Yugoslavia yesterday extended military service for its conscript army, with the authorities defiantly refusing to accept either a peace plan for Kosovo or the deployment of NATO peacekeepers.
In contrast to the deliberations in Paris, Kosovo is seeing the heaviest fighting of the year, with one of the largest set-piece battles of the war now under way 12 miles northwest of the capital, Pristina.
Serb artillery hammered a series of rebelheld villages running along the base of the Cicavica mountain, near the town of Vucitrn.
Artillery and mortar bombs exploded among the buildings, which burned throughout the day. Additional fire came from rapid-firing anti-aircraft guns, their high-velocity streams of shells cutting through the stone walls of the houses.
Most of the civilians of these villages have already fled and are now clustered further up the mountain, part of the 60,000 total of refugees aid agencies say have been created in fighting since a ceasefire signed between NATO and the Serbs last October.
So far there has been no infantry advance into these villages, leaving rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army in control of a string of bunker and trench complexes built around them, having sent their women and children to the rear.
"It is sad when you have to leave your husband behind and abandon your house," said Zarife Beqiri, riding one of many tractor-wagons taking refugees to higher ground south of the fighting. In Belgrade, Yugoslav authorities said the conscript army, many of whom were due to leave in the coming days having finished their service, would have to stay on.
"Because of increased pressures on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and threats of military intervention, it has been decided that soldiers whose military service has expired remain in the Yugoslav army for another 30 days," said a statement from the Defence Ministry.
NATO says elements of 14 army brigades are now deployed in Kosovo. Yesterday seven Serb soldiers were wounded in battles in the province. A total of 22 ethnic Albanian civilians and rebels are known to have died in fighting over the weekend.
Despite yesterday's declaration by the KLA that they will sign a proposed peace plan, KLA officials say there is uncertainty about just what they have signed. Commanders on the ground are determined to keep their army of approximately 15,000 men in being during the three-year period of the proposed peace plan, despite a clause in the plan calling for them to disarm.
"The commanders have given the right to
[the Paris delegation] to sign this," said a KLA spokesman, Mr Pleurat Sejdiu. "Their thinking is that the KLA will be preserved as an army, with part of it transformed into the police force." How this interpretation will square with the West's plan for disarmament in the province is to be seen, though Western diplomats say there may be "wiggle room" in which rebel units hand over some guns, but keep many more.
The KLA has few heavy weapons. Most soldiers are villagers with uniforms, armed with standard Kalashnikovs which can be kept at home and out of sight of NATO forces.