The British government yesterday accused two indicted war criminals from the Bosnian conflict of commanding active paramilitary units in Kosovo engaged in the repression of ethnic Albanians.
The Defence Secretary, Mr George Robertson, said the former commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Gen Ratko Mladic, and the paramilitary leader known as Arkan were recruited by the Yugoslav leadership in Belgrade to lead paramilitary units in Serbia.
Arkan, who has been indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for the massacre of 250 men taken from a hospital in Bosnia in 1991, is believed to be leading the recruitment of prisoners in Serbia.
Gen Mladic is accused of involvement in the murder of up to 10,000 men in the Bosnian enclaves of Srebrenica during the Bosnian conflict. Mr Robertson said the former commander was now believed to be leading a separate detachment of Yugoslav forces in Serbia.
The International Development Secretary, Ms Clare Short, disclosed that a judge from the war crimes tribunal will be arriving in the Balkans within days to begin gathering evidence into the claims of the mass rape of ethnic Albanian women herded into a camp in Kosovo by Serb forces. Mass rape was now recognised as a war crime. She said that at one location in south-west Kosovo, close to the Albanian border, it was alleged that women were being raped in front of their husbands and children in an organised campaign of repression.
Earlier, as the government gave a lukewarm response to Germany's proposal that NATO air strikes could be permanently suspended if Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic pulled his forces out of Kosovo - describing it as a "route map" to an eventual peace settlement - the Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, gave the strongest indication yet that ground forces would enter Kosovo to enforce a peace settlement.
Giving evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, Mr Cook said there were many circumstances in which an international protection force could be deployed in Kosovo without President Milosevic's agreement, "but with no resistance on the ground".
Before the ground protection force could enter Kosovo there would need to be evidence that Serb forces were at least in the process of a withdrawal.
During a heated exchange with the Conservative MP, Sir John Stanley, and the Labour MP, Ms Diane Abbott, Mr Cook denied NATO air strikes had triggered President Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleansing: "It was beyond imagination to conceive of that kind of enforced mass deportation by rail," he said. "We haven't seen that in Europe since the days of Stalin and Hitler."