The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) will attend peace talks outside Paris at the weekend, a spokesman for the separatist ethnic Albanian guerrilla force said yesterday.
Afterwards the US renewed its warning that President Slobodan Milosevic must also agree to the talks or face NATO air strikes.
Mr Jakup Krasniqi, the KLA spokesman in Kosovo, said: "We are definitely going to the talks with our proposals, which we can discuss [there]."
He spoke at a guerrilla base in central Kosovo where the "general staff" of the KLA had gathered to discuss the draft interim agreement document intended to serve as the basis for the peace talks.
KLA members said it was the first time all the members of the general staff had gathered in one place since fighting between guerrillas and Serbian security forces began in earnest 11 months ago.
Mr Krasniqi said the KLA would announce today its representatives on what is expected to be a broadly-based 15-member ethnic Albanian negotiating team.
He insisted that KLA representatives would not be shy about expressing their reservations about the draft interim agreement, a document whose preparation has been overseen by US and European envoys.
The interim accord would provide this southern Serbian province with substantial autonomy rather than the independence that guerrillas have been fighting for.
"We are not satisfied with the document, but we are going to the talks. The group must be led by the KLA," the spokesman said.
Mr Krasniqi identified three specific concerns that the KLA would be voicing: the need for an international "protectorate" for Kosovo for three years; the need for Kosovo to have its own army; and the need after the interim agreement runs its course in three years for a referendum on self-determination.
Analysts have identified the future status of the KLA as a potential stumbling block to successful peace talks.
The guerrilla force, more rumour than reality just a year ago, has grown so fast that the West fears it could provoke a wider Balkan war involving ethnic Albanians in neighbouring Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro.
Estimated to have between 10,000 and 15,000 fighters, the KLA would not be permitted to roam the countryside if NATO ground forces deployed in Kosovo, as planned, to seal any agreed peace plan for the province.
Some of the separatist fighters could be absorbed in a reconstituted police force, but that would still leave thousands of men who have risked everything for independence without any obvious role in an autonomous Kosovo within Yugoslavia.
Leaders of Kosovo's main ethnic Albanian political parties have agreed to go to Rambouillet, south of Paris, for the peace talks, but diplomats have been saying that KLA participation is an essential precondition for conference success.
The six-nation Contact Group at the weekend warned Yugoslav federal officials, Serb authorities and ethnic Albanian leaders to show up in Rambouillet or face NATO military action.
More than 1,500 people have been killed in Kosovo over the past year and several hundreds of thousands of others driven from their homes.
Serbian authorities in Kosovo yesterday released the bodies of more than 40 victims of a massacre of ethnic Albanians alleged to have been carried out by Serb security forces last month.
The official Belgrade-based Tanjug news agency quoted Judge Danica Marinkovic as saying the victims' families were free to take the bodies for burial in or near their village of Racak, south-west of the provincial capital, Pristina.
However, family members who arrived in Pristina said they wanted the Organisation of Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which organises a team of international monitors in Kosovo, to help them get the bodies returned and buried because they were afraid of Serb harassment.
"We want the OSCE to be there during the time we bury the bodies, and to accompany us on our way back home, because we are afraid," said Mr Hafiz Mustafa.
Mr Mustafa lost his son and his nephew when Serb security forces shot dead 45 ethnic Albanians in Racak on January 15th.
The incident, described by the chief monitor, Mr William Walker, as a massacre, helped galvanise the international community into issuing an the ultimatum to Kosovo Albanians and Serbian authorities to attend the peace talks in France.