[ALBSA-Info] Macedonia's Pivotal Albanian

[Kreshnik Bejko]

Arben Xhaferi, Macedonia’s pivotal Albanian
Mar 29th 2001
>From The Economist print edition

HOW much time, and how much room for manoeuvre, does Arben Xhaferi, the 
modulated voice of Macedonia’s aggrieved Albanians, still have left? That is 
the question on the minds of the many, from the south Balkan plains to the 
chanceries of Brussels and Washington, who are still hoping that a fresh, 
horrible war of Yugoslav succession can be avoided.

The past two weeks have been among the toughest for Mr Xhaferi (pronounced, 
roughly, Jafferi), a grey-faced, soft-spoken veteran of journalism and 
nationalist agitation with the battered, lived-in features of a Balkan 
intellectual. As leader of the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA), which 
shares power uneasily—but from a position of some strength—with an old and 
apparently reformed Slavic-nationalist party, he personifies the belief that 
Macedonia’s inter-communal quarrels may yet be ended peacefully.

Since mid-March, though, his position has been challenged by the sudden 
emergence of an ethnic-Albanian rebel movement, the National Liberation 
Army, which says it wants roughly the same things as Mr Xhaferi (in other 
words, sharply improved constitutional rights for Albanians in Macedonia) 
but insists that war will do the job more swiftly and certainly than 
politics; especially when the warriors can count on logistical support from 
cousins in Kosovo, whose Serb overlords were driven out in 1999.

By the end of March, after an offensive by Macedonia’s gimcrack security 
forces to expel the guerrillas from the northern mountains where they had 
cheekily encamped, the government of President Boris Trajkovski was bold 
enough to claim that the spectre of civil war had been staved off; things 
could return to normal now.

In fact, as Mr Xhaferi knows all too well, there is no reason to be 
sanguine. At best, Macedonia’s rulers have a small opportunity to satisfy 
the Albanians, who probably account for at least a third of the country’s 2m 
people—without hopelessly alienating the Slavic majority. How to achieve 
that was the subject of some hard talking this week between Mr Xhaferi and 
Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign-policy spokesman, who has been 
shuttling between Brussels and Skopje, Macedonia’s capital.

At a minimum, both seemed to agree, a new local-government law must be 
passed so as to give municipalities (including Albanian-dominated ones) the 
power to raise and spend money freely. The Albanian language, already used 
in many primary schools and in a fee-paying university that is due to open 
officially this autumn, must become the medium of teaching in some secondary 
schools as well. And the census, due to take place in a few weeks, must be 
fairly conducted so that the Albanians’ true demographic weight, claimed by 
some to be approaching 40%, can be ascertained. That in turn should give 
Albanians a stronger vantage-point from which to seek changes in the 
constitution.

Unless all this was set in train rapidly, a weary-looking Mr Xhaferi was 
telling people this week, a renewed resort to violence by his people would 
be inevitable. And if the Slav-led government reacted intemperately to that 
violence, then he and his party would immediately leave the ruling 
coalition. These warnings were not so much threats as statements of hard 
political fact. If and when Macedonia’s towns and villages become polarised, 
then everybody will simply reach for the nearest gun, including the DPA’s 
activists, who are no strangers to hidden arms caches and have connections 
with the smuggling underworld.

In fact, however convenient it would be to divide the region’s 
ethnic-Albanian leaders into pacifists and warriors, or moderates and 
extremists, the distinction is not a neat or easy one. Mr Xhaferi, for 
example, has been cast in many different roles. In 1968, at the age of 20, 
he was a keen organiser of demonstrations in his native Tetovo, Macedonia’s 
main ethnic-Albanian town. After studying philosophy in Belgrade, he moved 
to Kosovo, where, during the two decades before Serbia quashed the 
province’s autonomy in 1989, ethnic Albanians ruled the roost. As a senior 
editor at Pristina television, he developed a name as a critic of art, 
sculpture and the cinema.

When communist Yugoslavia started to break up, and new parties began to 
proliferate, Mr Xhaferi was never far from centre-stage in the politics of 
the ethnic-Albanian world. But it would be hard to pigeonhole him as a 
moderate or a hardliner. In Kosovo in 1990, he helped to found a Social 
Democratic Party whose manifesto was less nationalist than that of Ibrahim 
Rugova, the veteran leader of the Kosovar cause. But on returning to his 
native Macedonia in the 1990s, Mr Xhaferi surprised many people by the 
radicalism of his demands for greater rights for ethnic Albanians. He called 
for Macedonia to be “federalised”, a measure which many people feared, or 
hoped, would lead to full partition.

For the past two years, he has been party to a “historic bargain” with the 
Slav majority. This meant setting aside his calls for federalism in return 
for cabinet seats and the promise of gradual improvements in his people’s 
status. But at best, this has been a calculated, loveless deal between 
peoples whose mutual mistrust remains undiminished and is probably rising. 
The war over Kosovo in 1999, which left that province’s ethnic-Albanian 
majority firmly in charge, has fuelled hopes among the Albanians, and fears 
among the Slavs, that a historic shift in favour of the Albanians is taking 
place across the whole region, as their demographic and economic weight 
rises.

If that is true, then the best hope of avoiding war is to manage that 
process in a civilised way—without a violent attempt to impose border 
changes. Mr Xhaferi’s judgment, experience and personal authority could be 
crucial. But the constraints on his freedom of action are not only 
political. Although his mind is as sharp as ever, he is visibly suffering 
from a brain condition whose symptoms are similar to those of Parkinson’s 
disease. His speech is often slurred and hard to understand. For that 
reason, too, people are asking: how long does Arben Xhaferi still have left 
in politics? And if he were to bow out, who might take his place?

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