[ALBSA-Info] U.S. Moves Closer To Macedonia Aid

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

U.S. Moves Closer To Macedonia Aid

By BARRY SCHWEID


  
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is moving a few steps closer to 
intervening in Macedonia's escalating crisis while urging the government 
there not to overreact in trying to suppress ethnic Albanian insurgents. 

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday, ``We are looking at things that 
the United States might be able to do to enhance the capability of the 
Macedonian armed forces to deal with this crisis.'' 

Powell, at a news conference, said the Macedonian army seemed to be making 
headway against the ethnic Albanian rebels, who launched a siege March 14 
against Tetovo, a northwestern Macedonia city of more than 50,000. The army 
responded Sunday by bombing the rebels. ``It seems they've had some success 
getting partway up that hill,'' Powell said. 

In a telephone conversation Sunday, Powell said he told Macedonia's 
president, Boris Trajkovski, that ``we support him, and we'll do what we 
can.'' 

Even so, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week the Bush 
administration had no plans to send American troops to help the Macedonian 
push. The United States already has 400 noncombat logistics troops outside 
the capital Skopje at a camp used as a staging area by U.S. peacekeepers in 
Kosovo, about 40 miles east of Tetovo. 

In contacts with Macedonian officials, Powell said, ``We made the point to 
them that we hope that they would use proportionate military strength in 
order not to create an even more difficult problem to deal with.'' 

So far, the fighting appears limited, with the rebels Powell called 
extremists and terrorists last Friday limited to a few hundred men. That's 
far fewer than the number of ethnic Albanian separatists who fought the Serb 
army next door in the Serbian province Kosovo and gained U.S. help to expel 
Serb forces. 

Powell said the United States and its NATO allies ``have taken action within 
Kosovo to do what we can to interdict supplies and terrorists who might be 
moving through that area into Macedonia.'' 

Powell held tactical sessions by telephone over the weekend with U.S. Air 
Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, NATO's top commander, and with Gen. Henry H. 
Shelton, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and with ``other 
colleagues in the national security community.'' 

In tightening coordination with NATO, Powell said he spoke twice with Lord 
Robertson, the alliance's secretary-general, and Robin Cook, the British 
foreign secretary, among others. On Monday, he met in Washington with the 
French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine. 

Vedrine said his government agreed with Powell's approach and has provided 
the Macedonia armed forces with several drone airplanes. 

Powell urged the Slav-dominated Macedonian government Friday to reach out to 
the country's ethnic Albanian minority, who make up about 25 percent of the 
former Yugoslav republic's 2 million population, to deny extremists and 
terrorists ``fertile ground'' for guerrilla warfare. 

Specifically, Powell suggested possibly changing the Constitution and 
providing schooling in the Albanian language. 

Ivo Daalder, a Balkans specialist at the Brookings Institution, said the 
preamble to the Constitution effectively limits the Albanian minority to 
second-class status, and the Albanian language is not recognized as official. 

No university education is given in Albanian, Daalder said in an interview, 
but a new university is being built to do that. 

``The question is whether the Macedonia security forces are capable of 
defeating the insurgency without at the same time causing massive damage to 
the surrounding area,'' Daalder said. 

``If they are capable of doing that, and if the Macedonia government engages 
in a serious dialogue with the Albanian community on the questions that have 
roiled the community for 10 years now, it may be possible to resolve this 
conflict short of a much larger U.S. and NATO intervention,'' he said. 

``We think there is a way to deal with this that would not cause yet another 
Balkan war,'' Powell said Friday. 

At a European Union conference in Stockholm, Sweden, Russian President 
Vladimir Putin offered a different prescription. He said ethnic Albanian 
insurgents in Macedonia should be dealt with in a ``robust manner'' - much as 
Russia deals with rebels in Chechnya. 

Otherwise, he said, continuing unrest in Macedonia ``will create the 
conditions for shaking Europe in its very heart.'' 

Meanwhile, the White House issued a statement, in President Bush's name, 
``strongly condemning the violence perpetrated by a small group of extremists 
determined to destabilize the democratic, multiethnic government of 
Macedonia.'' 

The insurgents are not advancing the cause of the Albanian minority, the 
statement said. 

On the Net: CIA World Factbook on Macedonia: 
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/mk.html