[AMCC-News] NATO Urging Macedonia to Grant Albanian Rights

[Mentor Cana]

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010612/wl/balkans_nato_dc_2.html
Tuesday June 12 1:26 PM ET

NATO Urging Macedonia to Grant Albanian Rights
By Douglas Hamilton

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - NATO (news - web sites) leaders including President
Bush (news - web sites) were expected to urge Macedonia to speed up
political reforms needed to end an ethnic Albanian guerrilla insurgency, a
senior NATO official said Tuesday.

In addition to practical arrangements for voluntary disarmament of the
rebels, there must be rapid progress on giving Albanians and their language
formal status in the Macedonian constitution, he told reporters.

``I'm quite sure that this will figure high on the agenda tomorrow,'' the
official said at a briefing ahead of a one-day meeting Wednesday of the
leaders of NATO's 19 member states, convened for Bush's inaugural visit to
Europe.

``So far the international community has not succeeded in convincing the
government in Skopje to speed up the political process, because we feel if
the process is not sped up then the chances for the NLA to lay down their
weapons and accept the usefulness of political dialogue will not be
there,'' he said.

The NLA is the National Liberation Army, which says it took up arms in
January to win equal rights for a one-third Albanian minority who are
treated as second class citizens by Macedonia's majority Slavs.

A tenuous cease-fire -- the first mutual truce in five months of rebel
ambushes and long-range shelling by the army -- was holding Tuesday, but
guerrillas said they were now in range of the capital, Skopje and its
international airport.

ALBANIAN STATUS, LANGUAGE ARE CRUCH ISSUES

Macedonian political leaders were due to have further consultations at Lake
Ohrid in the south of the former Yugoslav republic at the weekend, with
alliance and European Union (news - web sites) representatives present to
facilitate final accord.

The EU and NATO have been closely involved for the past three months in
efforts to broker a political solution to the conflict, which threatens to
spread from northern border areas into urban centers, igniting a civil war.

``This is of major concern to us,'' the NATO official said, noting that the
allies have 40,000 peacekeeping troops in neighboring Kosovo who rely on
rear logistics bases in Macedonia close to the scene of recent fighting.

He said one part of the political solution was a disarmament plan by the
coalition government of Slavs and Albanians.

It aimed ``to create confidence building measures, to set out a timetable
for the NLA to lay down their weapons, the possible question of an amnesty
and what have you.''

``This is one part of a package which we think is very relevant. But the
other package is the really political package, which means to provide the
Albanian part of the population equal rights and responsibilities,'' he
continued.

It was ``absolutely essential'' for concrete discussions very soon of
``possible change of the constitution to make the Albanians a
constitutional part of this nation and also with regard to Albanian as a
second official language.'' The Kosovo Albanian newspaper Zeri Tuesday said
90 percent of the political deal was complete, including proportional
representations for Albanians in all state institutions, a state-funded
Albanian university, and secularization to remove the primacy of the
Orthodox Church.

But the sticking points were the preamble to the constitution -- which
mentions Albanians as a minority but not as one of the two founding peoples
-- and official status for Albanian as Macedonia's second language.