[ALBSA-Info] EU envoy starts Macedonia mission, NATO urges deal

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

EU envoy starts Macedonia mission, NATO urges deal

By Anatoly Verbin

  
SKOPJE, June 29 (Reuters) - The European Union's new Balkans envoy, Francois 
Leotard, on Friday met Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski on the first 
step of his mission aimed at averting a new war in the Balkans. 

Macedonian troops fired occasional machinegun and mortar rounds at ethnic 
Albanian rebel positions just above the city of Tetovo, but Reuters reporters 
said there were no fresh skirmishes in the northeast. 

In Brussels, NATO said it had given final approval to a plan to send up to 
3,000 troops to Macedonia to collect and destroy the weapons of ethnic 
Albanian rebels. 

The force would only go once a lasting ceasefire had been declared and a 
political agreement reached between Macedonian political parties -- the task 
Leotard is due to facilitate. 

"The ball is now firmly in the court of the Macedonian government to deliver 
on the political dialogue and the ceasefire in order to allow NATO's help to 
come into effect," NATO Secretary-General George Robertson told Reuters in 
London. 

Western nations have been engaged in intensive diplomacy to try to halt the 
four-month-old rebellion in Macedonia, fuelled from neighbouring 
NATO-patrolled Kosovo. 

"I indicated to President Trajkovski that there were several levels of 
dialogue," Leotard told reporters after the meeting. 

"There is the political dialogue among parliamentary representatives, but 
there's another dialogue which is carried out between the authorities of this 
republic with the international community and the opinion of the European 
Union has its place in this." 

Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political leaders have been discussing ways to 
improve minority rights to undercut the four-month-old rebellion, but talks 
have stalled. 

The latest meeting was disrupted on Monday when armed police reservists 
stormed into parliament during a nationalist riot and participants in the 
talks were evacuated through a back door. 

Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski said on Friday he had ordered 
demobilisation of some police reservists. 

LEOTARD STARTED WITH A SNAG 

The Albanians are demanding a more formalised international participation, 
something the Macedonian side has so far resisted, fearing it will play into 
their opponents' hands, but diplomats say such a move is crucial to get 
negotiations moving. 

Leotard made his talks ever more difficult when on Tuesday, one day after his 
appointment, he said the government should talk to the rebels. 

He later clarified his comments to make clear the EU position -- negotiations 
with the one-third minority's political leaders, but not the guerrillas -- 
remained unchanged. 

Another Leotard task is to avoid the prospect of NATO getting dragged into 
yet another conflict in former Yugoslavia. Slobodan Milosevic, blamed for 
most of the wars, was transferred to an international court in The Hague on 
Thursday. 

NATO has had what it calls "technical" contacts with the insurgents, 
brokering a deal this week to end an army onslaught in a strategic village. 

CIVILIANS SUFFER 

NATO spokesman Yves Brodeur told Reuters in Brussels that 15 of the 19 NATO 
member countries, including the United States, had pledged to take part in 
the operation under which 3,000 NATO troops would come to help disarm the 
rebels. 

About 100,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanian villagers, have been displaced. 
Thousands of others remain trapped in the northern hills held by the rebels 
in conditions described by some aid workers as close to a humanitarian 
catastrophe. 

A doctor in the northeasten village of Slupcane, held by the rebels and 
shelled by the troops since early May,  said the situation there was 
"catastrophic." 

"We have a lot of infection. We do not have food. There are a lot of dead 
animals. If they do nothing to bury them, it is possible there will be an 
epidemic," said the doctor who preferred to be called by his first name, 
Fatmir. 

In Kosovo, the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force said 20 suspected guerrillas 
from Macedonia were detained on Thursday near the border. Three of them had 
gunshot wounds.