Bonn split over air strikes as 700 refugees arrive

The first refugees from Kosovo will arrive in Germany today amid growing divisions in Bonn's governing parties over NATO's military action against Serbia. Seven hundred people, many of them old and sick, will fly into Munich on a Lufthansa charter plane before being dispersed throughout the country.

Bonn announced yesterday that it would accept 10,000 refugees from Kosovo and denied an earlier suggestion from NATO that as many as 40,000 could find refuge in Germany.

Fifteen Luftwaffe flights transported more than 130 tons of food, sleeping bags, blankets and medicine to Kosovo's borders yesterday and a further 16 flights are planned for today. Over the Easter weekend, Germany flew 280 tons of material into the crisis region.

Opposition to NATO's air strikes within the governing Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens has grown in recent days and one senior Green has warned that the party could split over the issue.

An SPD special party conference on April 12th, which was called to anoint the Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, as party chairman, is likely to be dominated by a heated debate over the Kosovo conflict.

Mr Benjamin Mikfeld, a member of the SPD national executive, claimed yesterday that 50 per cent of the grassroots membership opposes the air strikes and that the mood in the party was becoming more anti-NATO each day.

"The SPD is in the dilemma of being a governing party on the one hand and having its own view on the matter on the other," he said.

The deputy parliamentary leader of the SPD, Mr Michael Muller, called for an end to the air strikes and for the countries of central and eastern Europe to be included in peace negotiations with Belgrade.

"If we shoot everything in Yugoslavia to pieces, we won't be able to create peace," he said.

The Greens will discuss NATO's bombing campaign at a special party conference on May 13th. Mr Roland Appel, the Green leader in the state of North Rhine Westphalia, believes that the environmentalist party could split over the issue.

He called on party members to abandon their opposition to air strikes against Serbia and to work towards preventing an escalation of the military conflict. "We've long been on the slippery slope to ground troops. We must prevent that no matter what," he said.

The Defence Minister, Mr Rudolf Scharping, repeated yesterday that there was no question of sending NATO ground forces to Kosovo and claimed the bombing campaign was proving effective.

The foreign policy spokesman of the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU) called for renewed efforts to find a political solution to the conflict and warned that any peace agreement would involve compromises on both sides. "I hesitate greatly to say it but we would have to think about a division of Kosovo," he said.