EU governments last night rejected a mass evacuation programme for Kosovan refugees and agreed to take care of as many as possible close to their homeland. To fly them to other countries would only reinforce their displacement and send the wrong signal to the Serb regime which ousted them, the governments said in a statement issued by EU justice ministers meeting in Luxembourg.
Mystery surrounds the fate of thousands of Kosovan refugees, with the UN refugee agency saying around 30,000 were unaccounted for along the Macedonian border with Serbia.
The United States told an increasingly desperate Macedonia that it had to adhere to international standards in dealing with ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing Kosovo. Yugoslavia yesterday closed the main crossings from Kosovo into Macedonia and Albania, halting the refugee flow.
Macedonia abruptly cleared about 40,000 refugees out of the notorious Blace no-man's-land some 30 km north of the capital, Skopje, into transit camps or onto buses to Albania.
Only piles of garbage and human excrement remained in a field stretching between Macedonia and Yugoslavia where refugees had subsisted in squalor.
At the meeting of EU justice ministers in Luxembourg, Britain and France successfully rejected calls from Germany, Sweden and Denmark for national "quotas" of Kosovan refugees to be taken in by EU member states.
The British Home Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, said that while Britain remained ready to take in several thousand people if necessary, the best policy was to tackle the problem on the ground in the countries neighbouring Kosovo. 991511486 NATO jets used cluster bombs against tanks and artillery in Kosovo yesterday, the second day of an intensified campaign in which a convoy of up to 20 vehicles was also said to have been hit.
The action, by jets from NATO's Gioia del Colle base in Italy, came amid indications that more aircraft may be deployed. The strategy, to target army and paramilitary units of the kind used to "ethnically cleanse" Kosovan villages, marks a departure for the Western alliance, with a direct correlation for the first time between bombing and the perpetrators of the actions which prompted NATO intervention.
Less than 24 hours after NATO had summarily rejected as a sham a unilateral ceasefire offer from President Slobodan Milosevic, a Cypriot and Greek initiative was on the verge of securing the release of three US soldiers captured on the Kosovo border last week.
The Greek government described the mission as a "peace bridge" and said that if the three GIs were released it would be a positive development that Athens hoped would question the need for the air attacks to continue.
As it moved to free the three soldiers in the wake of its Tuesday ceasefire announcement, Belgrade also closed the border with Albania and Macedonia, leaving thousands of refugees stranded in long queues attempting to escape.
Washington, meanwhile, confirmed that it was in almost daily contact with Russia about possible diplomatic solutions to the war.
Officially, NATO was sticking both to its military onslaught against Yugoslavia and to its undeflected war aims against Belgrade. "This is no time to pause," the US defence secretary, Mr William Cohen, said in Brussels. "We are moving into a much more aggressive air campaign."
The US kept up the pressure by naming nine Yugoslav military leaders operating in Kosovo who it said were committing war crimes.
State Department spokesman, Mr James Rubin, said the fact that they may have been under orders from President Milosevic, who has also been targeted by US officials for possible prosecution, would not leave them immune.
Further diplomatic feelers were put out at the first meeting of the six-nation Balkan Contact Group since NATO began air strikes, but failed to produce a breakthrough.
NATO air attacks were renewed last night. A Yugoslav army building was hit in central Belgrade, though damage was not severe. Bombardment continued early this morning. CNN reported that an unmanned US reconnaissance plane had gone down over Yugoslavia, but the NATO refused to confirm the report.
Mr Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, said for the first time since the conflict erupted on March 24th that he was prepared to act as a mediator when and if it was helpful.