The moderate ethnic Albanian leader, Mr Ibrahim Rugova, yesterday repeated his call for the deployment of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo, comprising forces from Russia, NATO members and other countries.
The Kosovan leader made his remarks during a brief news conference after meeting Pope John Paul II. He added: "It was a great pleasure to be received by the Pope . . . I took the opportunity of bringing him up to date on the situation. Kosovo today is dead, Pristina is a ghost town inhabited only by soldiers and policemen.
"We must make every possible effort to ensure that people return to Kosovo but first we have to create the security conditions in which they can return. The vast majority of those who have fled Kosovo are Albanians but there are others too and they all need protection."
Mr Rugova, leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo, has been in Rome since last Wednesday following a surprise decision by the Yugoslav authorities to allow him to leave Belgrade, where he had been under de-facto house arrest. Asked yesterday about his controversial meeting last month with President Slobodan Milosevic, Mr Rugova said it had been due "to the pressure of the situation at that time", without further elaboration.
The Vatican spokesman, Dr Joaquin Navarro-Valls, told reporters the Pope had expressed hopes to Mr Rugova that his efforts "towards finding a just peace as soon as possible" might succeed.
The Pope met Mr Rugova on the day after his return from a visit to predominantly Orthodox Romania, during which he had repeated his call for an end to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and to NATO bombings.
Speaking in Paris, however, a Kosovo Liberation Army spokesman, Mr Bardhyl Mahmudi, repeated the KLA's condemnation of Mr Rugova's actions, saying he was "not the leader of the Kosovo Albanians" but "an emissary sent by Yugoslav President Milosevic".
Agencies add: Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro said in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, yesterday that NATO should halt its air raids against Yugoslavia. "It is necessary for the bombing to stop, because we are very worried to see that the raids are apparently moving away from military targets and are being directed towards civilian targets."
In Rome the Italian Prime Minister, Mr Massimo D'Alema, said NATO must do more than just apologise to China for mistakenly bombing its embassy in Belgrade, if it does not want to ruin its credibility. Mr D'Alema told the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, in a telephone conversation that "beyond the formal expressions of regret . . . for the bombing of the Chinese embassy, the Atlantic Alliance should conduct a rigorous inquiry into the circumstances that led to this unprecedented incident."
Mr Schroder has already called for an inquiry.