Serbian forces could be risking NATO air strikes in their offensive against separatist guerrillas in Kosovo in order to achieve a partition of the province, analysts suggested yesterday.
"These vows by Yugoslav army generals to destroy the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] root and branch in a week ring a little hollow," said an analyst for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), who asked not to be identified.
"The KLA will melt away to fight again. One plausible scenario is that [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic wants to establish a de facto line for the partition of Kosovo by cleansing the north and the west of ethnic Albanians.
"By Western standards it would be repugnant. It would be audacious.
"But if you try to think about Kosovo from the Serb perspective, it might make sense. The question is, could he do it militarily and would the West let him get away with it."
Mr Milosevic has been slowly building up his army and police forces in and around Kosovo for months in what most observers described as the obvious prelude to an offensive.
Both Belgrade and the West were inclined to restraint so long as peace talks about an autonomy plan for the southern Serbian province were under way, but those talks collapsed on Friday. The 1,350 international monitors of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission withdrew on Saturday due to possible air strikes, removing the last restraint on Serbian forces.
Building on attacks against the Podujevo region that started in December, and on recent weeks of offensive action against ethnic Albanian areas east of Vucitrn, Belgrade on Saturday launched a concerted assault against the Drenica area, a KLA stronghold.
The KLA, outgunned and outmanoeuvred by Yugoslav armour, has taken a pounding and tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians have been stampeded from their homes.
Despite this, it would take months for the Serbs to drive out Kosovo's two million ethnic Albanians, and the West could hardly stand by and watch this happen.
But analysts say a quick examination of the Kosovo map indicates that current offensive actions in the Podujevo-VucitrnDrenica area could be aimed at laying the groundwork for a division of the province.
Most of Kosovo's wealth - its mines, electricity generating plants and the railways and roads that serve them - are in a corridor leading north from Pristina, between the towns of Podujevo and Mitrovica.
Partition, analysts say, would give the Serbs everything west of the Pec-Djakovica road up to and including Decani.
Everything north of the PecPristina road, the land in an arc running from Pristina through Vucitrn, Mitrovica and Podujevo and the highway running from Pristina through Podujevo to Nis, would go to the Serbs as well, in theory.
All Belgrade would need to do to achieve the territorial division is to drive virtually all ethnic Albanians from this swathe of territory and deploy its substantial military forces along the de facto partition line to prevent them returning.
If partition is Mr Milosevic's goal, he might, after taking control of the north and west, tell the ethnic Albanians who have been fighting for independence that they can have it on the rump of land remaining, analysts suggest.
He might even invite them to form a greater Albania with neighbouring Albania and ethnic Albanians in Macedonia, a scenario the West fears greatly because of its potential to destabilise the entire Balkan peninsula.
Mr Milosevic might then relish the West's predicament, having divorced himself from the Kosovo quagmire and retained the economic and cultural assets that matter most to his people.
And he might calculate that NATO would never go to war to capture and re-populate such "cleansed" territory.
NATO had 60,000 troops in Bosnia after the war there and was still never willing to run the risks associated with getting refugees back to their homes across ethnic borders.
But what if NATO is prepared to go to war this time, if only to save face?
That must have been the hard calculation taxing Mr Milosevic as he prepared to meet the US special envoy, Mr Richard Holbrooke, in another of their now notorious "last chance for peace sessions" as NATO jets warm up on runways across Europe.