Facing the prospect of genocide in Kosovo, and unwilling to commit ground troops to stop it, NATO yesterday fell back on threatening Serb commanders with the long arm of the law - war crimes.
With reports of mass killings, looting and deportations coming out of the province, the alliance says the commanders of the police and army units will be held personally responsible.
"Trying to recreate a new apartheid in western Europe based on the cleansing, the forceful removal and execution of people of the wrong ethnic identity - that practice belongs to the Middle Ages, it does not belong to modern Europe," said Mr Robin Cook.
The British Foreign Secretary added that Serbs guilty of war crimes will be investigated in the same way that Bosnia's Serbs were dealt with by the UN war crimes tribunal investigating the ethnic cleansing of that war.
To ram home the point, he staged a press conference yesterday complete with flip charts showing the likely suspects - Yugoslavia's interior minister, defence minister, commander in chief, and of course President Slobodan Milosevic.
Hoping that those lower down the chain of command will grasp the message, NATO officials said the prosecution net would be spread wide.
The alliance has a good record here: More than a dozen Bosnian war crimes suspects have been arrested in sweeps by NATO commandos in the past two years, including, most recently, a serving Bosnian Serb general apprehended by US troops earlier this year.
Approximately half of 78 men - all the suspects are male - indicted for Bosnian crimes are now in custody, in jail, or dead.
The UN war crimes tribunal, in The Hague, is still feeling its way in what is a relatively new science - the idea that individuals, even under orders of their government, can be tried by a "World Court" for human rights violations.
Key to the success of these prosecutions for war crimes, in Rwanda as well as Bosnia, is to jail not just the soldiers who commit them - but the commanders who order them.
A suspect need not pull the trigger, nor even order the pulling of the trigger. The fall-back position for prosecutors is to accuse commanders of knowing that their men committed atrocities, and doing nothing about it.
"The job of a commander is to direct his forces and to control them," said Britain's chief of defence staff, Sir Charles Gutherie. "Whatever atrocity is committed under their command and in their name."
This sealed the fate of many German generals at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after the second World War, who found they had no defence in declaring they were "following orders."
To date The Hague's record is patchy. Several suspects have been jailed, more await trials and more are being arrested at regular intervals by NATO troops. Yet there are also embarrassing failures: Bosnia's two most wanted men, the former Bosnian Serb president, Dr Radovan Karadzic, and Gen Ratko Mladic remain at large, despite NATO's efforts to track them down. And many of those indicted have been let free, with prosecutors unable to make charges stick when several Bosnian Croats went on trial.
In-fighting has also broken out among alliance members, with Britain and the US angry about the number of Serb indicted men living in comfort in Foca, a town in the French-controlled zone of Bosnia.
The Hague has also been accused of politicising the prosecution process: Ensuring the principle that justice must be seen to be done, it has failed to explain why the most notorious of all Serb paramilitary commanders, Mr Zeljko Raznatovic, known as "Arkan", remains free of indictment despite thousands of pages of testimony from Muslims his forces ethnically cleansed.
Some think the reason is that he is too close to Milosevic, who has also escaped indictment until now because he was the Serb guarantor of Bosnia's 1995 peace agreement.
For more than a year after that agreement, NATO refused increasingly angry requests from The Hague to arrest war criminals. Only when it became expedient to so so - it wanted Karadzic to relinquish control of Serb territory - did it begin hunting for him.
And there was concern among Hague staff about the possibility that Chile's former president, Gen Augusto Pinochet, would escape extradition from Britain to Spain because as a leader, even one who seized power, he was immune from prosecution. Such a precedent would probably given Milosevic a free hand in Kosovo.
A spokesman for The Hague, Mr Christian Chartier, was characteristically tight-lipped about the tribunal's work on Kosovo: "We said in March 1998 that we would be looking into it and I don't think we have any reason to change our minds." Last year Yugoslavia humiliated The Hague's chief prosecutor, Ms Louise Arbour, by refusing to allow her into the country when she arrived by road at a border post. Investigations are, however, underway. A team of Finnish pathologists had forwarded its findings into the killing of 45 ethnic Albanians at Rakac to The Hague.
The US has reportedly sent signals which prove the Rakac attack was ordered by senior Yugoslav officials. And last year EU officials escorted the terrified Albanian survivor of another mass killing to Macedonia to give his testimony.
But already it seems clear that the chief objective of The Hague has failed. New killings and butchery are taking place in Kosovo, with no sign that the Serbs are deterred by the fate of other Serbs who perpetuated ethnic cleansing earlier this decade in Bosnia.