NATO is to begin assembling a force of 8,000 soldiers in Albania next week, leaving the alliance increasingly well placed to use ground troops to back up its air offensive on Yugoslavia should it so choose to do so.
NATO foreign ministers will hold an "exceptional" meeting in Brussels next Monday morning to discuss the Kosovo operation, the NATO spokesman Mr Jamie Shea announced yesterday.
The alliance also rejected reports that it had inflicted massive damage on the Kosovan capital, Pristina, saying these reports had been orchestrated by the Serbs, whose own military had caused the damage.
Mr Shea said that the 8,000 ground troops going to Albania were "strictly in conjunction with the humanitarian relief effort". The first of the troops in Operation Allied Harbour would be deployed by the end of next week, he said. The troops, from 14 NATO member-states, would establish a "mobile force land headquarters".
NATO is also to send 24 US Apache anti-tank helicopters and 2,000 troops to Albania in a separate operation. While NATO has not changed its stated position that ground troops will not be used, these deployments have increased speculation that that option could yet be chosen.
Asked whether NATO troops could enter Kosovo without a formal agreement from President Slobodan Milosevic, Mr Shea said they wanted to move in "as soon as possible". But that would be when the violence was stopped, the Serb forces had withdrawn, and guarantees of protection were provided to the refugees.
All this had to be done in the context of a "political framework . . . It's up to NATO governments to decide on the exact timing of that", he said.
NATO planes continued their aerial bombardment of targets in Serbia yesterday. With weather conditions improving, the NATO military spokesman Air Commodore David Wilby said yesterday afternoon that planes had carried out nearly 400 sorties in the previous 24 hours, including an attack on a military convoy on a road in Kosovo.
He denied that NATO had caused widespread, random damage to the Kosovo capital with its bombing raids.
Laying the blame squarely on Serbian forces he said the alliance's warplanes had attacked military targets around Pristina and one "very carefully targeted" special police headquarters within the city.
"NATO has certainly not caused the reported widespread and random damage, which we believe has been orchestrated by Serbian forces," Commodore Wilby told a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels. "I am sure that closer forensic investigation will reveal the truth."
Despite the declaration by the Yugoslav president of a ceasefire, Serbian forces were still involved in fighting the Kosovo Liberation Army, he said. There was evidence that mopping up operations were still being carried out in isolated areas by the Serbs, and also signs that the Kosovan Liberation Army had mounted some counter-attacks.
In a broadening of NATO's list of "legitimate targets", Commodore Wilby said that Serb television and radio stations would be attacked unless they offered six hours a day to western news broadcasts. He condemned Belgrade TV as "an instrument of propaganda and repression" which had "filled the air with lies" for years.
It was therefore a "legitimate target" for NATO, but if it offered to broadcast western news for two periods of three hours a day, it would be spared.