The NATO allies yesterday approved plans to increase the size of the peace-keeping force destined for Kosovo to around 50,000 troops with combat weapons and heavy armour, according to NATO sources in Brussels.
The exact figure and composition of the mission, described as KFOR Plus, will be determined by military commanders in the course of the week, the NATO sources said.
NATO says it has no plan to invade Kosovo but is keeping its military options open should the bombing campaign fail to force President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to comply with international demands on Kosovo. The unspoken implication is that KFOR could form the basis of a much larger army that would fight its way into Kosovo if NATO decides that such a strategy is necessary to enforce its demands and prevent the starvation of hundreds of thousands of dispossessed ethnic Albanians.
Military sources say NATO would require around 150,000 troops if an invasion were contemplated. NATO already has deployed nearly 14,000 troops in Macedonia, on the southern border of Kosovo, as the core of KFOR, which is officially known as Operation Joint Guardian. A further 2,000 troops from Britain are on their way, raising the British contribution to around 9,000.
The NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, said yesterday the force would be heavily armed with "big, sharp teeth" to enable it to repel any attempts to oppose its mandate or threaten its personnel.
The US is expected to contribute about 7,000 troops or about 15 per cent of KFOR. In addition, there are currently some 5,000 US troops in Albania, and 7,000 other NATO troops in AFOR, aiding half a million Kosovo refugees.
Non-member countries in NATO's Partnership for Peace programme have already expressed interest in contributing troops, and NATO wants Russia to take part.
The NATO supreme commander, Gen Wesley Clark, has said it is very important that KFOR's additional units be deployed to the Kosovo theatre as quickly as possible.
The UN refugee agency meanwhile was expressing fears that the latest wave of expulsions from Kosovo was methodically organised and now affected all inhabitants of the province.
"This could well be the last push," said the spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Mr Ron Redmond. "Everybody is being expelled now. We are seeing the arrival of very old people who normally stay at home in the very worst conditions rather than leave," he told a press conference in the Macedonian capital, Skopje.
"These expulsions are very well organised and prepared," Mr Redmond said. "The trains and buses carrying the refugees come from very different parts of Kosovo." Refugees were being obliged to pay for their transport, meaning "there is a commercial operation that obviously needed preparation".
The total number of refugees in Macedonia has now reached 247,000. Another 60,000 have been taken to other countries. Macedonia's nine camps are now full after the arrival of 22,000 in the past three or four days.
The head of a UN fact-finding mission to Kosovo said he was outraged by clear signs of huge-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, describing what he saw during a three-day trip as "revolting".
"We have seen enough evidence and heard enough testimony to confirm that there has been an attempt at displacing internally and externally a shocking number of civilians," said Mr Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs.
UN investigators say they have gathered evidence of massive war crimes by Serb forces in Kosovo from ethnic Albanians who have sought refuge in Albania and Macedonia.
"Certainly the information that we are receiving is allowing us to continue building the evidence of quite massive crimes that have occurred," said Mr Paul Risley, spokesman for the UN war crimes chief prosecutor, Ms Louise Arbour.
Inside Yugoslavia, the state news agency Tanjug said a federal prosecutor in Gnjilane had asked for an investigation against eight ethnic Albanians, five of whom had already fled from Kosovo, and all from the town of Urosevac, near the Macedonian border.