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Macedonian Fighting Intensifies
TETOVO, Macedonia, March 16 (News Agencies) - Mortar rounds slammed into the center of Tetovo Friday, as Macedonian forces battled to drive out scores of Albanian separatists perched on a hill above this northern town.
Four mortars hit the deserted center of the predominantly Albanian town, many of whose buildings are already pockmarked by bullets following three days of heavy fighting, as NATO vowed not to let yet another Balkans country fall apart.
Five civilians were injured by stray bullets in the fighting, Tetovo hospital director Raim Taci said, bringing the toll to one Albanian killed and 25 people injured, including 15 police.
Officials in Skopje said earlier that a church had been hit and a vehicle damaged outside the town's hospital.
Clouds of smoke rose from the hilltop where an estimated 200 gunmen from the National Liberation Army (UCK) fired down on police, who pounded their positions with mortars in a bid to wrest the vantage point from their control.
Interior Ministry spokesman Stevo Pendarovsky said in Skopje that around 2,000 people had already fled Tetovo, both ethnic Albanians and Slav Macedonians.
Many of the Albanians were trying to enter Bulgaria en route for Turkey, he said.
Pendarovsky said 500 gunmen were operating in Macedonia.
In Berlin, German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping said German tanks were sent from a base in southern Kosovo as a protective measure after unidentified assailants shot at a German military barracks in northwestern Macedonia.
"We won't let anyone play games with us, and also not Albanian terrorists," said Scharping, whose German peacekeeping troops head the Kosovo sector opposite northwest Macedonia.
Macedonia's parliament was holding a closed session to discuss the growing crisis, which the national defense council blamed on "terrorist formations" entering from U.N.-run Kosovo despite NATO border patrols.
Gunmen of the UCK, whose armed insurrection has prompted fears of a new Balkans war in the fragile multi-ethnic state, were still holding their positions in Tetovo as police appeared to have lost control of some areas on the outskirts.
"The police don't come here, they are afraid," said one resident.
"A bit further up, about eight kilometers [five miles], is our army. Those are the free Albanian zones," he said.
The UCK opened a daring offensive against Tetovo on Wednesday, for the first time emerging in force from their bases in mountain villages along the border with U.N.-run Kosovo.
Heavy as the fighting was, an UCK commander warned that the Tetovo battle was just a taste of things to come.
The commander, speaking to AFP in Kosovo by phone from a Macedonian mountain village, said: "We are capable of setting the whole place ablaze."
"In Tetovo, we wanted to warn the Macedonian government. We will continue to fight on all fronts, if the Macedonians launch an offensive in one place it will explode elsewhere," warned the commander, who asked not to identified.
He said he was referring to a possible offensive in the town of Kumanovo, northeast of Skopje.
"The Macedonian government is hard-headed, but we are not going to stop, it will go on until Skopje understands" the separatists' demands, he said.
The separatists want to make Macedonia a federation of Slav Macedonians and Albanians, who they say make up more than a third of the two million people in Macedonia.
Skopje, which puts the Albanian minority at around 500,000, sees such plans a step toward carving up the country.
NATO Secretary General George Robertson said in Athens his alliance had no intention of allowing "a small number of extremists" to destabilize Macedonia.
But he said NATO had no military mandate to move into Macedonia and did not believe Skopje wanted it to do so.
Responding to Skopje's charges that the separatists were coming from U.N.-run Kosovo, whose security and border are the responsibility of NATO-led peacekeepers, he said: "We are determined that Kosovo will not be used as a launching pad for violence and destabilizing activities.
But the UCK threat to spread the conflict appeared to be already becoming hard reality Friday. In a central village 60 kilometers (40 miles) from Skopje, a police station was raked by automatic gunfire by unidentified attackers.
The European Union said it was considering sending a team of observers to Macedonia to keep track of the growing conflict as German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer arrived in Macedonia to discuss the emergency.
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