In Macedonia, there are an estimated 22,000 refugees and United Nations relief officials are holding emergency meetings to deal with crisis. In Montenegro, at least 28,000 refugees have flowed in from Pec, the Kosovo border city, which remains under siege and burning, according to the State Department. NATO and Administration officials heightened warnings today that war-crime investigations will be pressed all the way down the Serbian military command to line officers in the field. We know the chain of command back to the political leadership in Belgrade. Commodore Wilby said the Albanians remaining in Kosovo were despairing.
Paramilitaries enter towns and villages and terrify the people.
As the war misery of the Kosovars deepened, the White House denied the raids had only encouraged Milosevic to hasten the routing of ethnic Albanians. And we think by acting we will make him pay a price. Pentagon officials emphasized that an adequate troop operation could take weeks to mount, if it ever were decided upon, because the Serbs already have 40,000 troops in Kosovo backed by hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces. The reported atrocities cited by the State Department and NATO officials, who stressed on-site confirmation was not yet possible, included 20 village school teachers who were said to have been gunned down by Serbs in front of their students in Goden. NATO reported that Serbian gunmen had tracked down and executed at least five prominent ethnic Albanians, including Batan Haxhiu, the editor of the main ethnic Albanian newspaper, Koha Ditore, and Fehmi Agani, a member of the Kosovar Albanian peace negotiating team at Rambouillet, outside Paris.