Briefing by the Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, the Foreign Office Minister, Mr. Tony Lloyd, and the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Peter Abbott

Excerpts:

Robin Cook: I want to focus on one topical set of those atrocities, and that is the repeated report by refugees that they or their neighbours were used as human shields by the Serb forces. I can tell you that we have now gathered 80 separate reports from refugees in Macedonia of the use of human shields by the Serb forces within Kosovo. They include for instance at Klena the use of 500 Kosovo men as human shields during fighting with the Kosovo Liberation Army. One refugee described how he was forced to lie naked in a field in front of the Serb artillery whilst they shelled the Kosovar positions. Another case comes from Orahovic where 700 men were forced to stand with their hands tied in front of tanks for two days. The refugees who brought that story only escaped by paying and bribing their guards in deutschmarks.

It is against that background that we should judge the crocodile tears that President Milosevic wept over those who died at Korisa. That was a human tragedy, but the responsibility for that human tragedy rests with the Serb forces who rounded up those refugees from the hillsides, forced them back to Korisa, and in particular forced those 100 refugees not to return to their homes, but to settle squeezed together in those two compounds. The Serb forces were the ones that those people were hiding from in the hills, the Serb forces were the people who rounded up those refugees and brought them back into those compounds near to the command post. It is the Serb forces that bear responsibility for the deaths and the atrocities that are occurring daily in Kosovo. And the Kosovar refugees themselves know the reality of what is happening in Kosovo, that is why the Kosovar Albanians are determined that we should continue with our air campaign and why we are also strong in our resolve to make sure that we continue it for as long as is necessary to enable us to secure our key objective that those refugees should go back under the protection of an international military force with NATO at its core.