NATO country leaders insisted last night that they would not send ground troops into Yugoslavia, even as renewed air attacks and a growing tide of refugees, some reported to being used as human shields, worsened the situation in the war over Kosovo.
Fighting is reported to be particularly fierce in the northern and southern parts of the province, and "ethnic cleansing" is believed to be occurring in several areas.
In Washington President Clinton insisted that the US would "stay the course" in keeping up the air strikes while making it clear that he has no intention of sending ground troops.
Before leaving the White House for Camp David yesterday, Mr Clinton said "the continuing brutality and repression of the Serb forces further underscores the necessity for NATO to persevere".
The President said he strongly supported the NATO decision to move to a new phase in the planned air campaign with a broader range of targets, including forces in the field. However, the use of ground troops is still being ruled out. "We are not considering at this moment sending forces on the ground," the NATO Secretary-General, Mr Javier Solana, said in an interview on French television.
The French Foreign Minister, Mr Hubert Vedrine, also rejected calls for ground troops, saying "all Western leaders have clearly ruled out the hypothesis of a ground war". He was speaking on French radio after Albania's President Rexhep Mejdani called on NATO to respond to "massacres perpetrated by Serbian forces against Kosovars".
Diplomats in Brussels, where NATO has its headquarters, said yesterday a recent study showed that about 200,000 men would be required if the alliance decided to fight the Yugoslav army in Kosovo, and that NATO could expect heavy losses.
If NATO had any illusions that it could control the war in Yugoslavia, they were dashed this weekend when a US stealth fighter crashed outside Belgrade. Yugoslav forces said they shot down the jet, and journalists were later shown a wing of the aircraft perforated with bullet holes.
The US F-117A Nighthawk fighter-bomber crashed in the Serb village of Budjanovci, 40 km north-west of Belgrade, at about 10 p.m. on Saturday; the loss of the aircraft was the first military setback for NATO since the war started on March 24th, but the pilot was rescued. He is believed to have called in help from nearby Bosnia with a geo-strategic satellite positioner.
Mr Slobodan Milosevic, the President of the Yugoslav Federation, which consists of Serbia and Montenegro, said the downing of the US jet proved that "Yugoslavia is still fit and able to defend itself."
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said Albanians were being driven from their homes at gunpoint and told they would be killed if they refused to leave. There were unconfirmed reports from Pristina that the home of Mr Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate Albanian intellectual whom the Kosovans elected their president in 1992, was burned down. Mr Rugova is said to be in hiding.
NATO's spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, said the humanitarian crisis created by the war was the worst "since the closing stages of the second World War".
Meanwhile, NATO continued its bombardment of Yugoslavia. Several loud explosions were heard in Belgrade as the Utva aircraft factory across the river in Pancevo was bombed for at least the third time. Later yesterday air-raid sirens sounded several times.
In another sign that the war could spread, the extremist Russian politician, Mr Vladimir Zhirinovsky - a friend of the equally extreme Serb deputy prime minister and head of the Radical Party, Mr Vojislav Seselj, - told the Duma (parliament) he favours sending fighters and material assistance to Yugoslavia.
Additional reporting by Joe Carroll in Washington