The US President, Bill Clinton, has appealed to Kosovar Albanians not to take revenge on Serbs. Mr. Clinton was speaking at the Stankovec refugee camp in Macedonia, which is just a few miles from the border with Kosovo. He also asked the 10,000 remaining refugees not to rush back to the province before land mines had been dealt with. The US President was given a huge welcome as he arrived at the camp. Mr. Clinton had earlier met the presidents of Macedonia and Albania; he pledged more aid to Macedonia, which suffered greatly from the disruption of trade with Yugoslavia.
It has been confirmed that the two British soldiers who died in an explosion yesterday were killed as they tried to move unexploded NATO bombs. British military commanders in Kosovo said they died after moving cluster bombs away from a school at the request of people in a village 30 kilometres west of the capital Pristina. The two soliders, part of the elite Gurkhas, were the first casualties of the Kosovo peacekeeping operation. Two local civilians also died in the explosion, while a third was injured.
The Supreme Commander of NATO, General Wesley Clark, has urged a speed-up of the deployment of Alliance troops in Kosovo and said the mission might need more soldiers than first planned. Over the past 12 days, NATO has deployed just over 17,000 troops in Kosovo out of a total of 55,000 due to be deployed.
The commander of the KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo, Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Jackson has said increasing numbers of Serbs are returning to Kosovo after fleeing when Serb forces pulled out of the province. NATO and UN officials, anxious to stem the flow of ethnic Albanian refugees risking a return home under their own steam, have unveiled plans for organised repatriations in the next week or so.
A previously unknown group has admitted planting a bomb under two NATO vehicles in the Macedonian capital, Skopje last week. The group, calling itself "Macedconia Dawn", warned of similar action during President Clinton's visit. Last Friday's bomb attack caused no injuries but destroyed a five-tonne truck and a four-wheel-drive vehicle in a parking lot in Skopje.
