[ALBSA-Info] Interesting Article at the Chicago Tribune

[Agron Alibali]

Chicago Tribune 
March 17, 2002 Sunday, CHICAGOLAND FINAL EDITION 
Leaders paint Balkans as terror war's front line 

By Tom Hundley, Tribune foreign correspondent. 

SKOPJE, Macedonia 

They may have been trafficking in weapons or drugs. Or maybe they were simply illegal immigrants trying to find an unguarded back door into Western Europe. 

Or perhaps they really were--as the Macedonian police insist--Al Qaeda terrorists on their way to attack the U.S., British and German Embassies here in the Macedonian capital. Whoever the seven unidentified men were, they are now dead--killed in a Macedonian police ambush outside Skopje two weeks ago. 

The Macedonian government has offered little persuasive evidence linking the men to Al Qaeda, but its eagerness to make the claim is not surprising. Since Sept. 11, everyone from Vladimir Putin to Ariel Sharon has tried to portray his local war as part of America's global war on terrorism. 

Even former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, on trial in The Hague for war crimes, argues that his police in Kosovo were battling Albanian insurgents sponsored by Osama bin Laden. 

The U.S. government is openly skeptical of Macedonia's claims that the seven men killed March 2 were plotting an attack on the embassy, but as the front lines in the war on terrorism grow blurry, the incident here has underscored genuine concerns that the Balkans, Europe's messy back yard, could become a staging area for future Al Qaeda operations. 

The alleged suspects were ambushed by Macedonian police in a vineyard near the village of Rastanski Lozja, about 5 miles from Skopje. They apparently had settled down for a meal about 4 a.m. when police opened fire from two sides. The police claim there was a gun battle, but Western officials say there was no evidence of return fire. 

The police also say the men were carrying a small arsenal of weapons and uniforms of the National Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group that took control of parts of the country last year. 

U.S., British and German diplomats were invited to view the men's bodies. But the inspection produced little beyond the observation that the men appeared to be from the Indian subcontinent, perhaps Pakistan. 

"It's still not clear to us who they were or what they were doing here," a Western diplomat said. "Obviously, it is worrisome to have guys like this wandering around. The Macedonian government likes to say there are ties between the NLA and international terror groups, but as far as we are concerned, we'd have to see some proof." 

Skepticism mounts 

Since the incident, there has been growing skepticism among the public and even within the Macedonian government about the credibility of the Interior Ministry's account of the incident. 

The weapons allegedly found with the men were brand-new--unusual in the Balkans. That suggests that the weapons could have been planted, or that perhaps the men were gun smugglers rather than terrorists. 

"There's quite a lot of movement through these mountains--trafficking in weapons, drugs, human beings, ideologies. You could come up with any number of scenarios," said Harald Schenker, a diplomat with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. 

"It's not surprising that the interior minister is trying to boost his approval ratings by showing that he is side-by-side with the Americans in the war against terrorism," he said. 

Government spokesman Georgi Trendafilov expressed anger that the U.S. does not take Macedonia's concerns about Al Qaeda terrorists more seriously. "We are on the front line in the war against terrorism," he said. 

But Macedonian officials further undermined their credibility on the issue a few days after the shooting incident when they announced that two Jordanian and two Bosnian terrorism suspects had been handed over to the American Embassy following their arrests near the residence of the U.S. ambassador several weeks earlier. 

Those suspects, the Macedonians said, spoke of plans to kill Macedonia's prime minister and interior minister. 

The announcement came as news to the U.S. Embassy, which said it had not received any prisoners from the Macedonian government. A spokesman for the government then retracted the claim and said the four had been "expelled." To where, he could not say. 

Link to U.S. targets in Italy 

Last week, Italian intelligence services issued a detailed report warning of "broad-ranged terrorist schemes . . . of increasing intensity" aimed at U.S. targets in Italy. Italy said the terrorist organizations use Balkan countries as an "outpost" for logistical support and take advantage of widespread illegal activities in the region to finance their operations. 

This month, Italian police arrested nine Moroccans, and a few days later they nabbed six men from Middle Eastern countries in connection with two possible plots to attack the U.S. Embassy in Rome. 

U.S. concerns in the region have been focused mainly on Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the mid-1990s, significant numbers of Arabs and others from the Muslim world came to fight alongside Bosnian Muslims in a war against Serbs and Croats that often took on a strong religious coloration. 

When the 1995 Dayton agreement brought an end to the fighting, many of these men were given Bosnian citizenship and remained in the country, as did a number of Muslim charitable organizations with possible links to Al Qaeda. 

After Sept. 11, the Bosnian government began taking a closer look at some of these organizations, and in January, the Bosnians turned over to U.S. authorities five Algerians and a Yemeni after a Bosnian court ruled there was insufficient evidence to continue holding them. The U.S. whisked the suspects to its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, despite protests from local human-rights groups. 

There also is evidence that Islamic mercenaries fought with the ethnic Albanian rebels during the 1999 Kosovo war and that some of them may have crossed the border and joined the Albanian insurgency that erupted in Macedonia last summer. 

But neither Albanian struggle could be considered a holy war. Both grew out of a demand for minority rights and were quickly transformed into grass-roots national movements when the government retaliated against civilians. 

Ethnic Albanian leaders in Macedonia scoff at the idea that they were harboring Al Qaeda terrorists. 

"I don't think you can be a nationalist and fundamentalist at the same time. Fundamentalists can fight only for their religion," said Asan Luma, an official in Tetovo, a mainly Albanian city in western Albania. 

He invited his visitor to share a whiskey. 

"I'm an Albanian Muslim, but here we are drinking alcohol. Not very convenient for Al Qaeda," he said. "And my wife doesn't let me tell her how to dress either, so what should I tell bin Laden?" 

Murat Ismaili, a former NLA fighter from the Tetovo area, said that when the U.S. declared war on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he and many other former guerrillas wanted to go to Afghanistan and fight--on the side of the Americans. 

"Many of us went to our former headquarters and asked if it would be possible to form a unit to go to Afghanistan," he said. "We hate Al Qaeda. We support the Americans." 

GRAPHIC: PHOTOPHOTO: A Macedonian police officer displays weapons allegedly seized from men killed in an ambush; officials say they were terrorists. Agence France-Presse photo by Georgi Licovski. 



---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Sports - live college hoops coverage
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed