A senior official from Kosovo's guerrillas said last night that the war will continue against Yugoslavia, despite the terrible price paid in apparent reprisals by the 46 murdered villagers of Racak.
Mr Jaser Falihu, a member of the ruling council of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, said that the massacre underlined the need to keep fighting for independence. "There is no other way to go. We have to fight to the end," he said.
Mr Falihu is an unusual choice as a guerrilla leader. For nearly 20 years he has lived and worked in Switzerland, and now operates as a fund manager, with mobile phone, briefcase and an office close to the glittering waters of Lake Geneva.
But he is also a leading light in the hard-line Popular Movement for Kosovo, which he set up with fellow exiles in 1982. Despite the name, the PMK was anything but popular among the tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians who went to Switzerland seeking a better life in the 1980s.
Most expatriates were happy to live and work and send money home to support their extended families and avoided the war-talk of Mr Falihu.
In 1989 Serbia's new President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, suddenly stripped Kosovo of the autonomous status it had been granted by the previous communist regime.
But Kosovars turned not to the exiles of the PMK, but to a homegrown intellectual, Mr Ibrahim Rugova, and a unique experiment in the Balkans: passive resistance.
Mr Rugova hoped the lack of violence would win support in the West.
It did not, and in 1995 the outside world drew up the Dayton peace treaty, ending Bosnia's war but offering nothing to Kosovo.
Mr Rugova was plunged into a form of political paralysis from which he has yet to emerge, while the hard men of the PMK were suddenly in business. They dusted off plans for an armed group, formed in name only in 1993 - the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Mr Falihu was elected paymaster of the KLA, and jetted around Europe and the US using his banking acumen to organise donations for the KLA.
But without a foreign backer, finding guns to buy was a problem, until, in 1997, came what some KLA call "the miracle". Upheavals swept Albania, mobs raided army depots, and suddenly there were one million small arms, going for a few pounds each, on the market. The KLA snapped them up, then began smuggling them into Kosovo.
By November of that year Mr Falihu had 200 men in the force, smuggled in from Albania, and they began hit and run attacks, targeting Yugoslav police patrols and also fellow ethnic Albanians accused of being collaborators.
Then, in March last year, came Prekaz. This tiny village was home to Adem Jashari, a local tough who made no secret of using guns to shoot at police who came to arrest him.
The Yugoslav solution was to use artillery to flatten the village and everyone inside, and after a two-day bombardment Jashari was dead - along with 85 men, women and children.
Suddenly the KLA "phantoms" were inundated with recruits. Units, often bands of villagers calling themselves KLA, sprang up everywhere, most ignoring advice from the cautious. They proclaimed farms, villages and finally towns as "liberated zones".
The Serbian counter-punch, when it came last summer, was devastating. Most units simply ran away, leaving the civilians and their homes, crops and animals to bear the brunt of the endless bombardments.
Now, Mr Falihu insists, the KLA has the bit between its teeth. "We can say last year was the year of decision," he says. "The Albanians made a decision not to wait and wait. They decided to act. Independence will come. It is only a question of price, of how many lives we have to lose. There is no force that can bring things together. Things have gone too far."
