[ALBSA-Info] Macedonia peace talks resume under ambush cloud

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

Macedonia peace talks resume under ambush cloud

By Daniel Simpson

  
SKOPJE, July 3 (Reuters) - Leaders across Macedonia's ethnic divide restarted 
peace talks on Tuesday with help from Western envoys but progress appeared 
likely to be difficult after an Albanian guerrilla ambush killed a Macedonian 
soldier. 

U.S. envoy James Pardew and his European Union counterpart Francois Leotard 
joined the cross-party session in parliament after holding two days of 
separate crisis talks with politicians to kick-start efforts to avert a civil 
war with dialogue. 

But neither gave any indication of how the deadlocked process might be 
salvaged to deliver substantial enough results to persuade Albanian gunmen to 
hand over their weapons. 

The guerrillas, whose rebellion in the name of greater rights for minority 
Albanians has brought Macedonia to the brink in less than five months, are 
planning to advance not retreat and Tuesday's ambush can only raise the 
pressure on the talks. 

"There is a fair bit of military muscle-flexing going on on both sides," a 
diplomatic source said, noting two successive nights of helicopter gunship 
strikes on a rebel-held village. 

A rebel commander codenamed Sokoli confirmed there had been an attack near 
the Kosovo border, where the guerrillas surfaced in February. The army said 
the rebels ambushed a patrol near the hamlet of Tanusevci, killing one 
soldier and injuring another. 

"One of the vehicles was hit by rockets from a hand-held launcher," army 
spokesman Blagoja Markovski said. 

Defence Minister Vlado Buckovski said peace talks had to move quickly and 
said the military situation was worsening after the guerrillas vowed to 
extend the territory they control. 

"The terrorists are in a phase of radicalising their acts," Buckovski said, 
but declined to say if he had used a weekend trip to Ukraine to restock the 
army's arsenal. 

MIRACLES UNLIKELY 

Diplomats say Pardew, appointed at the weekend to intensify Western efforts 
to broker a deal, should not be expected to work miracles in persuading the 
tiny Balkan republic's politicians to compromise on improving the lot of its 
Albanian population. 

Although now holding daily meetings, he is unlikely to make his first verdict 
public before Friday, a U.S. official said. 

On the table is a fresh draft of Macedonia's constitution, rewritten by a 
French expert in a bid to address the sensitive question of how to define the 
official status of Albanians. 

But diplomats expect this to be one of the last issues to be finalised and 
neither side has commented on the new proposal. 

Last week's controversial NATO-backed evacuation of rebels from a village on 
Skopje's outskirts sought to ease pressure on the talks. But the rebel 
National Liberation Army (NLA) has since seized new ground while the 
politicians have stood still. 

The rebels and Albanian politicians demand international mediation and are 
sure to welcome U.S. involvement. But their Macedonian counterparts are 
resisting a formalised foreign role. 

President Boris Trajkovski told Greek foreign minister George Papandreou that 
plans for an international peace summit being touted by several EU nations, 
including Greece, were unnecessary, although advice from Western envoys was 
welcome. 

"The political leaders in Macedonia have the responsibility for coping with 
the crisis," Trajkovski told Papandreou by telephone, according to a 
statement released by his cabinet. 

The only intervention both sides agree on is for NATO to help disarm the 
rebels if they agree to give up. But without major progress in the talks, 
this remains a distant prospect. 

Some 100,000 civilians have fled their homes since February, more than 70,000 
of them to join Albanian kin in Kosovo.