Defence Secretary George Robertson and the Chief of the Defense Staff General Sir Charles Guthrie briefed in London.

Excerpts:

ROBERTSON: Good Morning, Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sorry for the slight delay to the start of this press briefing.

At the beginning of this campaign we told you about what was happening in Kosovo and I showed you this picture of Izbica, shown here, of reported mass graves in one village in one part of Kosovo - Izbica. And there may have been some scepticism on the day among the people who were here, people who thought that it was some cheap trick, trying to exaggerate what was happening in a Kosovo village. Well now however, at the weekend, last weekend, you and others will have seen the heart-rending pictures on television which show what is really happening in so many Kosovo villages. On our TV screens from a video smuggled out of Kosovo, we saw the villagers of that self same village of Izbica, digging their own mass graves to bury the piled-high bodies of their neighbours who had been savagely murdered by the marauding Serb uniformed thugs.

These vivid and unforgettable images, bolstered as they are by moving and convincing eye-witness accounts of the refugees, show the stark mind-wrenching reality of the human tragedy going on inside Kosovo. And there is now a catalogue of atrocities and appalling incidents which run through the last 8 weeks and which mirror the events of the previous year.

The map on the wall behind me tells only one part of that story because we have included only some of the incidents where the reports are at the moment the most convincing. On 28 March, 7 villages on the road outside of Pec were torched. On 3 April, some 6,000 people were driven from their homes in central Glogovac and their houses were then burned. On 15 April the town of Bajgore was attacked by Serb forces using rockets and artillery. The following day 125 graves were identified near Klina. And on 26 April, 3,000 refugees were packed on to trains and buses and shipped to the Macedonian border.

There are still some misguided people around who still suggest that the Serb security forces were simply fighting the KLA and that the refugees are the result of NATO bombing. Mrs Milosevic, Mira Milosevic, has appeared on television in America and said as much. Well I have been to the camps in Albania and I have spoken to some of those refugees and they tell a very different story. Just ask the Prime Minister or Hillary Clinton, who recently visited these camps, or the hundreds of journalists, some of you included, and the aid workers as well, who have been to these camps and spoken to those refugees. Nobody has come back from these border camps, overflowing with humanity from all classes and walks of life, without having shed some silent tears for the people they met and the stories which they have heard. And I wish I could convey the horror of these stories, of a weeping grandmother who told how all the men in her family were taken away and shot; of the young women who had to force themselves to tell stories of degradation and systematic rape; of the men who lay under the bodies of families and friends mown down in mass killings; or of the children shot by Serbs simply because they are Albanians.

The Prime Minister has been in touch this morning after his visit to the camps in northern Albania. And he says that from every refugee he met comes a single strong message: NATO is our only hope, NATO must keep up the pressure, and only when it is safe and with NATO reassurance will they, the evicted people of Kosovo, be able to return home.

When NATO started its campaign there were those who did not believe what we said about atrocities, and now some people say the pictures of refugees on television cause so-called refugee fatigue. I have to say that I can't even contemplate that kind of fatigue, and not just because I have seen some of those hundreds of thousands of people now living in tents in a foreign country, it is because I know beyond any doubt in the world that what NATO is doing is right, right for the refugees, right for humanity and absolutely right for international law and order.

It is proving of course a long road to force Milosevic to reverse his evil policies. We knew that it might be, although we hoped that for the sake of the refugees that for once Milosevic would be moved by decency, common humanity or even Serbian self-interest. He knows he can't win and what he is doing is deeply wrong, and yet he persists in inflicting suffering on the Kosovars simply to keep himself in power, and he hopes that if he hides his own mis-deeds from the eyes of the cameras, while shedding crocodile tears for people killed by NATO, that he will win over public sympathy in the west, that if he holds out long enough then the Alliance will split and that the voters in our democratic countries will cry "enough".

But yesterday it was a crack that appeared in the facade of the Yugoslav regime. It has been reported on Montenegrin Television that over 5,000 people, mainly women and children, gathered in Krusevac, in central Serbia itself, to demand the return of soldiers from Kosovo. And the main slogan of the demonstrators was: "We want sons, not coffins". These are the ordinary people of Serbia who know of the futility of sending their sons to Kosovo to face the onslaught of NATO and possibly to die for a cause which they find repugnant.

So let us hope that Milosevic heeds the people that he is supposed to represent and ends his vile campaign of ethnic cleansing without causing any further lives to be lost. Because each day we will attack his troops relentlessly, we will destroy their equipment and their support infrastructure. There will be no let-up until we have achieved what we have said we would do because to do so would be to fail the refugees, and we are all determined that that will not happen. We will see the refugees return to their homes. I don't know when that will be, but however long it takes, NATO will be there for them.