[ALBSA-Info] ANALYSIS-Ethnic Albanian gunmen in Macedonia turn political

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

ANALYSIS-Ethnic Albanian gunmen in Macedonia turn political

By Philippa Fletcher

  
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, March 12 (Reuters) - A hitherto obscure ethnic Albanian 
group fighting on the border of Kosovo has signalled its ambition to become a 
political force in Macedonia -- exactly what the international commmunity 
feared. 

A communique faxed at the weekend to Deutsche Welle radio in Germany in the 
name of the group, the National Liberation Army, contained concrete demands 
for the first time. 

The shadowy group, held responsible for violence along the Macedonia-Kosovo 
border that has claimed at least five lives, first emerged in January when it 
said it carried out a grenade attack on a Macedonian police station that 
killed an officer. 

The NLA's demands were more moderate than earlier speculated -- calling for 
equal rights for ethnic Albanians in Macedonia while respecting the small 
Balkan state's integrity, countering talk they were separatists bent on 
creating a "Greater Albania." 

The gunmen and their backers are clearly aiming to tap into the political 
mainstream in Macedonia where Albanians, one-third of the population, see 
unity with ethnic kin in nearby Kosovo and Albania as more of a dream than a 
practical political aim. 

"Of course if Albanians were in one state then they would not have many of 
the everyday problems they have because of their ethnicity," Arben Xhaferi, 
leader of the Albanian party in Macedonia's ruling coalition, told Reuters 
last week. 

"But happiness does not start here because even in mono-ethnic states there 
are troubles with democracy and individual welfare. Very often conditions 
there can be even harder," he said, in an apparent reference to 
often-turbulent Albania. The apparent moderation of the NLA's demands will 
not make them any less unsettling to Western diplomats wondering why they 
have to be pursued with violence and concerned such agitation will tip 
Macedonia's fragile inter-ethnic harmony into chaos. 

ALBANIAN LEADERS WORRIED 

Xhaferi says the armed group that emerged on the border with Kosovo two 
months ago threatens his party's attempts to win more rights for Albanians in 
Macedonia through political means, just as those efforts are bearing fruit. 

Albanians living in the comparatively wealthy Tetovo region in the west of 
the country, where an Albanian now runs the police force, tend to agree with 
Xhaferi that the ballot box, not the bullet, is the way forward. 

"The best way is to get up in parliament," said Bardhyl Isa, a student at 
Tetovo University, an Albanian institution finally permitted to exist after 
years of campaigning, though the Macedonian authorities still do not 
recognise its diplomas. 

For Isa, the clashes between the gunmen and the security forces in and around 
the border village of Tanusevci, where the population is poor and isolated, 
are a source of concern. 

"If the situation starts to get heavy then police will go out onto the 
streets," he said. If things got really bad, he would fight, "but I hope it 
won't happen." 

The prospect of such people being drawn into conflict has alarmed the 
international community, which sees Macedonia as a beacon of hope in a region 
ravaged by war. 

The guerrillas were pushed out of Tanusevci last week by a U.S.-led 
contingent of the peacekeeping force that has been in Kosovo since NATO 
intervened to halt Serb repression of ethnic Albanians there. Low-level 
clashes between gunmen and Macedonian forces go on. 

International officials have issued a chorus of condemnation of what they 
call "extremists" and NATO Secretary General George Robertson has sent 
high-level missions to the region. 

SERBIA CONFLICT SEEN LINKED 

Diplomats fear the NLA could link with ethnic Albanian insurgents elsewhere, 
creating a swathe of rebel activity along the borders of the Yugoslav 
province. 

Serb police and ethnic Albanian rebels have been fighting for more than a 
year in a buffer zone set up in Serbia alongside Kosovo, originally to keep 
Yugoslav forces at a safe distance. 

The guerrillas there, who call themselves the Liberation Army of Presevo, 
Bujanovac and Medvedja (UCPMB), deny any links with the shadowy group that 
appeared in Tanusevci. 

But diplomats fear weapons, supplies and the high morale of men who feel they 
are fighting for a cause could be filtering through to the Macedonian group. 

The UCPMB emerged, vowing to defend the Albanian population living just 
outside Kosovo, when Slobodan Milosevic was in power in Belgrade and Serbs 
driven from Kosovo by vengeful Albanians were taking it out on the locals. 

Western leaders fear that now Milosevic has gone, the conflict may undermine 
his reformist successors. In Macedonia the conflict would not be confined to 
a relatively small area like the five km (three-mile) buffer zone in Serbia 
but could tear the whole country apart. 

While the gunmen on the border kept quiet, the international community and 
the Macedonian government could dismiss them as smugglers and criminals 
marginalised by the democratic trends in both Kosovo and Macedonia. 

Now, as Prime Minister Ljubco Giorgevski said last week, the situation is 
becoming "more complex."