The withdrawal of Serbian troops from Kosovo promised by Mr Slobodan Milosevic on Monday has not taken place, the NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, said in Brussels yesterday. "All we have is a promise and what we see is ethnic cleansing," he said.
Serbian troops and special police continued to engage in fierce fighting with the Kosovo Liberation Army throughout the last 24 hours, he added, and a new wave of 6,000 people arrived at the Albanian border, having been driven from their homes.
NATO, which with better weather sent out 600 sorties on Monday, observed the Yugoslav army and the special police forces carrying out "offensive and security operations" throughout Kosovo, Mr Shea claimed. In northern Kosovo there was fighting on the route from Pristina to Podujevo and also between Pristina and Mitrovica.
There was heavy fighting around the Kosari pocket, a mountainous area where many displaced people have found refuge, which is currently in the hands of the KLA. And in central Kosovo, special police or MUP units were in action against the KLA around Urosevac. There were other skirmishes elsewhere.
"Rather than withdrawing their forces," Mr Shea said, "the Serbian forces seem to be trying harder than ever to capture the remaining KLA strongholds. There are about 10,000-15,000 volunteers in the KLA and they are taking very heavy losses, but their morale is good and they have been able to provide safe havens for some of the people displaced into the mountains."
All of the allies agree that Operation Allied Force goes ahead until there is agreement to the five conditions laid out by NATO. Mr Shea said: "We are not going to allow 10,000 to go home for rest and recreation while the other 30,000 get on with business as usual." Gen Walter Jertz said the attacks on the fielded forces were critical to prevent further ethnic cleansing. One attack on Monday had destroyed a major tunnel complex near Pristina that provided a hiding place for many of the forces engaged in the reign of terror. Joe Carroll adds from Washington:
As the US continues to reject Mr Milosevic's proposal of a partial withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo as insufficient, it is continuing to work for a diplomatic solution. The Deputy Secretary of State, Mr Strobe Talbott, has flown to Moscow for further talks with the Russian special envoy for the Balkans, Mr Viktor Chernomyrdin.
Meanwhile, President Clinton was yesterday still trying to reach President Jiang Zemin by telephone to apologise to him personally for the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Mr Clinton has apologised by letter and on television but so far Mr Jiang has been refusing to take a call from the US President.
In a hard-hitting article in the New York Times yesterday, Britain's former ambassador to the United Nations, Mr John Weston, said that the bombing of the embassy was "an act of major and culpable incompetence".
"This incident and other misaimed bombings are symptomatic of underlying malaise in the NATO campaign," Mr Weston writes. "Only a faulty calculus could have concluded that the Kosovars would be made safe without a forceful military presence on the ground."