[ALBSA-Info] (no subject)

[e_dusha at hotmail.com]

Ethnic conflict in Macedonia

Waiting
Jul 14th 2001 | TETOVO
>From The Economist print edition

For peace, perhaps. For more fighting, probably

HOLED up with a large-calibre American sniper’s rifle in a ruined house on 
the slopes of the ethnic-Albanian quarter of Tetovo, the rebel sharpshooter 
could open fire on any target within 1,000 metres across Macedonia’s 
second-largest city. And, like others, he is ready to.

Supposedly, a ceasefire has put Macedonia’s insurgency, now in its seventh 
month of violence, on hold. But this week the rebel National Liberation Army 
set up roadblocks in and around Tetovo, in effect taking control of many 
suburbs and surrounding villages. Some of these heavily manned roadblocks 
are only a few hundred metres from the sandbags of police positions. The 
police mostly hold their fire; they are under orders not to break the 
ceasefire, on whose continuance all hope of successful political 
negotiations depends. Instead, the rebels claim, the government is sending 
armed civilians to do the shooting. Certainly, it is using Serbian, 
Ukrainian and Bulgarian mercenaries. If it is using civilians, that is new.

The NLA can afford to wait. It reckons it has the military upper hand. Its 
forces may be the weaker, but they have shown that they can resist months of 
everything, artillery bombardment and helicopter strafing included, that the 
inexperienced government troops can aim at them. There are bigger forces 
nearby, of course: NATO has warned the rebels that any attack on Skopje, or 
the capital’s airport, might be taken as an attack on itself. But even then, 
what happens?

NATO has said that it is ready, if the ceasefire holds, and if there is a 
political peace deal, to send in a force of up to 3,000 men to disarm the 
rebels. But it worries whether it could even do that, and get out again 
within the six weeks it talks of, rather than find itself drawn in as a 
long-term peacekeeping force. Still less does it want to come in shooting 
from the start.

Neither of its two conditions looks likely to be met. Macedonia’s Slav and 
ethnic-Albanian political parties have before them a draft framework of 
constitutional reforms, intended to meet Albanian grievances, drawn up by 
local and western experts. But the Slav side is split. The hawks are led by 
the prime minister, Ljubco Georgievski, backed by the interior minister, who 
controls the heavily militarised police force. The doves, under President 
Boris Trajkovski, believe these hardliners instigated the recent violent 
protests outside the parliament building in which westerners were attacked 
and the president’s office shot at. The hawks are also believed to be 
backing paramilitary organisations ready to attack civilian Albanians if the 
rebels kill too many policemen or soldiers, or occupy too much more 
territory.

But just suppose the ceasefire holds, and the four Slav and Albanian parties 
represented in the two-month-old coalition government can agree on and 
implement a constitutional reform. NATO troops will arrive, set themselves 
up around the towns of Tetovo, Gostivar and Kumanovo, and start collecting 
rebel weapons. The ethnic Albanians will see their language officially 
recognised, and their community given equal political rights with the Slav 
majority. In their villages, the Slavs manning the local police posts may be 
replaced by Albanians. Contented, the rebels will hand in their arms to NATO 
and largely fade away. The European Union, which put Macedonia on the road 
to full EU membership with a stabilisation and association agreement signed 
in April, will start deploying the euro50m ($42m) of aid that it has 
promised. And the government no doubt will replace its helicopters with 
flying pigs.

Yet the alternatives are grim. Suppose, say, that the NLA entices NATO in 
with a promise to disarm and then attacks the government forces across a 
line of NATO troops. Imagine a serious outbreak of paramilitary violence, 
typically the first step to disintegration in a Balkan country. A visiting 
EU-American delegation said last week, hours before the ceasefire took 
nominal effect, that Macedonia was as close as it had ever been to erupting 
into total war. A week later, little has happened to make that prospect seem 
much farther away.


_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com