NATO will intensify its bombing campaign against Yugoslavia until President Milosevic gives in to the western allies' key demands, President Clinton warned yesterday.
Speaking to 5,000 US military personnel at Spangdahlem Air Base in southern Germany, Mr Clinton said the primary purpose of the campaign was to end Mr Milosevic's project of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
"We must repudiate it, we must reverse it and we intend to do that. We will continue to pursue this campaign in which we are now engaged. We will intensify it in an unrelenting way until these objectives are met," he said.
Mr Clinton received an enthusiastic welcome during his morale-boosting visit to the base, where many of the NATO flight crews bombing Yugoslavia are based. The visit came within a few hours of the news that the US suffered its first losses of the campaign when two Apache helicopter pilots died during a training exercise in Albania.
Expressing his grief over the loss of the two pilots, Mr Clinton said that he sympathised with the hardship suffered by many US personnel and their families during the campaign so far.
"I know this is hard. I know too many of these pilots are flying long hours with too little rest. I know the stress and anxiety must be unbearable. But next time you are in a meeting of American service personnel, look around at your differences, at your racial differences, the differences of religious faith and thank God that you live in a society that honours that," he said.
The president was accompanied by the Defence Secretary, Mr William Cohen, and the Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, who will meet G8 foreign ministers, including Russia's Mr Igor Ivanov, in Bonn today.
After his visit to Spangdahlem, Mr Clinton travelled to Ramstein air base, where he met the three US servicemen who were released from captivity by Belgrade last weekend.
The president is due to meet ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo today before moving on to Bonn for talks with the Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder.
Part of the president's purpose in visiting Germany is to stiffen the resolve of Mr Schroder's centre-left government, which is divided over the continuation of air strikes against Yugoslavia. Insisting that the western allies have no quarrel with the Serb people, Mr Clinton reiterated NATO's conditions for ending the campaign.
"The Kosovars must be able to go home safely and with self-government. The Serb troops must go home - in their place must be an international force with NATO at its core," he said.
But the president was at pains to emphasise the moral dimension of NATO's campaign, which he characterised as a battle for the soul of Europe.
"If we want Europe to be undivided and democratic and at peace for the first time in history, then we must stand in Kosovo for the humanity of every living, breathing person in this continent," he said.
Earlier, Mr Clinton received a huge welcome from American troops and their families during a visit to NATO headquarters in Brussels.
The meeting with the NATO Secretary General, Mr Javier Solana, and with NATO Supreme Commander for Europe, Gen Wesley Clark, was short and to the point. Mr Clinton briefed NATO on the details of his meeting last weekend with the Russian envoy to Kosovo, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin, and NATO reported on the intensified air attacks on Kosovo.
Mr Clinton said he and Mr Chernomyrdin had discussed the form an eventual peacekeeping force in Kosovo will take.
The NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, said NATO "wants to and will encourage diplomacy", and said he was optimistic that the G8 meeting will bring about "100 per cent rather than 99 per cent" agreement. He emphasised, however, that NATO will keep the military campaign going until "every exit is banged shut".
Reuters adds from Rome: Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leader, Mr Ibrahim Rugova, arrived in Rome yesterday with the approval of Yugoslav authorities, the Italian prime minister's office said.