Pristina - Some 35,000 Kosovo citizens have fled their homes in the last two weeks, a UN refugee agency spokesman said yesterday, as Serbian security forces continued pounding the hard-pressed rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.
Meanwhile NATO has approved contingency plans for possible use of military force in the Kosovo crisis, but the Secretary General, Mr Javier Solana, has asked for their further refinement, the US State Department said. The disclosure by the department spokesman, Mr James Rubin, appeared designed to pressure President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to halt the offensive against ethnic Albanian rebels.
Mr Mans Nyberg, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said the refugee figure of 35,000 including those displaced internally and those who had fled to Montenegro or Albania. According to the government-run Serb Information Centre in Pristina, police units "neutralised this morning [Monday] a group of armed Albanian extremists in Smonica" north-west of the town of Djakovica. The EU and NATO both renewed calls for a ceasefire.