BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- NATO airstrikes remain very much an option even after Yugoslavia reversed an expulsion order against the U.S. head of Kosovo's international monitors, a senior diplomat said today.
Knut Vollebaek, the head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Yugoslavia's leadership has to realize that the West is serious when it says the Oct. 12 cease-fire in Kosovo must be adhered to."The NATO activation order is still there to threaten, and I think President (Slobodan) Milosevic understands that very well," the Norwegian diplomat said before leaving for Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital.
Faced with a threat of new NATO military action, the Yugoslav government today reversed its decision to expel William Walker, a U.S. diplomat who heads the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission, which is overseeing the tenuous cease-fire.
Walker had been ordered out of Yugoslavia on Thursday after he accused Serb police of murdering 45 ethnic Albanians last week in the Kosovo village of Racak.
But the Yugoslav government froze the expulsion order today, backing down after Secretary of State Madeleine Albright threatened to withdraw the entire 750-member mission if Walker were forced to leave.
Such a withdrawal would signal the collapse of the October peace agreement and would remove an impediment to NATO airstrikes.
Vollebaek also spoke of "some movement" in getting Yugoslavia to allow the U.N. war crimes tribunal to investigate the Jan. 15 massacre in Racak.
A report by the verifiers, obtained today, concluded that it was directed at civilians and appeared to be the Serbian forces' response to deadly rebel attacks on police.
The OSCE report, compiled Sunday but not made public, said facts verified by Kosovo monitors include "evidence of arbitrary detentions, extra-judicial killings and the mutilation of unarmed civilians by the security forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia."
It said the Yugoslav army had begun a buildup in the area after a "well-prepared ambush" by the Kosovo Liberation Army Jan. 8 that killed three police.
Verifiers saw one dead civilian and heard unconfirmed reports of mass detentions in Racak late on Jan. 15 but had to leave for safety reasons because of approaching darkness. They returned the next day to find 45 bodies, "several of them mutilated" and none wearing military uniforms.
Survivors told them, they said, that Serb security forces wearing police uniforms or black uniforms and ski masks had "executed some residents and detained others." They said they recognized some of the assailants as Serb police or Serb civilians from nearby Stimlje, dressed in police uniforms.
Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova called the killings a "crime against humanity," telling reporters today that 13,000 villagers had been displaced by fighting in Kosovo in the past week.
Serb sources, meanwhile, said today that five Serb civilians in Nevoljani, 18 miles northwest of Pristina, were kidnapped overnight by KLA rebels. There were no immediate details.
Albright also said she is lining up U.S. allies to push a series of demands on Milosevic to end "new and unacceptable violence in Kosovo."
If he keeps rejecting the demands, she said Thursday, the Serbian leader runs the risk of a NATO bombardment. "Force is the only language he appears to understand," Albright said.