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Serbia Ceasefire Holds Up, But Macedonia Unrest Flares Again
BELGRADE, March 13 (News Agencies) - NATO's bid at Balkans crisis management enjoyed a much-needed success in southern Serbia Tuesday as Albanian separatists and Serb forces observed an alliance-brokered ceasefire.
But in neighboring Macedonia, fighting broke out again between another Albanian separatist group and Macedonian security forces, who entered a village near the Kosovo border that the gunmen had been using as their headquarters.
In the Macedonian capital Skopje, at least 20,000 Albanians rallied peacefully to demand equal rights with the Macedonian Orthodox majority in education and the workplace.
The crowd, waving banners reading "We are not terrorists", turned out amid rising fears that the crisis the gunmen are provoking on the border could rip apart the country's ethnically-mixed population of two million.
NATO, which has more than 40,000 peacekeeping troops working to contain ethnic strife in UN-run Kosovo - which borders both regions - fears the crisis could spark a regional war.
It made intense efforts over the weekend to persuade the gunmen in southern Serbia to sign a truce with Belgrade.
Its diplomatic coup in convincing the gunmen not only to sign but also to allow Yugoslav troops to re-enter part of the Kosovo-Serbia buffer zone occupied by the separatists followed a more muscular military approach in Macedonia last week.
The alliance shot and injured two Albanian separatists of Macedonia's National Liberation Army (UCK), then launched an operation with Macedonian troops to occupy the UCK stronghold of Tanusevci on the Kosovo border.
The alliance hopes the deployment of Belgrade's forces in the southern tip of the buffer zone would drive a wedge between the two allied separatist groups, accused by Skopje and Belgrade of destabilizing the region in a bid to redraw national boundaries in the Albanians' favor.
Macedonia was Tuesday pursuing President Boris Trajkovski's vow to rid the country of extremists. Police took control of the separatist-held village of Malino Malo, which the gunmen had fallen back to after losing Tanusevci.
The operation was met with resistance by the separatists, who number up to 250, according to Skopje, but security forces announced late Tuesday they had entered the mountain village.
Police in the capital stopped a group of youths who joined the mass rally chanting support for the UCK separatists, but the protest was largely peaceful.
Macedonian Albanians say they have been treated as second-class citizens since the country became the first Yugoslav republic to secede peacefully from the former socialist federation 10 years ago.
While most Albanians want peaceful changes to improve their lot, the separatists have tapped into a growing discontent among younger members of the large minority, frustrated at the slow speed of reform.
Albanian leaders who make up part of the government coalition had called Tuesday's rally, believing that reforms will defuse the crisis and protect Macedonia's integrity.
But Orthodox Macedonians are alarmed by the separatists' demands for a federation of two nationalities, which they fear could be a staging post for secession, just as Kosovo's Albanian majority wants independence from Belgrade.
NATO will be seeking to capitalize on its breakthrough in southern Serbia to calm passions in the region, as Belgrade announced it was preparing to withdraw heavy weapons from the edge of the buffer zone as a confidence-building measure.
But southern Serbia's separatists leaders remained suspicious of the Serbian forces, warning that they will attack them if they harass Albanians in the zone, set up at the end of the Kosovo war in June 1999.
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