US President Bill Clinton has said he is "encouraged" by reports of a withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo but said air strikes against Yugoslavia would continue. He said NATO's bombing campaign would go on until Yugoslavia had met all allied demands for a peace agreement on Kosovo.
Asked whether news of a Serb withdrawal was positive, the president said: "Well, I'm encouraged by any good word, but I think that the conditions that we set out are the minimal ones to make this work." These include the return to their homes of hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees driven out by the Serbs.
President Clinton said the Kosovars would be unlikely to do so in response to a partial withdrawal of Belgrade's forces. "I don't think that after all the Serbs' build-up and the hundreds of thousands of Kosovars driven out, many, many killed, I don't think they'll come back with that. So I think we have to do better." "But any little daylight, any little progress, it's better than it was the day before."
The US State Department also insisted NATO would continue its nonstop campaign of air strikes. "We will continue the air campaign seven days a week, 24 hours a day from 360 degrees until such time as he (Milosevic) has agreed to the conditions, developed a rapid and precise timetable and begun a demonstrative, demonstrable and verifiable withdrawal," State Department spokesman James Rubin said this evening.
Rubin said that Milosevic must comply with five key NATO demands before air strikes would be suspended."NATO's conditions have been very clear," he said. Among them, he said, "there has to be a removal of all the Serb paramilitary, military and police forces that are responsible for the terrible atrocities and the campaign of ethnic cleansing that we described in such vivid detail to you today."He said if NATO's conditions were met "then and only then would we be prepared to suspend the air campaign," reserving the right to resume it again.
Yugoslavia has accused NATO of genocide at the start of a case being brought by Belgrade at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Yugoslavia is accusing 10 countries, including Britain and the United States, of bombing its territory in breach of their international obligations not to use force against another state. Both the United States and Britain are expected to argue that the court has no power to decide the issues.
