Unofficial reports claim that NATO has said that it is ready to send ground forces into Kosovo to protect fleeing ethnic Albanians without a prior peace agreement. However, diplomats have said that the reports were unofficial and maintained no deployment had been agreed by ambassadors from the nineteen NATO countries.
The original statement said that the international force would be based on the model of the Stabilisation Force S-FOR in Bosnia. The unnamed spokesman added that this did not represent a change in their opposition to the use of ground troops, saying that the forces would not be used in combat.
President Clinton has said that the United States will stand with its NATO allies to see that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic pays "a very high price" for his actions in Kosovo. In his weekly radio address, Mr. Clinton accused the Yugoslav leader of forcing NATO into air-strikes because of atrocities in Kosovo against ethnic Albanians.
The British Prime Minister has bluntly warned the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that the NATO bombing will continue until Serbia is defeated. Tony Blair predicted that Belgrade would offer a peace initiative within days, but he said that the NATO military action won't stop until Belgrade fully complies with the terms the international community has set out.
Yugoslavia has condemned last night's NATO attacks, which destroyed two buildings in the centre of Belgrade. The Yugoslav government described the raid as a crime against Serbia. The Serbian Interior Minister described the attacks, by what he called the NATO neo-Nazis, as acts of monsters and criminals. Moscow said that the attacks were an act of barbarity.
NATO said that their targets were the headquarters of the Serb operations against Albanians in Kosovo. They said that eight cruise missiles hit two interior ministry buildings in the heart of Belgrade overnight and added other targets in and near Kosovo were also struck. The federal Yugoslav Interior Ministry and the Serb Interior Ministry were destroyed because "that is where decisions were taken and orders given," a NATO official added.
A military headquarters in Nis, a town in Southeast Serbia was struck along with ammunition dumps and "facilities" in the Kosovar capital, Pristina. The Serbian-state run television said that the missiles in Belgrade had exploded 30 metres from a maternity hospital.
The Pentagon said that seven missiles were launched from American ships and one was fired from the British submarine HMS Splendid in the Adriatic Sea. Yugoslav television showed live pictures of the two buildings engulfed in flames. It is the first time missiles have hit the centre of the Yugoslav capital since the NATO operation began ten days ago. A spokesman for the Serbian Central clinic said that there had been casualties, including a fireman.
