Blair calls on nation to get behind battle against evil.

PREMIER Tony Blair made a powerful emotional plea to the British people last night to stand behind the war on Yugoslavia.

On prime-time TV, he pleaded: "I ask your support in seeing it through."

The Premier swept aside claims that the operation is doomed to failure and that Nato should restart negotiations with Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic.

He said: "We would have shown unpardonable weakness and dereliction. That is not the tradition of Britain. This is simply the right thing to do."

The broadcast was made from a hotel in Llandudno where Mr Blair had earlier addressed the Wales Labour Party conference.

He said he wanted to speak direct to the British people, to explain why he may have to send the forces into action again.

He added: "When I do, I want them to go with the whole country united behind them."

The broadcast was partly a warning to the Serbs that if they attacked NATO ground forces in Macedonia, they would face massive retaliation.

Blair was at his statesmanlike best as he pledged: "I would never expose our brave servicemen and women to those risks unless I believed that I had to.

"We are doing what is right, for Britain, for Europe, for a world that must know that barbarity cannot be allowed to defeat justice.

"We must act with total resolve to achieve our aims, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the future safety of our region and the world."

Left-wing Labour MPs, including Scots maverick George Galloway and pacifist Tony Benn, have called for an end to the conflict.

And the Government has failed to pull media and public support fully behind the military action.

But Mr Blair insisted that despite attempts to find a peaceful political solution to the Kosovo crisis, Milosevic refused to stop killing innocent people and driving them from their homes.

He said: "To those who say the aim of military strikes is not clear, I say it is crystal clear. It is to curb Milosevic's ability to wage war on an innocent civilian population."

In graphic detail the PM outlined the suffering the Albanian Kosovars have undergone at the hands of Serbian troops - and reduced the argument to simple human terms.

"These are our fellow human beings. Husbands taken from wives. Fathers taken from children, never to see them again, never knowing if they are dead or alive as they walk, mile upon mile, to a safety they may never find.

"Old women humiliated, young men massacred, just for being Albanian, just for being there when the Serb killing machine arrived. Our fellow human beings. Act or do nothing."

Kosovo was part of Europe, he said, a short sea journey from Italy and a short drive from Greece. It was also in the Balkans that the First World War began in Sarajevo.

Unless action was taken the Kosovars would continually be "ground under the heel" of Milosevic.