But President Yeltsin has argued that the accord enables Moscow to blunt the NATO threat, making the best of a bad situation.

Previous NATO threats have been jokes, and quickly seen as such by the Serbs.

Some teachers acknowledged that the government had brought on the NATO threats because it was the only way to stop government attacks on ethnic Albanian civilians.

"I think if they want to stop the violence, they should do that," he said of the NATO threat of strikes.

This military push has shown United Nations resolutions and NATO threats to be largely empty.

Bosnia's top diplomat expressed little confidence in the renewed NATO threat to use air power against the Bosnian Serbs.

The purpose of the NATO threat was to avert a humanitarian disaster among the Albanian civilian population in Kosovo.

So the NATO threat is indispensable.

Of course the background of the NATO military threat has been absolutely essential, as we in the Socialist Group have always insisted.

In the past, NATO threats, on enforcing such things as weapons-exclusion and no-flight zones, have proved empty.