British Secretary of State for Defense George Robertson, and the Chief of Defense Staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie briefed.

ROBERTSON: We are coming towards the end of the third week of the Kosovo air campaign, today will be the 20th day. So if President Milosevic assumed that NATO would drop a few bombs and just leave, he has now been proved conclusively wrong.

Today the North Atlantic Council of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation meets in Brussels. Alliance Foreign Ministers are united in their determination that Milosevic will not be allowed to profit from his brutal campaign of ethnic warfare, and I am sure their statement this afternoon will underline the message of the complete resolve and unity of the Alliance. NATO is backing that resolve with force and yesterday we announced the deployment of HMS Invincible and the United States announced the deployment of an additional 80 aircraft to increase the tempo of operations over Kosovo. Round the clock air patrols will mean that Milosevic's thugs will be under fire from NATO aircraft both day and night. These reinforcements will also send a message to Milosevic. The outcome of this campaign is not in doubt, it is only a question of how long it takes NATO to reverse Milosevic's ethnic cleansing. To those who ask how long it will be, I say this -- I don't know, for part of the answer lies in how long Milosevic is prepared to allow the people of Kosovo and Serbia to suffer. We never said that this operation would be quick, but I can assure you that it will be decisive.

The pressure on Milosevic is relentless and will not diminish. NATO has the will, the resources and the ability to continue this campaign for as long as it takes. If Milosevic had gambled on dividing the international community then he has lost. Yesterday, at this very briefing in the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Minister of Albania backed NATO's action and offered Albanian air space and ports to NATO forces. At the weekend Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations, called on Belgrade to end the campaign of intimidation and the expulsion of the civilian population of Kosovo, to cease military and paramilitary activity and to withdraw all of these forces. With the international community united and increasingly vocal, it is only a matter of time for Milosevic.

And while Milosevic is all too aware of these facts, the suffering Serb people are still being kept in the dark. The Serb people are being systematically misled by propaganda from the government-controlled media -- and just to illustrate the scale of the big lie, I have a few examples. On 29 March, General Smelganic, the Commander of the Serb Air Defences, claimed that over the previous 5 days Yugoslav Army units had shot down 7 NATO aircraft, 3 helicopters, 30 cruise missiles and 3 unmanned aircraft. Well as for the manned aircraft, I believe you counted them all out and you counted them all back in again; and the impact of the missiles you will have seen at briefings here and at NATO. I think everybody knows who is telling the truth and who isn't.

On 5 April, Milosevic's lie machine, the Serbian Ministry of Information website, reported that dozens of NATO soldiers had been killed in Kosovo and their bodies shipped to Thesilonika. On 7 April the reports had become 88 troops missing and 32 NATO aircraft destroyed, and the following day it was claimed that a complete German brigade had fled from their camp in Macedonia, crossing into Greece and were refusing to take part in the NATO campaign. Next came the claim that Norwegian pilots had refused to take part in attacks and had returned home, and on Saturday the reports were of 15,000 soldiers having deserted to Greece and Bulgaria. Well I suggest to you that you might have noticed if any of this fictitious activity had actually happened.

I am not going to bother to refute these claims because you can see yourselves how much relation they bear to reality. In our eyes they are simply crude propaganda, but to people living in Yugoslavia this may well be the only information that they have available to them, and when an Australian aid worker is paraded on television and proclaimed to be a spy after 10 days in detention and out of public sight, then they might take that at face value. In fact among other things he has been working mainly to help the Krajina Serbs who were expelled from Croatia in 1995. But perhaps the most chilling part of this campaign is the brutal murder of Slavko Curuvija, the owner of the Belgrade Dnevni Telegraf -- one of Milosevic's most outspoken critics. He was murdered by gunmen in his Belgrade apartment yesterday. That is the way that dictators deal with their critics.

And those other friends of dictatorship -- corruption and nepotism -- are also the cancer at the heart of Milosevic's empire. Serbian state enterprises control over half the economy and they are run simply as family fiefdoms. The directors employ family and friends, to whom they give company cars and flats, and they have numerous scams creaming off foreign currency into overseas bank accounts. They set up their own companies to provide supplies at inflated prices and the companies are set up for privatisation and sold to the directors at knock-down prices.

Just let me give you a few examples of the way in which the political leadership of this country makes its money. The Prime Minister of Serbia, Mirko Marjanovic, is the President of the Progress Company which is the main importer of natural gas. Nikola Sainovic, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is the President of the RTB Bor Copper Mine, a lucrative source of foreign currency. And the Speaker of the Parliament, Dragan Tomic, is a Director of NIS Jugopetrol, which has a near monopoly on Serbian petrol. The higher the position the greater the rewards, but at any sign of disloyalty, any sign of disloyalty, you are sacked and you lose everything. That is the way in which the Milosevic regime continues to ensure loyalty, but not even monumental corruption can ensure loyalty when Milosevic is driving towards the destruction of the Serbian state.

There are increasing signs that senior army commanders and political leaders in Serbia do not want to go down with the sinking Milosevic ship, and I expect that these splits will widen further as this campaign intensifies and continues. While this brutal and corrupt regime exploited its own people, the international community could not act, but the campaign of ethnic warfare unleashed in Kosovo left NATO no choice at all. Having embarked on the air campaign there is no pulling back. People must be able to return to their homes in Kosovo without fear of persecution by Serbian security forces. Milosevic knows the conditions which will bring an end to the air strikes, Kofi Annan spelt them out again in his statement on Friday. For the sake of all of the people of Yugoslavia, Milosevic should now comply.

GENERAL SIR CHARLES GUTHRIE: Yesterday weather in theatre was not particularly good. However, many of NATO's aircraft were able to successfully prosecute their attacks, particularly against Serbian Army and special police forces in Kosovo. The Royal Air Force's Harrier GR7s carried out attacks by both day and night. Not all the eight pilots were able to find suitable targets to attack and one formation didn't press home their attack on a column of vehicles because they were unable to identify in the poor weather conditions whether the convoy was military or refugees. However, other aircraft were able to identify and attack a column of military vehicles and a further attack was made against a Serbian surface to air missile battery. Last night Harriers attacked a petrol storage facility in Kosovo which as you know is one of our highest priorities. All of the aircraft returned safely to base.

Yesterday was significant because for the first time in this campaign the Royal Air Force engaged targets through cloud. We have been working extremely hard over the past few weeks to develop our techniques and to refine the accuracy of such attacks. We are now satisfied that the degree of target information and accuracy of such attacks allows us confidently to carry them out whilst minimising the risk of collateral damage. The targets for such attacks will, like all other attacks, be very carefully considered, taking into account all relevant information before the attack is mounted. As the campaign goes on, our detailed knowledge of his dispositions improves daily, allowing us to use these techniques with confidence in their accuracy and effectiveness.

The effect of each day's attacks is cumulative, steadily whittling away Milosevic's capabilities. I don't propose to go over the detail again this morning, but there is one point which I want to make. Despite the damage which we have done to his air defences, they remain a threat to our aircraft and their crews. NATO has only lost one aircraft and one unmanned drone, but we have to be aware that it could have been much worse. We are not complacent about the risks but they are inescapable as we continue to press home our attacks, and press them home we will. The addition of HMS Invincible will add another flexible element to the assets available to NATO, using the Harriers in either the air defence or ground attack role, and the additional American aircraft which have been announced will offer still more capability.

The question of NATO using ground forces continues to be raised and I wish to make it clear, absolutely clear, once again what our position is of today. Neither NATO nor the United Kingdom have any plans for an opposed invasion of Kosovo by force. The NATO force in Macedonia is there in order to be able to respond quickly and effectively to any negotiated settlement. However, this doesn't mean to say that over many months we haven't been considering and making contingency plans for the use of ground troops. It would have been irresponsible not to do so. We have considered many scenarios and our possible response to them, but we are not currently planning to implement any of these options. Milosevic must look at the forces already arrayed against him, and know that in military terms he cannot win; and by prolonging his defiance of the international community, he harms only the people of Yugoslavia.