Yugoslavia yesterday broke off diplomatic relations with its Balkan neighbour, Albania, as NATO and the British Ministry of Defence firmed up their reports of mass graves and thousands of refugees in deteriorating health crossed into Albania and Macedonia.
The NATO Secretary-General, Mr Javier Solana, and the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, separately said ground troops were not planned but did not rule them out for the future. Ms Albright said the military assessment could be quickly updated.
Yugoslavia accused Tirana of siding with NATO in its fierce bombing campaign against Yugoslav targets, Albanian officials said. But Albania, which has accepted about 100,000 Kosovan refugees, dismissed the Yugoslav move as unacceptable and vowed to continue supporting the Western alliance against what it branded "a criminal regime" carrying out a policy of genocide against ethnic Albanians in Serbia's Kosovo province.
Relations worsened considerably when Albania recently put its airports, air space and territory at the disposal of NATO, which is waging air raids against Yugoslavia in an effort to push back troops sweeping through the Serb province of Kosovo.
The British government yesterday seized on distressing reports of a Serbian cover-up of massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo using civilians or former prisoners dressed in red clothing to transport the bodies of their own people away from killing sites.
The Armed Forces Minister, Mr Doug Henderson, said NATO and the Foreign Office had received "disturbing reports" that 200 villages and towns in Kosovo had been destroyed by Serb forces and "clean-up" squads were being used to remove evidence of massacres.
At yesterday's Ministry of Defence press briefing, he said hundreds of villages had been destroyed and more than 20,000 refugees had crossed the Kosovan border in the past 24 hours. An estimated 20,000 more were gathering at the border waiting to cross into neighbouring Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro.
Between 2,500 and 3,000 people crossed from Kosovo into Macedonia at the Jazince checkpoint in the east of the country yesterday. At 3 a.m. on Saturday morning, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees personnel was contacted by Malina villagers, who are ethnic Albanian, saying up to 4,000 refugees had arrived at their homes and that they needed help.
There are approximately 60 houses in the village; some are now accommodating over 100 Kosovans each. The village is in what are known as Skopje's Montenegro Mountains overlooking the city and almost on the border with Kosovo. Yesterday Macedonian police were restricting access to between 1,500 and 2,00 Kosovan refugees, who crossed over the mountains into Malina late on Friday.
As the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, prepares to meet NATO commanders at its headquarters in Brussels tomorrow before visiting British troops at a base in Germany, his government is keen to ensure that all alliance participants in the Balkans conflict avoid sending out confused messages. The delay in releasing details of the NATO bombing of a convoy of ethnic Albanians last week is seen as increasingly bizarre and has been criticised in the British media. Serbian state television last night broadcast a taped conversation purporting to show a NATO pilot being ordered to attack a civilian convoy in Kosovo last week despite seeing only cars and tractors.
Meanwhile, the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, told GMTV's Sunday Programme that it would take two to three months to assemble a ground invasion force to enter Kosovo. Denying that such a policy was under consideration, Mr Cook said NATO could not wait that long to defeat President Milosevic and was not prepared to enter a ground war which would result in inevitable casualties on both sides.
Meanwhile in Dresden, Germany, in an acknowledgement that the EU will foot most of the eventual bill for the reconstruction of Kosovo, EU finance ministers began at the weekend the process of finding the cash, expected to run into many billions of pounds.
The Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, said that although the ministers had made no hard decisions there was a strong consensus that the EU must be heavily involved.
The new German Finance Minister and president of the Finance Ministers' Council, Mr Hans Eichel, would not be drawn on the likely cost and said now was not the time for penny-pinching. " We paid for German unity and now we will have to pay for peace in the Balkans," Mr Eichel told the final news conference of the informal meeting on Saturday.
Meanwhile, NATO's bombing of a petrochemical complex north-east of Belgrade early yesterday raised fears of serious pollution in Yugoslavia and its Balkan neighbours.