NATO's military commanders were yesterday finalising plans for air strikes against Serbian targets, as politicians sought to convince President Slobodan Milosevic that this time the west would act in the wake of the massacres of civilians in Kosovo.
At least 11 NATO member-states have pledged aircraft in the event of a decision to attack Serb targets in Kosovo, most likely airfields and artillery positions easy to detect. The US Sixth Fleet with five warships and three attack submarines is also available, equipped with cruise missiles.
Britain has four Harriers, capable of firing laser-guided bombs, at the Gioia del Colle air base on Italy's eastern coast, and a further four are on standby in Britain and Germany.
British sources indicated there could be widespread attacks on the Serb air defence system, not as NATO's primary objective, but to safeguard planes hitting military and security targets in Kosovo. The British Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, said NATO was looking at Serb military forces, "and that may not stop in Kosovo".
The NATO Secretary-General, Mr Javier Solana, speaking from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, said: "NATO is prepared to act, it has a plan and it has the means assembled to do it, so from a technical point of view NATO is prepared to act if the international community and the situation on the ground is such that action is needed."
But the NATO allies were still arguing about the political as well as military objectives of air strikes and also over the legal basis for such action. Diplomats made plain yesterday that the strategy still was to try to persuade Mr Milosevic to withdraw his forces without the need for military action.
"The strategy is to avoid the use of force, if we can, by exerting the maximum political and diplomatic pressure," said a diplomat at NATO headquarters in Brussels. "Nothing leads us to believe that President Milosevic will not back down when he sees the west is deadly serious about action."
Although detailed plans for initial air strikes are well under way, there is no clear strategy about what NATO would do next if these fail to persuade the Serbian President to back down.
NATO is discussing a second phase of sustained air attacks and the possibility of sending in ground troops in the event of a ceasefire leading to a peace agreement, but such plans for an extended military campaign are far from complete.
Independent observers yesterday questioned the wisdom even of an initial air strike. "The moment you start dropping bombs, you are embarked on the road to Kosovo independence, legally or de facto", Dr Jonathan Eyal, of the Royal United Institute of Defence Studies, said yesterday.
"There seems to be a patent mismatch between the means and the objectives", said a senior serving military officer who commanded NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia. "It's not at all clear how you could use air power to force a sovereign state to grant one of its provinces autonomy, especially when people there are fighting for independence, not autonomy," he said.
Dr Terence Taylor, assistant director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, said air strikes would have to be accompanied by a land campaign to be effective. Other commentators pointed out that the Serbs were stopped in Bosnia by air strikes followed by the presence of ground troops.
Dr Eyal said any deployment of ground forces would be a "logistical nightmare". Tensions between pro-Serb Greece and Turkey present a further problem for the alliance, though the overriding concern is with Russia, always unhappy with unilateral action by NATO, and especially now under the new Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov.
Reuters reports from Geneva:
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, yesterday called for an independent inquiry into the massacres of 30 civilians in central Kosovo last weekend, allegedly carried out by Serb forces.
Mrs Robinson said in a statement from the UN office in Geneva that the independent inquiry should include international forensic specialists and look into "violent deaths resulting from armed actions and into reported massacres".
She said that she had discussed a "strong UN presence" in Kosovo with the Yugoslav Foreign Minister, Mr Zivadin Jovanovic, in New York a week ago.