Macedonia rebels offer ceasefire Posted June 7, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1376000/1376259.stm
Thursday, 7 June, 2001, 20:20 GMT 21:20 UK
Macedonia rebels offer ceasefire
Homes and shops in Bitola were burned or destroyed Ethnic Albanian rebels in Macedonia say they will begin a ceasefire at midnight local time (2200 GMT) on Thursday and have urged the government to do the same.
A statement from the National Liberation Army (NLA) said it would halt combat as long as it was "not provoked by the military and police forces of the government".
Reports shortly afterwards quoted Western diplomatic sources as saying that President Boris Trajkovski was preparing to table a peace plan involving rebel withdrawal and decommissioning of arms.
The news came a day after Prime Minister Lyubco Georgievski called for war to be declared on the rebels after five soldiers were killed in an ambush on Tuesday night.
The deaths sparked ethnic rioting in the southern town of Bitola, which had been home to some of the dead troops.
Government plan
Mr Trajkovski's plan envisaged a rebel withdrawal into Kosovo, the diplomats said.
An amnesty has been ruled out as unworkable under Macedonian law, but relief from prosecution could be offered.
The demilitarisation plan will be presented in a speech by Mr Trajkovski to parliament on Friday.
US and European leaders have called on the government to exercise restraint.
Macedonia's leaders pulled back from a proposed declaration of war last month after coming under intense Western pressure.
Funerals
Thousands of people attended the funerals in Bitola on Thursday of three of the soldiers who were native to the town.
Three separate processions wound their way through the town, after which the coffins were buried to the sound of artillery salutes.
Tuesday's fighting inflicted the heaviest toll on Macedonian forces for over a month and marked the return of heavy fighting to the north-west of the country.
Riots triggered by the soldiers' deaths left up to 13 people injured in Bitola, and 50 properties and a mosque damaged.
NATO Walking Tightrope Over Smoldering Macedonia Posted June 7, 2001
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010607/wl/balkans_nato_dc_1.html
Thursday June 7 7:00 AM ET
NATO Walking Tightrope Over Smoldering Macedonia
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The crisis in Macedonia cast a pall over a meeting of NATO (news - web sites) defense ministers in Brussels on Thursday, as the 19-member alliance struggled to maintain its delicately balanced policy in the face of rising violence.
NATO Secretary-General George Robertson urged ethnic Albanian guerrillas to give up because they had no support, but also advised them to go into politics the normal way.
He urged the Macedonian Slav-dominated government not to let itself or the Slav majority be goaded into a blind anti-Albanian backlash, but said it should continue with the proportionate use of military force.
The European Union (news - web sites) has so far taken the lead in trying to broker a political solution, which depends on the maintenance of a Slav-Albanian government of national unity and an offer of amnesty to the insurgents.
But the killing of five Macedonian soldiers and the anti-Albanian rioting on Wednesday put the whole scheme at risk.
``NATO utterly condemns the violence of yesterday in which five soldiers were killed. Such cowardly, senseless attacks will never achieve any political goals and they must cease, Robertson said.
``I urge the men of violence to lay down their arms and take part in normal political processes. They have no support among the international community at all and no other means of achieving their ends,'' he added.
One European ally was putting the idea of a joint EU-NATO crisis mission to Macedonia, providing alliance backing for European Union foreign affairs chief Javier Solana, who was due to shuttle back to Skopje on Friday for further emergency talks.
Robertson said NATO ``would also encourage the government in Skopje to persevere in its two-track approach of engaging in an effective political dialogue, while using necessary and proportionate military force.''
Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski responded to the latest killings by calling for a state of war to be imposed.
He was unlikely to obtain the two-thirds parliamentary majority this requires, but it may be an indication of the pressure for action building up from his Slav constituency.
Divisions Tear at Macedonia's Multiethnic Regime Posted June 7, 2001
http://www.latimes.com/news/asection/20010607/t000047478.html
Thursday, June 7, 2001 | Print this story
Divisions Tear at Macedonia's Multiethnic Regime
Balkans: Shaky coalition of Slav and ethnic Albanian parties receives further blow as premier is said to be ready to declare war on rebels.
By DAVID HOLLEY, Times Staff Writer
SKOPJE, Macedonia--As this country's national unity government tries to cope with an ethnic Albanian guerrilla insurgency and its own fierce internal divisions, only severe foreign pressure and fear of a full-scale civil war keep it together.
The multiethnic government formed in mid-May is like a critically ill hospital patient, already on life support from the international community, said Arben Xhaferi, the country's leading ethnic Albanian politician.
"They are keeping us alive," he said, "pumping us with very powerful drugs."
In a fresh blow to the coalition, a government spokesman said Wednesday that Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski will call for a declaration of war against the rebels. The announcement came after five soldiers were killed in fighting near Tetovo, a mainly ethnic Albanian city in northwestern Macedonia.
The prime minister also demanded that leading ethnic Albanian politicians "state publicly what side they are on--the side of the murderers or the side of the state," spokesman Antonio Milososki said.
A state of war would give President Boris Trajkovski the power to rule by decree and appoint a government of his choosing, but the proposal does not appear to have the two-thirds approval it would need in parliament. The idea is also opposed by Western governments.
Coalition Members Fight for Advantage
Georgievski's proposals fit into a pattern of fierce infighting for advantage within the government.
The four main parties in the ruling coalition are split by two fault lines, either of which could bring the government's collapse at any time. One is the gulf between ethnic Albanian and Macedonian Slav politicians. The other is political rivalry dividing the two key parties representing each ethnic group, which is exacerbated by jockeying for advantage in parliamentary elections set for early next year.
Georgievski, a key Slav leader, suggested Sunday that because of the deadlock, elections should be moved up to September. "I do not see a big future for this coalition," he told the private A1 television network.
Macedonia has often been praised for its multiethnic democracy and its success until this year at avoiding the ethnic warfare that racked many other areas of the former Yugoslav federation in the 1990s.
The unity government was formed, under intense international pressure, with the idea that all parties would share the political price of necessary compromises. But as the focus turns toward elections, hopes for some kind of grand reform package seem to be collapsing into bickering.
Meanwhile, the guerrillas, who call themselves the National Liberation Army, say they are simply fighting for equal rights for ethnic Albanians, while Macedonian Slav leaders say the rebellion is aimed at splitting the country. At least a quarter of the nation's 2 million people are ethnic Albanian.
Trajkovski and Georgievski, with strong support from international leaders such as George Robertson, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have rejected any direct negotiations with the guerrillas, whom they describe as terrorists.
While providing financial aid and diplomatic support for a tough line against the rebels, Washington and European capitals have pushed for quick reforms that they hope might undermine support for the armed uprising.
At the core of the conflict in Macedonia is whether this should be a country that exists first of all for its Macedonian Slav majority, with Macedonian as the only official language, or whether it should be a country seen as belonging equally to ethnic Albanians.
In the case of the second option, favored by almost all ethnic Albanians, the argument is then made that Albanian should become a second official language and that neither Macedonian Slavs as a group nor the Macedonian Orthodox Church should have a privileged constitutional status, as each does now.
The preamble to the constitution declares that the country is "a national state of the [ethnic] Macedonian people" but that citizens from other ethnic groups should have "full civic equality."
One proposed reform would change the preamble to read: "Macedonia is a state of [ethnic] Macedonians, and of Albanians, Turks, Serbs, Roma [Gypsies] and Vlachs [a small ethnic group]." This change is vehemently opposed even by many relatively liberal Macedonian Slavs, yet doesn't go far enough to satisfy ethnic Albanian demands.
The core of the Macedonian Slavs' argument is that to remain a unified state, the country must have only one official language. Many also say that ethnic Albanians' demands for greater rights are only a cover for their real desire to split the country, and that because of this no concessions will ever be enough.
Dispute Bears on Employment, Education
The constitutional dispute is important because it relates to employment in government and state-run industries of people who are fluent only in Albanian, or to issues such as the use of taxes to fund Albanian-language university education.
"The constitution produced the [guerrilla uprising], because the constitution defines the state as the property of one ethnic community, and this community does not want to share their so-called property with others," charged Xhaferi, the ethnic Albanian politician. "We are extremely marginalized in this society."
The national unity government was created "to change the constitution," but Macedonian Slav politicians are unwilling to do this, Xhaferi said, adding, "They cannot accept equal treatment of Albanians in the state."
Last week, Georgievski declared that under pressure from the international community, Macedonian Slav parties had adopted a "peacemaking agenda" intended "to make the Republic of Macedonia the kind of place Albanians want to see."
To reach that goal, Albanian would "most probably" be declared a second official language, alongside Macedonian, and the Macedonian Orthodox Church would lose its privileged place in the constitution, the prime minister said. It also seemed likely that the constitution would be revised to ensure equality in the standing it gives to Macedonian Slavs and ethnic Albanians as nationality groups, he added.
At first, the announcement appeared to mark an important breakthrough, because it addressed several complaints of ethnic Albanian political leaders and the guerrillas. But it was immediately denounced by other Macedonian Slav politicians and treated with disbelief by ethnic Albanians, including Xhaferi.
Georgievski backed off from the statement in the interview with A1 television, describing his own earlier comments as "cynical." It was unclear to what degree his original statement may have been a trial balloon that was quickly shot down, or whether it was an attempt to show the international community the political impossibility of meeting its demands.
Xhaferi said he viewed Georgievski's announcement as an attempt to incite a backlash against reform. The prime minister's goal, he said, was "to create a panic among Macedonians" by suggesting that "Albanians will be equal with them."
"After this panic, the politicians started to withdraw from negotiating the changes in the constitution," Xhaferi said. "It means that the dialogue cannot start."
Meanwhile, President Trajkovski has been pushing for a partial amnesty for the guerrillas. Xhaferi said he thinks the amnesty proposal is a good idea. He complained, however, that such issues can be meaningfully discussed only with the guerrillas.
"People want to negotiate with me for peace," Xhaferi said. "But I am not a participant in the war. I cannot bring peace. . . . They cannot eliminate the NLA from these discussions, because they are a factor for peace or war."
The president is only "buying time," because he does not have "a real solution how to stop the fighting and how to start the dialogue," Xhaferi said. "I am more pessimistic now because there is no readiness to have a real dialogue."
Storm Over Macedonia Partition Plan: A proposal to divide up Macedonia along ethnic lines has provoked outrage Posted June 7, 2001
http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/bcr/bcr_20010606_2_eng.txt
Storm Over Macedonia Partition Plan
A proposal to divide up Macedonia along ethnic lines has provoked outrage
By Veton Latifi in Skopje (BCR No. 253, 6-Jun-01)
While Macedonian troops battle it out with Albanian guerrillas in the north, a fierce political conflict has broken out in the capital over a proposal to partition Macedonia.
The bombshell proposal was lobbed by Georgi Efremov, chairman of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Macedonia, ASAM, who suggested that the best way of ending strife between Macedonian and Albanian communities was to carve up the country into two entities.
According to this plan, Albanians would settle in the western regions of Gostivar, Tetovo, and Debar which would then join Albania itself at a later date. In exchange, Albania would hand over to Macedonia the town of Pogradec and the surrounding area near Prespa Lake, where a small Macedonian minority lives.
The exchange should be completed peacefully in three months, the academy said.
Efremov described his plan as a "document for the salvation of Macedonia". He said that after the recent fighting in Tetovo and elsewhere, Albanians and Macedonians could no longer live in peace.
The proposal enraged large sections of political opinion. Albanian minority parties united in opposition, parties representing the Macedonian majority were split, thus endangering the "grand coalition" set up a few weeks ago with international blessing to guide the country through its crisis.
Among the few political leaders who refrained from denouncing the plan were Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, the leader of the Macedonian VMRO-DPMNE party, and parliamentary speaker Stojan Andov, a member of the Liberal Party, a junior member of the coalition.
Strong opposition came from Branko Crvenkovski who heads SDSM, Socialist Democratic Alliance of Macedonia, the other major Macedonian party. He called the ASAM plan "an incitement for civil war and suicide for Macedonia". Crvenkovski favours pursuing current negotiations on giving ethnic Albanians greater civic rights and recognising Albanian as an official language.
The ASAM plan has brought unexpected harmony to the two main Albanian parties, the DPA, Democratic Party of Albanians and PDP, Party of Democratic Prosperity, which until now had been locked in bitter feuds. Both dismissed the partition plan as "unacceptable and ridiculous".
The president of the Albanian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ylli Popa, also rejected the proposal. "Inter ethnic problems cannot be solved by exchange of territories and populations," he said. "The only solution to the Macedonia crisis is to respect the rights of Albanians living there."
Macedonian political feuding intensified after the daily, Vecer, which is close to VMRO-DPMNE, published a map of the planned exchange. When Crvenkovski threatened to walk out of coalition, Georgievski said he would not mind if the alliance did break up.
After lack of support from the Macedonian parties and outright rejection by their Albanian counterparts, ASAM Chairman Efremov, sought to distance himself from his own plan, saying it had been misinterpreted.
Efremov said it was only one of 25 possible ways of solving the crisis and that it was not an official ASAM proposal, just the personal view of some of its members.
Partition has been discussed several times since Macedonia became independent a decade ago.
When the NLA first emerged at the beginning of this year, there were rumours that its main goal was the federalisation of Macedonia. But a month later, it backed away from the partition idea, saying it supported the territorial integrity of Macedonia.
Instead, the NLA called for Albanians to be elevated to the status of nation in the country's constitution.
During the last decade, the two main Macedonian parties have argued fiercely about the country's integrity and sovereignty. LSDM has accused the VMRO-DPMNE of working to hand over parts of Macedonia to Bulgaria. While the latter has charged the former of trying to draw Macedonia back into the Yugoslav federation.
The partition proposal, no matter whether it is ASAM policy or the idea of some of its members, might be a severe blow to the country at a time when all Balkan nations are oriented towards European integration.
If the plan frustrates the political process, the EU might decide to review the validity of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement with Macedonia, signed in Luxembourg on April 9. It could also undermine the support that Macedonia has received until now. But no such measures are foreseen by the EU at present.
The fact that Efremov is close to the VMRO-DPMNE and that his plan was not rejected outright by some politicians might indicate other motives behind the proposal. Whether it was a test of public opinion, an outright provocation or a serious project, the plan has certainly shifted attention away from the fighting in the north. It has also delayed political dialogue between Albanians and Macedonians on resolving their present differences.
Veton Latifi is a political analyst and IWPR assistant editor in Macedonia.
Bitola Spirit Crushed: Bitola is seething with ethnic tensions following recent rioting by Macedonian mobs Posted June 7, 2001
http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl?archive/bcr/bcr_20010606_1_eng.txt
Bitola Spirit Crushed
Bitola is seething with ethnic tensions following recent rioting by Macedonian mobs
By Sime Alusevski in Bitola (BCR No. 253, 6-Jun-01)
For the past 20 years, children from all over the world have gathered here annually to paint Bitola's historic architecture.
Their pictures sent messages of peace, tolerance and hope for a better world. But this year, all visitors to the Mont Martyr arts colony will see are the charred ruins of the city's celebrated old bazaar.
Some 40 Albanian and Muslim-owned shops and restaurants were smashed and set on fire on the night of April 30, when several hundred Macedonians went on the rampage.
The riot followed the funerals of four Bitola policemen, killed by NLA rebels in the mountains above Tetovo, close to the border with Kosovo.
Four other Macedonian policemen were killed in the ambush, the single most deadly incident since clashes between government forces and Albanian insurgents flared in February.
Bitola's Albanian community, which makes up around 10 per cent of city's 80,000 inhabitants, has been successfully integrated over the years. There are plenty of mixed marriages and friendships.
But the NLA's recent attacks in northern Macedonia have dealt a blow to community relations. "Death to the Shiptars [a derogatory name for Albanians]" is frequently daubed on the walls of the city. Though there's no extremist Macedonian party based in the city, anti-Albanian rhetoric is rife.
"We cannot tolerate this handful of armed terrorists bothering the entire country with cowardly attacks," said local journalist Metodija Mladenovski. Macedonians are convinced the Albanians want to partition the country - the latter insist that they are struggling for equality.
Their cause though is not helped by the fact that many sympathise with the tactics employed by the NLA.
Petar Panovski, a Macedonian from the village of Dolenci near Bitola, said he was sickened when his Albanian neighbour said outrages such as the killing of the eight policemen would continue until his community are granted full equality.
The growing ethnic tensions in Bitola exploded following the burial of the four policemen. Some Albanians compared the riots to Kristallnacht, when Jewish shops in Nazi Germany were destroyed.
Some Albanians believe the rioting was orchestrated by Skopje-based Macedonian political groups, others lay the blame on Ckembari, local football fans. Few believe the violence was spontaneous.
Dzeko Miftarovski, owner of a pizzeria and cake shop, said, "I am sure that the people of Bitola didn't do it. My friends, who were there that night, told me that gangs from Skopje and other towns were sent to destroy our property. You can't say it was spontaneous when, in front of the destroyed shops, there were trucks loading up with stolen goods."
The rioters appear to have targeted wealthy Albanians, some of whom are associated with the Bitola black market.
Albanian Kamber Rasimovski shot one rioter after his home, motel and café were set on fire. He was arrested by police, with his two sons. They were later released.
Sources in Bitola say Rasimovski's café was the haunt of prostitutes from Russia and the Ukraine. He refused to comment, but his wife told IWPR that the family's losses amount to 200,000 German marks. "We are so scared - they destroyed our business and beat up our son," she said, "we don't know what will happen next."
The home of Mitat Ali - once a mayoral candidate from the Albanian Party for Democratic Prosperity - was also torched. He was sentenced last year to six years in prison for drugs and arms trafficking. But ordinary people also fell victim to the rioters.
Ajco Miftarovski, a Muslim who has lived in Bitola for almost half a century, put new doors and windows on his ransacked restaurant the day after the rioting, only to find them destroyed again. "I am still in shock and taking pills," he said.
In the wake of the violence, Albanians say they don't feel safe. "I don't dare to walk around the city any more," said one." I just have this feeling that something bad will happen. "
Most of the shops in Bitola's old bazaar are still as the rioters left them on the morning of 1 May. Businessmen have approached the mayor's office for help to patch up their properties, but there are apparently insufficient funds.
Worse still, local insurers appear reluctant to service Albanian claims - only three businessmen have so far received any compensation. They were awarded 25,000 marks - substantially less than the cost of repairing their properties.
And, significantly, the insurers are not keen to sign to new contracts with Albanian clients as they clearly fear more trouble is on its way.
After the killing of five more Macedonian soldiers - three of them from Bitola - in the Tetovo area on Tuesday night, there are indeed fears of another backlash against Bitola Albanians.
One of the soldiers killed was a member of Ckembari. His brother, a taxi driver, organised a protest in the city today, Wednesday. Two hundred cabbies drove through the centre of Bitola, sounding their horns and waving anti-Albanian placards.
"I don't know what to do...I fear for my life...and have nowhere to escape to," a young Albanian woman told IWPR.
Sime Alusevski is a journalist on the regional weekly Bitolski Vjesnik
Macedonia Threatens to Declare State of War Against Rebels Posted June 7, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/07/world/07MACE.html
June 7, 2001
Macedonia Threatens to Declare State of War Against Rebels
By CARLOTTA GALL
BELGRADE, Serbia, Jun. 6 — Macedonia threatened to declare a state of war today after five government soldiers were killed and six soldiers and police officers wounded in one of the deadliest attacks by ethnic Albanian rebels in weeks.
After the rebel ambush, anti-Albanian rioting broke out in the hometown of some of the dead soldiers, and an unidentified gunman fired on the office of President Boris Trajkovski in a drive-by attack. The incidents raised tensions in Macedonia, as the president came under criticism from members of his own party over his handling of the conflict.
They have also exposed how close Macedonia's multi-ethnic government is to collapse. A declaration of war would give greater powers to the president and allow him to order a mobilization of the population for military service, but it would almost certainly end the current government, a coalition of parties representing ethnic Albanians and Slavs.
Macedonian Slavs in the government have been urging tougher military action against the rebels, while Albanian parties, fearing civilian casualties, have pleaded against the use of force. Mr. Trajkovski had tried to forge a unity government to stop the divisions between the two sides from worsening, but he appears to be failing, and for the first time has come under fire from his own party, VMRO-DPME.
Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, who is leader of VMRO- DPME, the main Slav party, called today for full military mobilization and emergency powers to allow the country to quell the ethnic Albanian insurgency, his spokesman, Antonio Milososki, said.
"A strong military response is the only way to achieve peace," Mr. Milososki said. "All we lack is a strong political decision for military action."
"The prime minister does not want more fighting," he said, "but we must finish with illusions that four months of conflicts can be solved only through dialogue."
There was no reaction from the two main Albanian parties, which are still part of the government, but they have persistently opposed the government's use of force against the rebels, citing the danger to civilians. A declaration of war would force them to leave the government, and end Western diplomats' attempts to unify political leaders.
After the Tuesday night ambush, the government appealed for calm and asked that people not converge on the capital, Skopje, in protest. But tonight, in the southern town of Bitola, home to three of the soldiers killed in the ambush, crowds of Slavs set fire to shops and other property belonging to ethnic Albanians.
Last April, anti-Albanian riots erupted after the funerals of four local men, soldiers who died in a similar ambush.
The prime minister's party also criticized the president for his "controversial approach to fighting terrorism," saying Mr. Trajkovski had not carried through with a promise to first fight the rebels and then progress to talks.
Mr. Trajkovski has allowed a month-long military operation against rebel-held villages north of the capital, near the town of Kumanovo and close to the border with Kosovo. But he has also gone along with Western diplomatic efforts to make peace with the rebels, and has at times delayed or restrained assaults on villages where many civilians are sheltering.
Government forces have nonetheless used artillery and helicopter gunships, on lease from the Ukrainian government, against the rebels, but they have made little progress. The rebels have withdrawn under heavy fire, only to re-emerge elsewhere.
NATO-led peacekeepers have stepped up patrols on their side of the Kosovo border to prevent men and weapons from crossing the border, but rebel activity does not seem to have diminished.
Macedonian Slav rioters target ethnic Albanians Posted June 7, 2001
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010607/3/su67.html
Thursday June 7, 9:46 AM
Macedonian Slav rioters target ethnic Albanians
By Sean Maguire
SKOPJE (Reuters) - Crowds of Macedonia Slavs rioted in the southern city of Bitola on Wednesday, torching ethnic Albanian property in retaliation for a deadly rebel attack that rocked the fragile Balkan state.
Five soldiers, three of them from Bitola, died in the late Tuesday attack on mountain outposts, the deadliest assault by ethnic Albanian guerrillas in almost six weeks.
Shocked Macedonian politicians said they were ready to declare a state of war to give themselves the powers to quell the insurrection, which began in February.
Macedonia's Western allies urged the government to show restraint, warning that a declaration of war risked aggravating the insurgency, which has raised fear of a full-scale civil war.
In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the government in Skopje should press on with inter-ethnic dialogue and maintain a "measured response" to the violence.
"We don't see that a declaration of a state of war would serve to advance this kind of political reconciliation, political solution.
"We reiterate the importance of the measured response that the government has taken, showing maximum concern for the safety of civilians and pressing forth with this dialogue," he said.
Bitola suffered reprisals after the death of eight soldiers in April. On Wednesday night crowds swept through the town burning at least 25 shops and the home of Macedonia's deputy minister of health, an ethnic Albanian, eyewitnesses said.
"Its total chaos here. There is smoke everywhere and at least four shops of people I know have been burnt," said Svetlana, a witness reached by telephone.
TOWN QUIETENS
The town quietened down later but is likely to remain tense with the funerals of some of the soldiers scheduled for Thursday.
The soldiers died during fierce fighting in the hills above Tetovo in northwestern Macedonia, the country's main ethnic Albanian town.
Boucher in Washington called the attack on the soldiers "a reprehensible act of violence".
Macedonia's government spokesman Antonio Milosovski said: "A strong military response is the only way to achieve peace," said government spokesman Antonio Milosovski. "All we lack is a strong political decision for military action."
Macedonian politicians suggested a declaration of war in early May to end the insurgency which began in February but were persuaded by the Western powers that it would alienate ethnic Albanians and complicate the search for peace.
It was unclear how determined they were this time to seek the two-thirds majority in parliament needed for such a move. Ethnic Albanians say they face discrimination by majority Slavs. The government calls them terrorists trying to wreck the nation.
In a further sign of unrest, a gunman in a car fired shots towards the office of Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski.
The president was in his office, housed in the Macedonian parliament building in central Skopje, when the shots came. No one was hurt and there was no explanation for the shooting.
Skopje's allies urged restraint after the killings of the five soldiers. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana strongly condemned the killings but urged Skopje to make only a "measured" military response.
"PLAY INTO HANDS OF EXTREMISTS"
"A declaration of the state of war would only be playing into the hands of the extremists and would not help in resolving the current crisis," he said in a statement.
A spokeswoman for Solana said he would visit the capital, Skopje, on Friday as part of an EU drive to end the crisis.
In Brussels, a senior NATO diplomat said the Western defence alliance backed Macedonia's right to take "proportionate" action, but stressed: "There is no military solution."
Macedonian Defence Minister Vlado Buckovski, who is from a different party than the premier, said he opposed a state of war. "We must remain calm because the struggle against terrorism will be a long one," he told the MIA state news agency.
Trajkovski agreed to make a speech to parliament on Friday after deputies called for an urgent debate on the crisis.
The killings of the five soldiers came after rebels launched concerted attacks late on Tuesday with heavy machineguns and mortars against three military positions near the village of Gajre, 40 km (25 miles) west of Skopje.
Two soldiers died when they were ambushed making a food delivery and three more died in the same place in a second ambush as they escorted medics to help the wounded.
Western diplomatic sources said the rebels had been trying for some time to open a second front near Tetovo to widen the conflict beyond the string of villages northeast of Skopje which they have been occupying for the last month.
Local officials accused rebels of cutting off water supplies to Kumanovo, a town of 100,000 northeast of Skopje, by blocking water flowing from a reservoir. Kumanovo residents were forced to line up at a natural spring to fill bottles.
HEAVY TETEVO FIGHTING IN MARCH
The Tetovo area last saw heavy fighting in March, when the Macedonian army beat back rebels from the outskirts of the town.
Apart from the three dead soldiers from Bitola, a fourth was another Slav and the fifth was a member of the ethnic Albanian minority, which makes up almost a third of the population and which is also subject to military call-up.
The West has been pushing the Slav majority to undercut support for the rebels by improving the rights of Albanians, who say they suffer state-backed discrimination in education, employment and language rights.
The cross-party coalition formed in May to work on reforms has made little progress amid political bickering and tension.
Macedonia: Albanian Rebel Abuses of Serb Civilians Posted June 7, 2001
http://www.hrw.org/press/2001/06/albabuses0607.htm
Macedonia: Albanian Rebel Abuses of Serb Civilians
(New York, June 7, 2001) The National Liberation Army (NLA) physically abused eight ethnic Serb civilians whom it arbitrarily detained in the Macedonian village of Matejce last week, Human Rights Watch charged today. Altogether, at least 21 ethnic Serb men, many of them elderly, were detained by the Albanian rebel
"These villagers were clearly not combatants," said Holly Cartner, executive director of the Europe and Central Asia division of Human Rights Watch. "The NLA has a responsibility to respect international law, just as much as the Macedonian government does."
According to interviews conducted in Macedonia this week by Human Rights Watch, the NLA arbitrarily detained two different groups of Serbian civilians in the mosque of Matejce, a village with a mixed Serbian and Albanian population west of Kumanovo. The village has been the location of ongoing fighting between the NLA and Macedonian forces for much of the past week.
Both Albanian and Serbian witnesses said that all of the villagers of Matejce had decided to try to avoid the fighting between the NLA and Macedonian forces, and ethnic Albanian elders of the village had requested that the NLA stay out of the village. However, following heavy fighting in the nearby villages of Vaksince and Slupcane, NLA fighters entered Matejce around May 24 and attacked the government police station, pulling the village of Matejce into the conflict.
Sixty-year-old Krunislav Filipovic, an ethnic Serb, was taken from his home by NLA fighters on the evening of May 24. He was taken to the village mosque together with three other elderly ethnic Serbs, he told Human Rights Watch. All four were fathers of Macedonian policemen, apparently the reason for their detention. At the village mosque, NLA fighters beat the four men with their fists and gun butts and kicked them. On several occasions, the men were subjected to mock executions, and NLA fighters sharpened knives in front of the men, threatening to behead them.
The men were kept in detention, abused for four days, and then released in the village of Otla, where they were told to walk towards Macedonian government positions. NLA soldiers fired above their heads as they fled.
Two of Filipovic's fellow captives remain hospitalized in Kumanovo as of June 8. Police guards at the hospital refused to allow Human Rights Watch researchers access to the men, thereby preventing the researchers from documenting their injuries and providing a more complete description of the incident. Human Rights Watch's investigation was further impeded by the refusal of the Macedonian police to allow access to the Serbian-inhabited village of Umni Dol.
Seventy-eight-year-old Bozidar Trojanovic was also detained at the village mosque by NLA fighters on May 25, together with three other men and three women, most of them elderly. The four men in the group were beaten at the mosque, according to Trojanovic, although the women were not physically abused:
They started kicking our [the men's] legs with their boots. We kept silent; there was nothing we could do. Then they ordered us to stand up and face the wall, and to bend our heads. They kept hitting us on the back of the head. Then they told us to turn around and to turn our faces to one side. They slapped my [male relative] four times on each side. Then they told him to hit his brother just like that.
The second group of ethnic Serbs was detained in a guarded basement with ten other Serbs from Matejce for four days before being released. On May 28, they were released when the ethnic Albanian inhabitants of Matejce left the village.
Human Rights Watch has also looked into a number of other reports of NLA abuse that have appeared in the Macedonian-language press or come from the Macedonian government. To date, Human Rights Watch researchers have not been able to confirm many of these reports, but are continuing to investigate these allegations. Human Rights Watch has also asked the Macedonian authorities for specific details on a number of allegations they have made regarding NLA abuses, but has received no concrete information to date.
Macedonia Threatens War After Rebels Kill Troops Posted June 6, 2001
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010606/wl/balkans_war_dc_5.html
Wednesday June 6 2:28 PM ET
Macedonia Threatens War After Rebels Kill Troops
By Sean Maguire
SKOPJE (Reuters) - Macedonia threatened on Wednesday to declare a state of war after five soldiers were killed in the deadliest attacks by ethnic Albanian rebels in almost six weeks.
Macedonia's Western allies urged the government to show restraint, warning that such a declaration risked aggravating the insurgency. The crisis has already raised fears of a full-scale civil war in the Balkan state.
The soldiers' deaths came during fierce fighting in the hills above Tetovo in northwestern Macedonia, the country's main ethnic Albanian town, which lasted through the night. Intense shelling resumed on Wednesday for brief periods.
Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski wanted full military mobilization and emergency powers, his spokesman said, to allow the country to quell the rebellion.
``A strong military response is the only way to achieve peace,'' said spokesman Antonio Milosovski. ``All we lack is a strong political decision for military action.''
Macedonian politicians suggested a declaration of war in early May to end the insurgency which began in February but were persuaded by the Western powers that it would alienate ethnic Albanians and complicate the search for peace.
It was unclear how determined they were this time to seek the two-thirds majority in parliament needed for such a move. Ethnic Albanians say they face discrimination by majority Slavs. The government calls them terrorists trying to wreck the nation.
GUNMAN FIRES AT PRESIDENT'S OFFICES
In a further sign of unrest, a gunman in a car fired shots toward the office of Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski on Wednesday evening.
Trajkovski was in his office, which is housed in the building of the Macedonian parliament in central Skopje, at the time of the shooting, but no one was hurt. There was no explanation for the shooting.
Skopje's allies urged restraint after the killings of the five soldiers. European Union (news - web sites) foreign policy chief Javier Solana strongly condemned the killings but urged Skopje to make only a ''measured'' military response.
``A declaration of the state of war would only be playing into the hands of the extremists and would not help in resolving the current crisis,'' he said in a statement.
A spokeswoman for Solana said he would visit the capital, Skopje, on Friday as part of an EU drive to end the crisis.
In Brussels, a senior NATO (news - web sites) diplomat said the Western defense alliance backed Macedonia's right to take ``proportionate'' action, but stressed: ``There is no military solution.''
Macedonian Defense Minister Vlado Buckovski, who is from a different party than the premier, said he opposed a state of war. ''We must remain calm because the struggle against terrorism will be a long one,'' he told the MIA state news agency.
The deaths could further radicalize anti-Albanian sentiment among Slavs. Trajkovski agreed to make a speech to parliament on Friday after deputies called for an urgent debate on the crisis.
The killings of the five soldiers came after rebels launched concerted attacks late on Tuesday with heavy machineguns and mortars against three military positions near the village of Gajre, 25 miles west of Skopje.
Two soldiers died when they were ambushed making a food delivery and three more died in the same place in a second ambush as they escorted medics to help the wounded.
Reporters saw a bullet-riddled army jeep being towed down the mountain road into Tetovo.
SECOND FRONT
Western diplomatic sources said the rebels had been trying for some time to open a second front near Tetovo to widen the conflict beyond the string of villages northeast of Skopje which they have been occupying for the last month.
Local officials accused rebels of cutting off water supplies to Kumanovo, a town of 100,000 northeast of Skopje, by blocking water flowing from a reservoir. Kumanovo residents were forced to line up at a natural spring to fill bottles.
The Tetovo area last saw heavy fighting in March, when the Macedonian army beat back rebels from the outskirts of the town.
Three of the dead soldiers were from Bitola, a majority Slav city in southern Macedonia where Albanian and Muslim shops and businesses were attacked and burned by Slavs in retribution for a rebel attack on April 28 in which eight soldiers were killed.
Four of the dead in that attack, the highest toll in a single day in the conflict, were from Bitola. On Wednesday, the government imposed an overnight curfew in Bitola to stop any violence.
One of the other dead men in the ambushes was a member of the ethnic Albanian minority, which makes up almost a third of the population and which is also subject to military call-up.
The West has been pushing the Slav majority to undercut support for the rebels by improving the rights of Albanians, who say they suffer state-backed discrimination in education, employment and language rights.
The cross-party coalition formed in May to work on reforms has made little progress amid political bickering and tension.
Gunmen fire on Macedonian president's office Posted June 6, 2001
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010606/1/so7o.html
Thursday June 7, 1:18 AM
Gunmen fire on Macedonian president's office
SKOPJE, June 6 (AFP) - Unidentified gunmen fired on the office of Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski on Wednesday, sparking alarm but causing no casualties, officials said.
The attack took place at 5:50 pm (1550 GMT) as Trajkovski was meeting the leader of a political party in his office, they said.
Police were searching the area for clues as to the identity of the gunmen, who had fled after "twice opening fire in the direction of the building," they said.
LORD OWEN SEEKS PEACE CONFERENCE FOR THE BALKANS Posted June 6, 2001
RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 5, No. 107, Part II, 6 June 2001
website: http://www.rferl.org/newsline
LORD OWEN SEEKS PEACE CONFERENCE FOR THE BALKANS
In an interview with the "Berliner Zeitung," former British Balkan diplomat Lord David Owen said on 5 June that it is necessary to hold a peace conference modeled on the Berlin Congress of 1878. "The difference will be that the then-European powers could simply decide about a region," he said. "Today the Balkan states must be included [in the decision-making]." In conjunction with the future independence of Kosova, Lord Owen maintained that the redrawing of existing borders should not be excluded from the agenda of any conference. UB1
Macedonia PM wants to declare war Posted June 6, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1373000/1373466.stm
Wednesday, 6 June, 2001, 12:37 GMT 13:37 UK
Macedonia PM wants to declare war
The fighting is said to be the heaviest since March
The Macedonian Prime Minister, Ljubco Georgievski, has called for the declaration of a state of war to bolster the fight against ethnic Albanian rebels.
The statement came after five Macedonian soldiers were killed in fierce overnight fighting in the hills above Tetovo, the country's main ethnic Albanian town.
"A strong military response is the only way to achieve peace," Mr Georgievski's spokesman Antonio Milosovski said.
Declaring a state of war would allow the military to call up all able-bodied men to fight, the prime minister said.
However, a two-thirds majority in parliament is needed to approve such a declaration.
Heavy fighting
The overnight fighting inflicted the heaviest toll on Macedonian forces since an attack on 28 April left eight soldiers dead.
It also marks the return of heavy fighting to the north-west of the country, after a month in which the main focus of the conflict has been a string of villages in the north of the country, near the border with Serbia.
Army officials said three of the soldiers died during an ambush as they were escorting a medical team to help six men wounded in clashes that broke out late on Tuesday.
Billowing smoke
It was not clear whether the two extra casualties came from within this group of wounded men, which included three soldiers, and three police.
We expect terrorist attacks to intensify in the coming days - Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski
Ethnic Albanian fighters - who launched a rebellion in February - say they are fighting for greater rights for their minority, up to a third of the population. However, it is widely believed that they want to adjoin Albanian-populated villages to neighbouring Kosovo.
Macedonian officials claimed to have driven the rebels from the Tetovo area at the end of March, but there have been sporadic clashes there in recent weeks.
Macedonian radio said Tuesday's fighting began when rebels attacked army positions near the mountain village of Gajre.
The army used tanks in response and residents said columns of billowing smoke could be seen rising from the area.
Appeal for help
Earlier, Macedonia asked the United States and western European countries to use their influence to stop financial help from Albanian migrs reaching ethnic-Albanian rebels.
Donald Rumsfeld made a brief stopover in Skopje
Defence ministers from Balkan countries are to meet on Wednesday in northern Greece in talks expected to focus on the continued conflict in Macedonia.
On Tuesday, Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski warned of an upsurge in the violence.
"We expect terrorist attacks to intensify in the coming days and we are prepared to respond and attack resolutely," he told journalists.
"We have groups of terrorists who have no intention of withdrawing from Macedonian soil," he said.
Commando plea
The Macedonian Government has asked the US for help in training special military commandos to fight the rebels.
The request was made by Macedonian Defence Minister Vlado Buckovski during a meeting with US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, who made a brief stopover in Skopje on his way from the Ukraine to Kosovo.
The Macedonian minister also appealed to the US and Europe to help stop ethnic Albanian migrs in the West from sending money and other support to the rebels, a Macedonian defence ministry spokesman said.
After the stopover Mr Rumsfeld flew to Kosovo, where he met American troops.
WHAT HAPPENED IN BITOLA? (RFE/RL) Posted June 6, 2001
http://www.rferl.org/balkan-report/
5 June 2001, Volume 5, Number 39
WHAT HAPPENED IN BITOLA?
It has been almost a month since Macedonian rioters smashed and set fire to a string of Albanian-owned pastry shops and cafes in Bitola (see "RFE/RL Newsline," 1 May 2001). The incident followed the funerals of four local policemen, killed along with four soldiers in an ambush by Albanian insurgents a few days earlier in the Sar mountains in northwestern Macedonia.
Since then, broken shards of plate glass outside the shops have been carted off. Graffiti -- crosses and the words, in Macedonian, "Death to the Albanians" -- have been scrawled on some shop facades. The blackened interiors remain a scene of devastation, with rotting cream cakes and baklava lying amid smashed mirrors and display cases.
During the traditional Sunday afternoon promenade, Albanians are nowhere to be seen. Many have left to stay with friends or relatives elsewhere in Macedonia or abroad.
Bitola, known to Albanians as Monastir, had a flourishing Albanian population until the mid-20th century. The town is revered by Albanians as the place where in 1908 and 1909 they adopted a standardized alphabet for the Albanian language using Latin letters, ending the practice by some of using the Greek alphabet and by others of using Arabic script to write in Albanian.
However, Bitola's Albanians have been a dwindling minority for the last half-century. Some 30,000 emigrated from the city and its surroundings to Turkey as part of a Tito-era Yugoslav policy to reduce the Albanian population in Serbia, Kosova, and Macedonia by offering Albanians the opportunity to leave.
According to the 1994 census, which many Albanians boycotted, Albanians make up only 2,000 of Bitola's population of 86,000, or just over 2 percent. An additional 2,600 live in surrounding villages. But the main ethnic Albanian political party, the Democratic Party of the Albanians, or PDSH, estimates the Albanian population is nearly double the census figure.
Ljubco Taskovski is a 35-year-old ethnic Macedonian and a reservist in the Macedonian army. He has a job at the local dairy plant and owns a trailer from which he sells fresh doughnuts on the corso. He says it was the brothers, sisters, and friends of the four murdered policemen who were the "organizers" of the rampage in the early hours of 1 May. They were joined, he adds, by others they met in the street: "It went on for about two hours, from shop to shop. We know whose shops these were. The people doing this were purely on a raid. They weren't carrying anything more than stones to break glass. They turned things upside down, but [did] nothing else."
Taskovski says some 50 people -- from Bitola and from the villages of the dead policemen -- participated in the violence: "They rose up in response to the deaths of innocent soldiers, and as a warning to the Albanians who are in Bitola -- not that we are going to kill people, but that we are going to draw the line. We can kill, but before [we do] that we will warn them. [If] we break glass and smash [their] workshops, [Albanians] will stop killing soldiers and policemen."
Taskovski's remarks echo an unsubstantiated report, broadcast at the time by a private TV station, which alleged that Albanians in Bitola and nearby villages celebrated the deaths of the four local policemen by firing off their guns in celebration. Several people interviewed said the TV report was one of the factors that incited Macedonians to riot.
Taskovski accuses some of Bitola's Albanians of being "terrorists" and of battling the Macedonian army in the north of the country.
Macedonia's deputy health minister, Muarem Nexhipi, is politically the senior member of Bitola's Albanian community. A Zagreb-educated medical doctor, he is a leader of PDSH and a possible successor to the ailing party chief Arben Xhaferi. Nexhipi was in Bitola during the unrest. He says a total of 42 shops and businesses, as well as about 10 kiosks, were attacked the first night whiled the police watched and did nothing.
Nexhipi says that about an hour after starting to set fire to Albanian businesses in the center of Bitola, the crowd moved to a pastry shop near his house, setting it on fire as well. When the fire department arrived, he says the crowd attacked the firemen, who Nexhipi says turned their hoses on the demonstrators, dispersing the gathering and saving the Nexhipi home from attack. He says that "a large number of police" intervened to protect his house from two subsequent attempts to set it alight.
Macedonian attackers demolished 17 additional Albanian-owned or managed businesses the following evening. Nexhipi says that after authorities declared a curfew the third evening, attackers burned down two Albanian-owned homes. One belonged to a man working in Switzerland, the other was owned by a lawyer who had agreed to take up the cases of people whose businesses had been torched. Fire inspectors subsequently suggested that the fire had been due to an electrical problem.
Bitola's Social Democratic mayor, Zlatko Vrsakovski, appeared on TV after the first two nights of violence had passed and appealed for calm. Almost three weeks passed before he lifted the nighttime curfew on 20 May.
Nexhipi suspects the real reason for the unrest can be found in Bitola's legacy as a key garrison town of the former Yugoslav People's Army, or JNA, due to Bitola's proximity to the Greek border, 16 kilometers to the south. When the army withdrew to Serbia nearly a decade ago, Nexhipi says the majority of ethnic Serbian JNA officers and their families stayed behind in Bitola. He says they now have Macedonian citizenship and have been active in the past in organizing what he terms "anti-Albanian initiatives and demonstrations." Nexhipi estimates that between 30 and 50 Serb former JNA officers currently reside in Bitola:
Nexhipi believes that "there has been something grave going on Bitola for years. Groups of [Serb] people are at work, conducting operations. So because of all of this, we were afraid when we learned about the murders of the four [policemen] from Bitola. We knew from past experience that whenever anything, clashes or whatever, occur involving the Albanian question in Macedonia or Kosova, it will be reflected in Bitola. We knew that there would be broken shop windows, that someone would make a show of power toward a symbolic number of people."
Interior Ministry spokesman Stevo Pendarovski told RFE/RL on 30 May he has not previously heard the allegations that former JNA officers might be involved in the Bitola unrest. But he suggests there may be a connection if the former officers, rather than retiring from the military, joined Macedonia's security forces: "I don't see how they could organize the events if they're retired. If they are active, it will be good for all of us here to know what positions they are in now, and to investigate such rumors. It's [more effective] to be in a position to be active, and to be employed formally in the ministries [of Defense or Interior] or in some of our [secret services], and in that way have an impact on that kind of movement, of the rebellion in Bitola."
Vladimir Milcin is executive director of the Macedonian branch of the Open Society Institute, based in Skopje. In a recent essay, he wrote of his own suspicions regarding the Bitola incident:
"There is something smelly in this dim story, something that stinks much more than the burnt shops in the bazaar in Bitola. Power and money are [at work in] this death game. [Someone] is encouraging enmity to incite voluntary or violent ethnic cleansing."
Milcin says the aim is to divide Macedonia into ethnically pure regions as a prelude to partition. He predicts that what is left of Macedonia will not be able to survive as an independent country.
The Open Society Institute chief adds that the Bitola residents involved in the attacks on Albanian businesses were provoked by the fact that despite an official order for all four caskets containing the remains of the dead policeman to remain sealed, the brother of one of the dead men insisted his coffin be opened. The mourners, he says, were horrified by the sight of a burned body.
Milcin says he is convinced the unrest was organized:
"On the day of the funeral, the state secretary at the Interior Ministry was there, Ljube Boskovski, who has since become [on 13 May] minister of the interior. And he remained [in Bitola] overnight, until the next day. The mayor of Bitola, [Zlatko Vrsakovski], asked police to intervene. The police didn't do anything except protect the house of Mr. Muarem Nexhipi [from the PDSH], the deputy minister of health."
Milcin says the police did nothing to stop the violence during the first two nights of unrest and notes the curfew was only introduced on the third day. He says members of a private Macedonian security agency, Kometa, led the mob in the unrest. He accuses Kometa of having very close relations with the nationalist party of Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, known as VMRO-DPMNE. "I don't believe that what happened in Bitola [was] something spontaneous. I think that basically, [the incident was] stimulated and supported by some people close to VMRO, to the government."
Interior Ministry spokesman Pendrovski, when asked whether any evidence has been found confirming suspicions that the unrest was organized, says that until now there have been "only rumors:" "I have heard some rumors, or 'semi-information,' about the so-called Macedonian organizations -- 'Lions' and 'National Front for the Liberation of Macedonia,' or something like that -- that are [allegedly] behind the events [in Bitola]. But so far we have not confirmed anything."
The Lions and the National Front are previously unknown groups which have claimed credit for the attacks. Pendarovski says there are suspicions at senior levels in the Interior Ministry that local police chiefs in Bitola may be close to these secretive groups. But so far, Pendarovski says, investigations of the unrest have not gotten very far -- in part, he says, because the ministry is concentrating its efforts on the fighting around Kumanovo in the north of the country. "Unfortunately, we've had only four charges brought against four people -- criminal charges -- and all of them, according to our law, have been released and can defend themselves [while] being free. And after that it's up to the court in Bitola, the local court in Bitola, to proceed further with criminal investigations."
Milcin of the Open Society Institute says Bitola has been impoverished since 1997, when Albania's TAT pyramid investment scheme went bust, and many residents lost their life savings. Bitola, in Milcin's words, "is a town which is easily pushed into being involved in events like a pogrom." (Jolyon Naegele)
GROWING SKEPTICISM IN MACEDONIA (RFE/RL) Posted June 6, 2001
http://www.rferl.org/balkan-report/
5 June 2001, Volume 5, Number 39
GROWING SKEPTICISM IN MACEDONIA
As Javier Solana, the EU's security policy chief, became a regular guest in Skopje following the outbreak of the crisis, his visits and ideas increasingly lost support among the small Balkan country's ruling elite and population.
Every unsuccessful crisis resolution effort by Solana or any other Western diplomat -- like, for example, OSCE representative Robert Frowick -- contributes to a growing skepticism in Macedonia (see "RFE/RL Balkan Report," 29 May 2001). This is true whether the sponsor is the EU, the U.S., NATO, or the OSCE. Many Macedonians have come to ask themselves whether the West wants a solution to the crisis at all, and if it wants one, what kind of solution that might be.
Over the past three months, there have been regular statements like this one by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer: "The [German] federal government is concerned about the violence in Macedonia which has flared up again in the area around Tetovo. The use of force by ethnic Albanian extremists, apparently the cause of the most recent conflicts, is to be strongly condemned.... The federal government reiterates its support for the territorial integrity of Macedonia and for the country's democratically elected government. The process of political dialogue carried out with the help of the high representative for the common foreign and security policy of the EU [i.e. Solana] must now be continued swiftly and with a view to achieving results. The government of Macedonia must also contribute to this. All those involved are urged to exercise the greatest restraint and refrain from doing anything which could further aggravate the situation." (Press release of the German Foreign Office of 24 May 2001).
The ambiguity of this kind of statement, and the apparent lack of clarity and vision, have led to a mushrooming of conspiracy theories in the Macedonian press during the past weeks. The main theme of such articles is that the West does not have any real interest in ending the Macedonian crisis that was triggered off by the ethnic Albanian rebels of the National Liberation Army (UCK) earlier this year. Some journalists even go so far as to blame the West for inciting the conflict.
According to most theories, the starting point was NATO's failure to secure the border between Kosova and Macedonia and prevent the rebels from infiltrating Macedonian territory. The West is also chastised for failing to control the economic and financial resources of the Albanian rebels that stem mostly from organized crime in Western Europe, such as cigarette smuggling and drug trafficking.
It was also pointed out that the Swedish Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research (TFF) recently published an analysis which noted that the former Kosova Liberation Army (UCK) and the Macedonian army were trained and supplied by the same U.S. company, Military Professional Resource Incorporated (MPRI). Now members of the former UCK are fighting the Macedonian security forces.
In its latest edition, the Skopje bi-monthly "Forum" accuses MPRI of having "disabled" the Macedonian army by denying it a regular supply of arms on the grounds that certain arms to do not conform to NATO standards or because the Macedonians "do not need them." Thus, the article continues, MPRI (and, by implication, NATO) has contributed to the fact that the Macedonian security forces are not able to cope with the UCK rebels.
But if there allegedly are secret plans to dismember Macedonia -- the bread and butter of Balkan conspiracy theories -- what kind of plans might these be and who might stand behind them?
When the president of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Georgi Efremov, presented a plan for a possible solution of the interethnic conflict in Macedonia, he came in for tough criticism both at home and abroad. The plan Efremov put forward was to exchange heavily Albanian-populated areas of western Macedonia with Albania, while some Macedonian-populated areas around Lake Ohrid were to be added to Macedonia. Efremov also proposed "resettling" the scattered Albanian population from elsewhere in Macedonia to Albania.
At the peak of the almost hysterical reaction of politicians and the media to Efremov's proposal, the state-owned Skopje daily "Nova Makedonija" on 1 June published a front page article entitled: "Together with the Albanian [question], the Macedonian question will be solved as well." The article quoted unnamed "diplomatic sources" as saying that the international community plans to redraw the borders of the Macedonian state. Apart from the above-mentioned exchanges of territories, according to the "Nova Makedonija" article, the country would gain territories from Greece as well as from Bulgaria, and, in any event, not come off too badly.
But there is more. Even if the newspaper does not say so explicitly, it is clear that it believes that the eternal Evil One of all conspiracy theories is also behind this plan: the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA, so the theories continue, is also behind the U.S. company that trains the Macedonian army. And, of course, it is Frowick's alleged employer.
These conspiracy theories might contain some truth somewhere, but they are first and foremost a symptom of the growing fear that a civil war might tear the country apart -- a fear that might at the same time be giving rise to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The perception is, in any event, widespread that the West is unable to cope quickly and effectively with Balkan crises, be they in Bosnia, Kosova, or elsewhere. This combines with the confusion generated by diplomatic efforts beyond the understanding of many local people to produce a desire to find alternative allies and partners.
For the time being, it seems that Russia, Ukraine, and, to a certain extent, Bulgaria will be the military partners of Macedonia in the short run. This is because they give Macedonia what the West will not: weapons to fight the rebels. But Russia and Ukraine -- to the extent that they are interested in becoming involved in the conflict -- have little to offer Macedonia other than military equipment. For its real long-term needs, Macedonia has no alternative to the Western countries. (Ulrich Buechsenschuetz, ub@itinerarium.de)
Five Macedonian soldiers die in rebel attack Posted June 6, 2001
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010606/3/sh8q.html
Wednesday June 6, 5:16 PM
Five Macedonian soldiers die in rebel attack
By Sean Maguire
SKOPJE (Reuters) - Five Macedonian soldiers were killed overnight on Wednesday in the deadliest attack by ethnic Albanians rebels in almost six weeks, government officials said.
The deaths came during fierce fighting above Tetovo in northwestern Macedonia, the country's main ethnic Albanian town, which lasted through the night.
The deaths are sure to worsen inter-ethnic relations and sour attempts to find a political solution to end the ethnic Albanian rebellion launched in February.
"The military situation is worsening," a government source said.
The Macedonian military said rebels had launched attacks late on Tuesday with heavy machine guns and mortars against positions near the village of Gajre. The army responded with artillery and small arms fire.
Army officials said three men had died during an ambush as they were escorting a medical team to help others wounded earlier. It was not clear where the other two died or the total number of wounded.
Reporters in Tetovo could clearly hear sharp exchanges of fire late in the evening and residents of Macedonia's unofficial ethnic Albanian capital gathered in the main square to stare at the hills in the gloom.
Three of the dead soldiers were from Bitula, a majority Slav city in southern Macedonia where Albanian and Muslim shops and businesses were attacked and burnt by Slavs in retribution for a rebel attack on April 28 that left eight soldiers dead.
Four of the dead in that attack were from Bitula.
Some of those wounded on Tuesday night were soldiers and others were members of heavily armed police units that patrol villages.
Ethnic Albanian fighters say they are fighting for greater rights for their minority, a third of Macedonia's population. The government says the rebels are terrorists trying to grab land and destroy the state.
Since early May fighting has been concentrated to the north-east of the capital Skopje but the attack above Tetovo appeared to be an attempt to open a second rebel front.
There have been minor clashes between guerrillas and the army near Tetovo for days. Western diplomatic sources said rebel activity was being hampered by NATO, which was blocking supply lines from neighbouring Kosovo.
Rebels still occupy a string of villages to the northeast of Skopje but fighting in that area has died down since Sunday.
U.S. Defense Chief Visits Balkans Posted June 6, 2001
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010606/8/shcm.html
Wednesday June 6, 4:00 PM
U.S. Defense Chief Visits Balkans
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) - Peacekeeping efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo are making a ``very valuable contribution'' to stability in the Balkans, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday.
His comment, a day after he visited U.S. troops in Kosovo, suggested a more enthusiastic view of peacekeeping than Rumsfeld had expressed previously. A few weeks ago he said he was pushing within the administration to ``do something about'' the strain that humanitarian missions put on American combat forces.
``There is no question but that the SFOR and KFOR forces in the Balkans are making a very valuable contribution to stability in the region, and our interest is peace and stability in the region,'' he told a news conference after meeting with Greek Defense Minister Akis Tsochadzopoulos. SFOR refers to the Bosnia peacekeeping force and KFOR refers to the Kosovo operation.
A prominent theme of President Bush's campaign last year was that the U.S. military is overburdened by non-combat missions such as peacekeeping in the Balkans and elsewhere. He likened these missions to police work and said his administration would narrow the military's overseas commitments.
Rumsfeld has said many times previously that the focus in both Bosnia and Kosovo should be to shift the responsibility for maintaining order to civilian authorities. He has said the real military mission in Bosnia is over, although he has characterized the Kosovo situation differently, saying instability is still a threat.
Rumsfeld was in Thessaloniki to attend an informal meeting of southeastern European defense ministers, including representatives from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Italy and the Ukraine.
Asked whether he saw a need to keep U.S. troops in Kosovo, after having seen them at an observation post near the Macedonia border on Wednesday where they are interdicting arms along a smugglers route, Rumsfeld said, ``Oh, certainly.''
A short while later he qualified that remark by stressing that goal was to eventually get out.
``Obviously the hope and goal and intention of all the nations that have troops in the Balkans is that over a period of time the parties on the ground will sort through their differences in a peaceful and constructive way and find the kind of civil structures that will enable them to have the stability that would be necessary for them on a more durable basis,'' he said.
The United States has about 6,000 troops in Kosovo and about 4,000 in Bosnia. They have been in Bosnia, as part of a 20,000-strong NATO-led operation, since 1995. They entered Kosovo in June 1999 after NATO bombing forced the Serb army out of Kosovo and allowed ethnic Albanians to return. The total peacekeeping force in Kosovo now is about 40,000.
Rumsfeld was flying to Brussels, Belgium, later Wednesday in preparation for two days of talks at NATO headquarters. The topics are expected to include the future of peacekeeping in the Balkans.
US troops still needed in Kosovo, US defense secretary told Posted June 6, 2001
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010605/1/samx.html
Wednesday June 6, 1:41 AM
US troops still needed in Kosovo, US defense secretary told
MIJAK, Yugoslavia, June 6 (AFP) -
US peacekeeping troops are still needed in Kosovo to maintain the fragile stability in the Balkans, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld heard as he made a whistlestop tour of the region Tuesday.
"I will not conjecture what will happen if the US troops are removed," the top US commander in the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo, Army Brigadier General William David, said after Rumsfeld flew into Kosovo.
"As long as KFOR has been here, levels of instability have been managed," he said.
"If asked, I would tell Rumsfeld that US troops are still needed here."
Rumsfeld, who has made no secret of his skepticism about keeping US forces in the Balkans, was making his first official visit to Kosovo since becoming defense secretary in the administration of US President George W. Bush.
To an assembly of US troops at Camp Bondsteel, the main US base in Kosovo, Rumsfeld said: "Your task here is to help maintain stability in this important region.
"But you also are here to help protect the freedom of men and women back home."
Thanking them for their work, Rumsfeld said that he knew that "peacekeeping operations are complex, sometimes extremely dangerous" and added: "We watch what's happening out there very carefully in Washington. We see intelligence reports, we follow the details."
Some 6,000 US soldiers are deployed with the 41,000-strong KFOR presence that has been ensuring security in Kosovo since the end of NATO's 1999 war on Yugoslavia.
Rumsfeld has shown himself to be lukewarm to keeping the US troops in Kosovo, partly because the United States has turned its military attention more to Asia than to Europe and partly because of the Balkans' notorious volatility.
In recent months, the US forces' assigned sector of Kosovo, the southeast, has been the scene of much activity as ethnic Albanian rebels criss-cross over the border with Macedonia to wage a conflict with the Macedonian army.
Rumsfeld, who met briefly with Macedonian Defense Minister Vlado Buckovski at the airport in the airport in the Macedonian capital of Skopje on his way to Kosovo, also viewed the border area.
After flying over a ridge where rebels had been fighting Macedonian forces, the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters carrying Rumsfeld and his party, and their Apache gunship escorts, landed for a closer look.
The village they landed near was Mijak, a cluster of houses 50 metres (yards) from a Macedonian border post.
A 31-member US platoon has been standing guard and posted here since early March, when they drove out ethnic Albanian rebels in a firefight, the platoon commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Owens, told Rumsfeld.
Since then, they have been trying to staunch the flow of weapons over the border to the rebels.
The US defense secretary walked around the zone, ducking into a sandbagged observation post to shake hands with troops in combat gear, and peering across razor wire separating Kosovo from Macedonia.
At one point, Rumsfeld asked how many arms smugglers had recently crossed over.
Owens turned to his sergeant. "How many 'mules' did we see coming through the night before?" he asked.
"Nine, sir."
After leaving Kosovo, Rumsfeld passed again through Skopje, which is being used as a logistics supply base for KFOR. There, he inspected five US army "Hunter" drones used for unmanned aerial surveillance missions along the Kosovo-Macedonian border.
He then boarded a flight for Salonika, Greece, where he is Wednesday to participate in a meeting of defense ministers from southeast European countries which is expected to dominated by the security situation in the Balkans.
Macedonian interior minister warns of escalation in clashes Posted June 6, 2001
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010606/1/sc4j.html
Wednesday June 6, 8:37 AM
Macedonian interior minister warns of escalation in clashes
Macedonia's Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski warned that attacks by ethnic Albanian rebels in the north of the country would intensify in coming days, as five members of the security forces were wounded in clashes.
"We have groups of terrorists who have no intention of withdrawing from Macedonian soil," he told national television. "On the contrary, they are continuing to gather and are now in the Sar mountains" in the northwest of the country.
"We must act to find a solution because they don't understand the language of dialogue," Boskovski said of the rebels, warning that he expected an intensification in attacks in the next few days.
"Our troops are ready, our defence will be more firm," he said.
The warning came as ethnic Albanian rebels and Macedonian security forces again exchanged fire in the north of the country late on Tuesday, wounding three policemen, authorities said.
The incident occurred when rebels launched a mortar attack against police in Gajre, a village near Tetovo and the scene of clashes on Monday, police said. They said other such exchanges had been reported near Lisec, another village in the region.
The head of the hospital in Tetovo, Rahim Thaci, told AFP that three policemen had been admitted with injuries to their arms and legs, but that their conditions were not critical.
A defense ministry spokesman, Georgi Trendafilov, said two soldiers were also wounded in clashes late Tuesday in the Sar mountains, above Tetovo.
Gajre was one of the areas occupied by forces from the rebel National Liberation Army (NLA) in March. The guerrillas occupied around a dozen villages around Tetovo before being forced back at the end of the month by a government offensive.
The rebels have since taken control of another group of villages around Kumanovo, also in the north, with Macedonian troops trying for more than a month to dislodge them with almost daily bombardments, so far in vain.
The majority ethnic Albanian region of Tetovo has remained a focus of fighting, with rebels launching attacks from nearby mountainous areas.
But while incidents around Tetovo have increased since Sunday, bombardments have ceased on villages near to Kumanovo.
An army spokesman, Colonel Blagoja Markovski, meanwhile confirmed that groups of 20 to 30 rebels had been spotted around the villages of Matejce, Otlja, Orizare and Slupcane, occupied by the guerrillas.
He said that Macedonian security forces had opened fire on a van in the area which he said was carrying arms and ammunition.
No information was available as to the number of possible casualties.
Macedonian mercy mission leaves thousands behind Posted June 5, 2001
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010604/3/rxw0.html
Tuesday June 5, 5:14 AM
Macedonian mercy mission leaves thousands behind
By Rosalind Russell
KUMANOVO, Macedonia (Reuters) - Only the weakest were allowed to leave Lipkovo on Monday, a handful of old and sick civilians from thousands left cowering in basements in a Macedonian village besieged by weeks of fighting.
Children weakened by diarrhoea and old men shaking with fatigue and fear had to be carried from the Red Cross vehicles which had sped them to safety through the no-man's land in the north of the Balkan state.
Just 66 civilians were rescued from between 13,000 to 15,000 people still trapped in Lipkovo, one of a string of villages occupied by ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the green foothills of mountains that border Kosovo.
Women clutching their babies and plastic bags with meagre belongings wiped away tears with their headscarves as they were met by friends and relatives in the town of Kumanovo a few km (miles) away.
With artillery, tanks and helicopters, the Macedonian army has been trying for a month to blast the rebels out of their positions in and around the villages. The guerrillas have responded with machineguns and mortars.
Monday's mercy mission was the first the International Committee of the Red Cross has been able to make in nine days.
Lipkovo, relatively unscathed, has become a magnet for the ethnic Albanian civilians fleeing combat in the surrounding villages.
"Our village is full of people," said Fatimah Sharif, who was evacuated with her paralysed mother-in-law among the group, which was hand-picked by the local authorities.
"In my house there are 34 people. We take in anyone who comes, but there is nothing for them."
Food supplies were running desperately low in the village and clean water is scarce, refugees say. People are starting to fall sick.
"There are no medicines, but so many people, in the houses, in the basements, all together," said Fatimah. "We were eating just bread and salt. I think there is enough for just two more days, then it will be a catastrophe."
ALBANIAN CIVILIANS BLAME ARMY
The government has accused the guerrillas of using civilians as human shields. It says the army is making slow progress on the battlefield for fear of inflicting civilian casualties.
But most ethnic Albanian refugees pledge loyalty to the rebel National Liberation Army (UCK) which says it is fighting to end discrimination against Macedonia's one-third Albanian minority.
"They have fired shells at us. And in the other villages houses are destroyed, mosques are destroyed," said Fatimah. "The Macedonian army wants to eat us. It says it wants to destroy the guerrillas but it is shooting at us."
But refugees from the majority Slav community see things differently. Pero Giorgevic and his family fled the ethnically mixed village of Matejce nearly a month ago.
"We all lived together in Matejce. One Albanian kept a cow for me," he said, sipping coffee in a small room crowded with rowdy children.
"My kids went to school with Albanian kids, they could even speak their language. Now the UCK has destroyed everything we have. How can we go back?"
William Walker: A Big Tent for Macedonia Posted June 5, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16709-2001Jun3.html
A Big Tent for Macedonia
By William G. Walker
Monday, June 4, 2001; Page A19
Macedonia is at a place at which taking the wrong fork in the road could lead to another Kosovo, or worse. Recent TV coverage of Albanian villagers fleeing the violence of government efforts to crush a guerrilla force -- scenes straight out of the 1999 Kosovar refugee tidal wave that engulfed the region -- only confirms this possibility.
The newly announced "grand coalition" government in Skopje has the historic responsibility to formulate and deliver a bold package of reforms. If successfully implemented, such measures would contribute to forging a multiethnic society in Macedonia, one that values diversity, cooperation and coexistence among its citizens. But if the coalition fails to carry out significant reforms, the results will be catastrophic for Macedonia and the region at large.
Attempts have been made by the Macedonian authorities to ease tensions between the country's Slavic and Albanian ethnic groups. To a large extent, these efforts have been too little too late. After a decade of Macedonian independence, its Albanian citizens see themselves as second-class citizens in their own country. Despite the fact that Macedonia is a nation of many minority groups, with none representing an overwhelming majority, Slavic Macedonians occupy more than 90 percent of public-sector jobs and make up 90 percent of the police force and 90 percent of the university student population. Macedonian remains the only official language permitted, and Albanian-language universities are denied public funding.
This state of affairs is untenable. Much effort went into forming the grand coalition. Now it must step up and do grand things. The coalition must demonstrate with actions instead of words, and in no uncertain terms, that Macedonia is a truly multiethnic society that guarantees and respects the rights of all.
Unfortunately, the present regime is unlikely to take that path unless it receives both help and pressure from the West. Having led two international peacekeeping efforts in the region -- in Croatia and Kosovo -- I am convinced there is no substitute for high-level American involvement in solving Balkan ethnic conflict. The visit of Secretary of State Colin Powell to the region was significant and timely. But more must be done. The United States should step up its involvement by hosting a Dayton-like conference in which representatives of the coalition regime and all important sectors come together with the goal of designing a reform package to put Macedonia on the road to sustainable stability.
Such a conference will have limited success, however, if the international community continues to reject all contact with the National Liberation Army (NLA). We fear that to talk with the NLA somehow will "legitimize" a violent group -- as if the NLA, with its cause, its popular support and its guns needed such legitimacy. The international community should have welcomed and built upon the recent agreement between Albanian political leaders and the NLA brokered by U.S. diplomat Robert Frowick. Instead, the agreement was condemned. History has shown that more often than not combatants such as the NLA -- the Vietcong, those in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland, the FMLN in El Salvador -- will not lay down their arms if they are branded as "illegitimate" and excluded from negotiations. The KLA in Kosovo is a further example. The international community is right to denounce the tactics and violence of the NLA. But lasting peace in Macedonia will be elusive unless the NLA is engaged, either through direct talks or intermediaries.
Neither side in this crisis can win a military victory. The government's efforts to do so will only drive more recruits into the ranks of the NLA. Slobodan Milosevic acted on the basis of a similar miscalculation. In the heat of the moment, the government, the NLA and the rest of us appear to have lost sight of this fact. The NLA has offered to talk instead of fight. Let's take it up on the offer, while working more closely with the coalition regime.
Bold steps are needed immediately to prevent Macedonia from descending into a cycle of tit-for-tat violence and ethnic hatred. Does anyone believe that further shelling of Albanian villages and further killing of Albanian civilians will convince Macedonians of Albanian ethnicity that the government and the army welcome their presence and recognize their rights?
The writer is a retired career ambassador who headed a Kosovo mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.