``I think the US administration realised they are going to have a difficult time getting the American people to support this operation,'' said Gary Dempsey, a Balkans specialist with the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington foreign policy think tank. ``And I think they are willing to use the most inflammatory terms. That suggests a weakness in their policy,'' Dempsey said. ``There is a veryfertile environment for propaganda here. Terms like `genocide' really evoke a very strong response among people.''

Dempsey and other experts stressed they could not rule out the possibility that Serb forces were committing genocidal acts in Kosovo, but questioned the accuracy of the term given the absence of direct, independent reporting from inside Kosovo.

The word `genocide' was first suggested by the US in a briefing as a way of describing Serb actions against Kosovar Albanians, when a State Department spokesman said: ``There are indicators that genocide is unfolding in Kosovo.''

Respected human rights groups closely monitoring the situation in the embattled province stressed that those reports came neither from them nor from independent journalists, whose ability to report first hand has been severely restricted by Belgrade.

``"We have not called this genocide,'' said Fred Abrahams, Kosovo researcher for US-based Human Rights Watch. ``Everyone has talked about it, but no one has witnessed it,''Abrahams said. ``I don't want to say it's not happening, but we are doubly careful to put out there only what we have confirmed.'' Other groups involved with monitoring human rights abuses, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Amnesty International, have published accounts of specific killings in Kosovo but have so far steered clear of `genocide' and similar terms. Pressed on his language a day later, the State Department spokesman, James Rubin, told reporters: ``Whether or not the formal definition of genocide has been met, there are indicators that genocide is occurring.'' In his answer, experts say, lies an insight: while steering clear of a ``formal definition'' that could lock NATO into introducing ground troops into combat in Kosovo, the alliance is trying to mount public support for this possibility should it be judged necessary later.