Pressure grew yesterday on President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia to join Kosovo peace talks this weekend, after the province's separatist guerrillas and moderates named their negotiating teams.
On the eve of a Serbian parliamentary decision on talks participation Yugoslavia's Information Minister, Mr Milan Komnenic, said in Paris that Serbian authorities were likely to attend the peace talks.
"It's more a yes than a no," Mr Komnenic told the private French television station LCI. "This international conference could provide a real chance for peace in Kosovo."
The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), waging a guerrilla war against Serbian security forces for nearly a year, said it was sending a five-member delegation to the talks starting on Saturday at Rambouillet castle, outside Paris.
But it insisted it wanted to lead the entire Kosovo Albanian side, and expressed scepticism about the Contact Group's blueprint for greater autonomy for the secessionist Serbian province.
Mr Komnenic said he was in Paris to prepare for the conference sponsored by the so-called Contact Group on the Balkans - Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States.
The moderate Kosovo Albanian leader, Mr Ibrahim Rugova, whose authority is challenged by the KLA, also confirmed he would be going to France, along with four deputies from his Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK).
The US Defence Secretary, Mr William Cohen, said a "relatively small" number of US troops could be sent to Kosovo, and only to help NATO monitor a genuine peace accord. Under pressure from senators at an Armed Services Committee hearing on the US defence budget, Gen Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put the number somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 if NATO settled on an overall force of 20,000.
The bodies of 29 ethnic Albanian victims of a massacre in Kosovo were handed over to their families at a mosque in Stimlje, near Racak, where 45 people were killed last month, OSCE monitors said.