[ALBSA-Info] How many groups, how many guns?

[e_dusha at hotmail.com]

Both of Macedonia's communities are split between hawks and doves

Aug 23rd 2001 | SIPKOVICE
>From The Economist print edition

ALI AHMETI, the smooth-talking leader of Macedonia's ethnic-Albanian 
insurgents, has come a long way in the six months since his National 
Liberation Army (NLA) proclaimed its existence and was instantly denounced 
by western governments as a marginal group of bandits with whom no decent 
person could have dealings. This week Mr Ahmeti and his black-uniformed 
comrades were graciously playing host to senior NATO liaison officers, who 
swooped in by helicopter to visit them in a school classroom halfway up a 
mountain in rebel-controlled territory in western Macedonia.

As the negotiators shared chocolate biscuits and fine-tuned the procedure by 
which NLA fighters would hand over their weapons (or some of them, anyway) 
to NATO soldiers under a western-brokered peace plan, the atmosphere was 
businesslike and cordial. Outside, British paratroopers—the advance guard of 
a NATO force that will eventually number 3,500—chatted to NLA fighters.

But despite the apparently promising tone of these exchanges, it is still 
far from clear whether NATO can simply relieve some obliging guerrillas of 
their weapons—a process that is supposed to take only 30 days—and then leave 
Macedonia to let its people live happily ever after.

As NATO's exhaustive press releases make clear, the intervention force which 
the allies formally agreed to deploy on August 22nd—after being told a 
ceasefire was more or less holding—will be drawn from 13 countries, with 
Britain, France and Italy providing the lion's share and Germany still shaky 
about what it can do (see article). But it is much harder to find accurate 
information about the precise number and character of the local armed 
factions which the allies may encounter.

The conflict NATO is supposed to be ending has two main protagonists: 
government forces, led and dominated by the Slav Macedonian majority, 
against the NLA guerrillas whose declared aim is to secure enhanced 
political rights for Albanians. To a large extent, the NLA has stolen the 
show from the ethnic-Albanian political parties which have been pursuing 
similar aims by constitutional means.

But in the Balkans things are never that simple. There are acute tensions 
within both of Macedonia's main communities (to say nothing of the small 
Turkish, Gypsy and Serb minorities). The outcome of these micro-conflicts 
may well determine whether the broader peace effort works.

In the Slav Macedonian camp, President Boris Trajkovski, a Methodist 
minister, and his foreign and defence ministers are the main exponents of 
moderation. They reckon that Macedonia has more to gain from co-operating 
with the western world. But growing signs of cosiness between the NLA and 
NATO have enraged many Macedonian Slavs and made them warmer to the more 
nationalist faction under the aegis of Ljube Boskovski, the interior 
minister.

If NATO commanders feel nervous about their troops' security, it is mostly 
because of the hostility they sense from the Boskovski supporters in the 
VMRO party, which has several ultra-nationalist offshoots. Many of Mr 
Boskovski's followers—perhaps 10,000 of them, in a country where the regular 
army is only a little larger than that—have guns and are ready to use them. 
They also have money because their party is active in the black economy. 
They are seething with bitterness towards the whole Albanian community, and 
they are angry about NATO's apparent tolerance for misdeeds by the 
rebels—including the killing and expulsion of Slav Macedonian civilians.

Some apparently believe in tit-for-tat retaliation and have acted 
accordingly. Human-rights workers are convinced that VMRO sympathisers with 
links to the security forces have already been killing and maltreating 
Albanian civilians

Conscious of how hard it will be to win the hearts and minds of Macedonia's 
Slav majority, western governments have launched a propaganda campaign for 
peace. But it has started badly. An advance team of (mainly British) troops 
that arrived in Skopje were shielded from the press by junior officers with 
little training in how to deal with the media—let alone how to smooth the 
feathers of Macedonia's prickly pro-government journalists.

The private hope of western diplomats is that if the peace plan is seen to 
work and set Macedonia back on the path of normal economic development, 
voters will turn away from the VMRO school of nationalism and plump for 
moderates in elections early next year. But in the short term, more 
passionate feelings may be on the rise.




Real armies and fake
On the Albanian side, it is at least clear who speaks for most of the 
rebels. The hospitable Mr Ahmeti, though branded a war criminal by Mr 
Boskovski, has emerged from the shadows to give press conferences and 
declare (in language that could have been taken verbatim from speeches by 
politicians fronting for Northern Ireland's IRA) that “the war is over”.

Unfortunately, the parallel with Ireland does not end there. Just as the 
“Real IRA” claims to be carrying on the anti-British struggle which the 
Provisional IRA has halted, the standard of militant Albanian nationalism 
has been raised by a new force calling itself the Albanian National Army 
(ANA), which is pledging to fight on—and which claims to have killed several 
Macedonian soldiers already.

Both NATO and the NLA are reluctant to acknowledge that any such force 
exists. One conspiracy theory holds that the ANA has been invented by Slav 
Macedonian diehards to discredit the Albanian cause. Another suggests that 
Mr Ahmeti and his cronies are keeping the “new” army in reserve as a front 
behind which they can return to war if their demands are not met.

In between its amicable negotiations with the rebels, NATO is discreetly 
trying to find out how much weaponry the NLA is taking out of Macedonia for 
burial or storage. The Macedonian government is insisting that since there 
are about 7,000 rebels, they must hand over at least 7,000 guns. The precise 
numbers are still being negotiated. But it would be naive to imagine that 
all armed Albanians will put all their guns beyond use.




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