Yugoslav soldiers have thrown a ring of steel around Montenegro, setting up checkpoints at all the main border crossings of this small republic, officials said yesterday.
Some people were being allowed into the country, but only if they had valid visas for Serbia. Local men of a fighting age can leave Montenegro only if they get special dispensation from the army.
"It is getting worse. They want to throttle us. They have effectively taken over control of our borders," said an official at the Information Ministry, declining to be named.
The ministry has advised Westerners against entering Montenegro for the "next couple of days", saying new arrivals might exacerbate an already tense situation.
Government officials also reported the army had positioned tanks and heavy artillery around the ancient capital, Cetinje, heartland of Montenegro's burgeoning independence movement.
"They say they want to defend us from NATO, but it is clear with what they are doing in Cetinje that this is not true," an official said, again declining to be named. Around 600 reservists were sent to the sleepy hill town at the start of the week.
Montenegro is Serbia's last surviving partner in the Yugoslav federation. But it has refused to recognise Belgrade's declaration of a state of war during the Kosovo crisis. Government ministers have accused President Slobodan Milosevic of plotting to use his military to seize power in Montenegro.
The army, which takes its orders from Belgrade, has regularly snarled Montenegro's many frontier crossings over the past eight weeks, but the latest operations amounted to a systematic seizure of all border controls.
Soldiers on Wednesday dug in heavy machinegun positions close to Montenegro's sole crossing into Croatia and took humanitarian aid from the Italian charity Beati i Costruttori di Pace. Two truckloads of French medical and food aid were confiscated at the weekend.
The army also barred access to 12 trucks bringing raw materials for Montenegro's large aluminium plant. The sudden upsurge in army activity has forced the government to delay plans to bring in some 3,200 tonnes of much-needed flour.
Two Kosovo Albanian refugees are among three persons injured when a bomb exploded near the Jaja-Pasha mosque in Skopje, capital of Macedonia, police said. The two, one aged 18 and the other 15, were hospitalised and were in "very critical condition" after the blast on Wednesday afternoon, according to the sources quoted by Macedonian independent television A1.