we would have very little option," Mr Clinton said in Washington, referring to NATO air strikes on Serbian targets.
Speaking at a joint press conference, the co-chairmen of the Kosovo peace talks, the British Foreign Minister, Mr Robin Cook, and the French Foreign Minister, Mr Hubert Vedrine, praised the ethnic Albanian side for its "courage".
"Yugoslav leaders now have their backs against the wall," Mr Vedrine said. "It now is up to them to choose. They have the possibility to get Yugoslavia out of its isolation."
Mr Cook agreed, saying the pressure now was on Belgrade after the Kosovo Albanian delegation announced in a letter to the two foreign ministers that they would put their names to the agreement.
The two ministers said the Kosovar Albanians had made it clear during the talks that they were dropping demands for the peace deal to include an independence vote in three years, when the accord runs out.
They also had set aside their reluctance over the disarmament of the 15,000-strong Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighting Serbia for the past year.
Dismantlement of rebel forces would be one of the tasks handed to the NATO-led peacekeepers.
In Kosovo, however, fighting raged on the doorstep of the provincial capital, Pristina.
Tanks and heavy machineguns fired on rebel positions near Lebane village, just 5 km north of Pristina, said Ms Beatrice Lacoste, of the OSCE observer mission.
Sounds of large-calibre gunfire could be heard in the city centre.
One OSCE observer told journalists that the KLA had fired at midday on a Yugoslav army vehicle, wounding a colonel and provoking a firefight.
Yugoslav troops also pounded KLA positions near the town of Vucitrn, forcing villagers to flee as peace talks resumed in Paris, the OSCE reported.
On Saturday six people were killed and 66 injured in bomb attacks in Podujevo and Kosovska Mitrovica, in one of the bloodiest weekends since the peace process got under way.