NATO planning for the possible deployment of thousands of troops in Albania went into high gear yesterday, as an escalation of fighting was reported in neighbouring Kosovo.
"NATO planning following the Luxembourg foreign ministers' meeting last week is now in full swing. We're not sleeping on this," a NATO official said.
NATO military commanders were already at work developing operational plans for a troop deployment to strengthen Albania's border with the Yugoslav province of Kosovo and to demonstrate allied resolve not to permit a spiralling conflict.
An Austrian military attache said the Serbs were systematically destroying villages in their battle to defeat armed ethnic Albanian separatists. A weekend exodus of refugees was provoked by "massive shelling by Serb forces which turned villages along the border into rubble", said an official of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
He warned that the latest developments directly mirrored events in Bosnia before the outbreak of hostilities in 1992.
In the provincial capital, Pristina, the local Albanian human rights committee said 26 ethnic Albanians had been killed since last Friday.
The upsurge of violence overshadowed intermittent talks to resolve the crisis and prompted an appeal by Albania on Monday for the world to intervene "powerfully and immediately".
NATO foreign ministers agreed last week to immediately step up technical assistance to Albania and hold a joint military exercise there in mid-August, while studying a preventive deployment and unspecified "further measures". They stressed that they had made no commitment to engage alliance forces in the conflict zone.
Preventive deployment by NATO could mean sending between 7,000 and 23,000 troops to northern Albania.
Albania said yesterday it had not raised the state of readiness of its armed forces, despite the weekend's violence across the border and the refugee influx. Russia meanwhile said it was against the use of foreign military force to solve the crisis in Serbia's Albanian-majority province but added that it would spare no diplomatic effort.
The Montenegrin opposition leader, Mr Slavko Perovic, resigned yesterday as president of a nationalist Liberal Alliance after his party received only six per cent of the vote in the republic's assembly polls held on Sunday.
Claiming that his party had been "robbed" in the polls, Mr Perovic said his move was a sign of "revolt" against voting fraud. "My act is a contribution to the democratisation of Montenegro," he said in a statement.
No other party running in the polls complained of vote fraud.
The coalition led by the Montenegrin reformist President, Mr Milo Djukanovic, won almost 50 per cent of the votes.