Washington - NATO and European troops will hold exercises in Albania the week after next and in Macedonia in September to warn President Slobodan Milosevic to end military action in Kosovo, the Pentagon said yesterday. "I don't think that he should doubt our ability to move forces in very quickly, whether they be air forces or ground forces," the Defence Department spokesman, Mr Ken Bacon, said.
The announcement came after the Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, told Mr Milosevic his offensive against ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo increased the threat of NATO military intervention. President Clinton and the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, also talked for 30 minutes by telephone yesterday about ways to halt the Serb offensive.
Meanwhile the Austrian daily newspaper Die Presse yesterday defended its reports of alleged mass graves in Kosovo in the face of protests from the Yugoslav authorities. Die Presse foreign editor, Mr Andreas Schwarz, said the reports of mass graves near the south-western town of Orahovac, which prompted an EU investigation, were reliable.
Die Presse on Wednesday published a story based on what it said were eyewitness accounts of more than 500 people, many of them children, being buried in mass graves near Orahovac.