|
Albanian Separatists Battle Macedonian Police
TETOVO, Macedonia, March 15 (News Agencies) - Scores of Albanian separatists battled Macedonian special forces in and around the ethnic Albanian-dominated town of Tetovo Thursday, sending panicky residents fleeing the area.
As the gunmen entered the northwestern town of 200,000 people, the government warned in Skopje that it would use "all means at our disposal" to crush the separatists, who it estimated to number up to 200 men.
Separatist snipers took up positions in houses on the outskirts of Tetovo, sparking a pitched battle with Macedonian special forces determined to dislodge them.
Columns of smoke could be seen rising from near the separatist positions as the two sides locked into heavy fighting, the latest chapter in mounting trouble in Macedonia in recent weeks that has raised fears of a new war in the Balkans.
Crowds of residents were fleeing the area by car or on foot, carrying bags full of belongings as minibuses arrived to ferry the panicked civilians away from the fighting. Witnesses said many of those fleeing were Slav Macedonians, who are in the minority in Tetovo.
Special police units closed off the narrow streets winding up the hill into Kale suburb, but the city center remained calm, if almost deserted.
In Kale, two civilians were injured, a day after intense clashes left one civilian dead and 15 police wounded.
The funeral of Wednesday's victim, a 42-year-old Albanian man shot in the head by snipers as he passed a police station, was held in Tetovo Thursday.
Speaking in the capital, Skopje, interior ministry spokesman Stevo Pendarovski said up to 300 residents had already arrived in the city, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) to the east, and that demands for passports had shot up by almost 50%.
"There is no reason to flee the country," he said.
He said some 200 separatists, 140 of them from neighboring U.N.-run Kosovo, were firing from the hills around the town.
Pendarovski said sporadic skirmishes had also broken out around separatist strongholds in mountain villages near the Kosovo border.
The battle came as the government met in Skopje to discuss "special measures" to contain the crisis.
The most significant of these was a decision to allow army border units, until now restricted to operating within 100 meters (330 feet) of the frontier, to move into the interior of the country, although Skopje did not say how far.
It would allow police forces to be backed by the military, equipped with heavy weaponry.
The government also decided to increase the number of military checkpoints along its northern border, which has been closed since Monday.
But Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said it was "too early" to impose a state of war.
"Those who want to cause war in Macedonia should know that we will use all means at our disposal and we will not be selective in choosing our allies if we are forced to ... including NATO actions," Georgievski said.
He added that, "for a month, our country has been attacked by groups we at first thought were criminal ones."
"But now it is clear they have political and technical support from certain structures based in Kosovo."
Georgievski said Skopje could be in for a long haul in its struggle with the separatists. The separatists say they are fighting to end discrimination against Macedonia's ethnic Albanian minority, who claim to make up a third of the country's two million people.
He said President Boris Trajkovski would again consider imposing a state of emergency at a defense council meeting later in the day.
Skopje is convinced the separatists mainly come from U.N.-run Kosovo, despite patrols by the Yugoslav province's NATO-led peacekeepers.
Interior Minister Dosta Dimovska told reporters Macedonia was being "flooded" with "trained terrorists" from among the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which dragged NATO into its own 1998-99 conflict with Belgrade.
Officially, the KLA disbanded as a military force in 1999, under the terms of a deal it signed with NATO.
Trajkovski blamed the international community for "making the same mistakes" as it had done in Kosovo during the war there.
Kosovo Albanian leaders denied the allegations, saying Skopje was looking for a scapegoat because of its maltreatment of its own Albanians.
NATO officials in Brussels said earlier the Macedonian government "has the situation in hand" as it confronted "small groups" of ethnic Albanian separatists.
|
