[ALBSA-Info] Bulgaria urges firm stand against separatists

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

Bulgaria urges firm stand against separatists

By Douglas Hamilton
  
BRUSSELS, March 6 (Reuters) - Ethnic Albanian guerrillas trying to test the 
will of Balkan governments are a politically isolated group that must be 
stopped in its tracks, Bulgarian President Petar Stoyanov said on Tuesday. 

"The message must be firm and categorical," Stoyanov said. Any new ethnic 
conflict could wreck efforts to stabilise the region after nearly a decade of 
wars, and set back Bulgaria's own post-communist reform programme by years. 

But he said NATO and other international organisations appeared to have no 
coherent view at the moment on how to tackle guerrilla challenges in 
Macedonia and southern Serbia. 

Stoyanov said the whole region could take heart from the unequivocal way in 
which the rebel actions had been condemned, by Albania and by Kosovo Albanian 
leaders alike. 

He said Bulgaria would contribute troops to a United Nations border 
protection force for Macedonia if the U.N. Security Council this week takes 
up Macedonia's appeal for the creation of a buffer zone along its northern 
border with Serbia and Kosovo. 

The message must get across to the gunmen that regional governments and the 
international community will not stand for a new round of ethnic violence and 
are "ready to go to any length" to prevent extremists from stoking one, 
Stoyanov said. 

The clearer that message the less likely a major military operation would be, 
the Bulgarian leader told reporters during a visit to Brussels. 

SLOW BUILDUP 

NATO has been heavily criticised for allowing ethnic Albanian separatist 
rebels to turn a buffer zone it controls on the east Kosovo border into a 
safe haven over the past year, from which they have launched attacks on 
Serbian police. 

The alliance, which has 36,000 well-armed troops in Kosovo, is now being 
berated for failing to stop gunmen exploiting gaps on the Kosovo-Macedonia 
border and for allegedly putting protection of its own forces above all else. 

Stoyanov, who has kept in close touch with President Boris Trajkovski of 
neighbouring Macedonia during a week of crisis, said ethnic Albanian 
guerrillas who took control of the border village of Tanusevci were not 
native to Macedonia. 

"It would be difficult to say if they're Kosovo Albanians but one thing is 
clear, and that is that they crossed the border from Kosovo to Macedonia," he 
said. 

Their purpose was to test the will of the region and see if there is still 
readiness to act vigorously "or if a certain fatigue has overcome them and 
they're not interested," said Stoyanov. 

This extremism, once confined to Yugoslavia, "has now been exported to a 
third country and this new nuance calls for a very firm and strong response." 

About a third of Macedonia's population of two million is ethnic Albanian, 
the rest mainly Slav. There have been a couple of attacks on police recently 
by self-proclaimed separatists, and gunmen who occupied Tanusevci bore the 
"UCK" insignia of a so-called National Liberation Army. 

Clarifying earlier statements, Stoyanov said it would be "inconceivable" for 
Bulgaria to send troops to Macedonia unilaterally. Such a step would only be 
taken "through international organisations of which we are members," he said.