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Macedonian Villages Come Under Fire
SKOPJE, Macedonia, May 6 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Villages in northern Macedonian braced for a fourth day of fighting Sunday as the government issued its daily warning to residents to quit, declaring a state of war to give it a free hand to battle ethnic Albanian rebels, news agencies reported.
The rural area just west of the city of Kumanovo was calm early Sunday as the government once again appealed to villagers to leave their homes and make easier the army's job of flushing out rebels with heavy guns.
The government says the Muslim Albanian National Liberation Army - who are fighting for more Albanian rights - are holding back more than 3,500 villagers in the combat zone as a human shield against army attack.
While the NLA has dismissed the claims as propaganda, Western news agencies said several people who fled the area for Kumanovo said they had been forced to pay large sums of money or hand over jewelry to be allowed to leave. There was no independent confirmation of the report.
A1 television said Saturday that at least six civilians had been killed in Vaksince while the Red Cross said two had died earlier in Slupcane. The two villages are in the center of the fighting. It was not clear which side was responsible for the killings, but it was likely that they were caught in crossfire.
Rebel commander Hoxha said five civilians had been killed in Slupcane and Orizari, adding that there had been more deaths in other villages. He said one Albanian Muslim activist had been seriously injured, but his life was not in danger.
The conflict flared up on Thursday when the rebels shot dead two soldiers in Vaksince and seized several villages.
Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said late Saturday the government was considering declaring war after a week of violence that left 10 security officers dead, saw the southern city of Bitol rocked by ethnic rioting and ended with the bombardment of the northern villages.
Georgievski said a meeting of parliament, which alone has the right to declare a state of war, had been convened for Tuesday.
He said Macedonian forces were gaining control of the situation but that the declaration of a state of war would "allow for the widening of the possibilities for action".
But the rebels, who are holding one Macedonian soldier and two men they accuse of being "paramilitaries," remained defiant.
Commander Hoxha warned that the army "would never be able to dislodge" his fighters, who he said had the support of the local population.
An NLA commander calling himself Sokoli said that 5,000 villagers had taken cover from the bombardment in the large basements of their houses, some of which can hold 120 people.
"Nearly all the villagers have stayed and no one has forced them to," said Sokoli, responding to government accusations that his men were keeping the civilians as a human shield.
He said seven civilians had been killed since fighting broke out on Thursday, four in Slupcane and three in neighboring Vaksince. More than 20 were injured, including three NLA fighters, he added.
"In the Kumanovo region, 80% of the shells are hitting civilian targets and not the soldiers," he said.
The government said it had succeeded in destroying several machinegun nests, sniper positions and weapons dumps in Slupcane, Vaksince, Orizare and Opje, many of them in intensive fighting Sunday.
Sokoli, a 33-year-old from Skopje who, like many ethnic Albanians, worked for years in Switzerland, warned that "if the government wants war, we will give it to them, not just here but in Tetovo, Gostivar and Debar," towns in the majority Albanian west.
His words rang true as the government said a few hours later the rebels had attacked two police checkpoints near Tetovo in the northwest, scene of heavy fighting in March.
"We are ready to resist," said Sokoli, speaking in a semi-buried room of the NLA's local headquarters near Slupcane.
The rebels remain defiant although the villages they control have run out of water and electricity.
"We can wait here forever, we have more than 2,000 soldiers in this sector," he said, adding that the NLA controlled around eight villages in the hills above the Kumanovo plain.
The NLA can call on 18,000 fighters organized in three battalions, he said, though he did not specify where the various sectors were.
He said the rebels had come down from the mountains on the nearby border with Kosovo after the government failed to make headway in the political talks it had promised would address the grievances of the country's sizeable Albanian minority.
He said the killing of 10 security officers in the past week which sparked the latest government offensive had been "defensive actions," while a soldier they grabbed during Thursday's fighting in Vaksince was being treated as "a prisoner of war."
In the surrounding villages, only armed men in uniform and civilian clothes can be seen on the streets, keeping an eye on the road that links the settlements in the hills.
In nearby Lipkovo, whose local parliamentary deputy ran off to join the rebels in the last flare-up of fighting in March, the muezzin's call to midday prayer mingles with the opening crash of government guns as the daily deadline for villagers to leave the combat zone expires.
On the political front, President Boris Trajkovski said Saturday he wanted to "step up dialogue" between his country's various communities, and notably to improve the lot of minorities.
The statement, apparently aimed at placating Macedonia's large Muslim Albanian minority, came after Trajkovski met for four hours with both majority Slav and Albanian parliamentary parties.
He later told reporters he had proposed "adequate representation for minorities within the administration".
Thursday' offensive came a day after Trajkovski met with U.S. President George W. Bush in Washington, winning pledges of wide-ranging support and access to U.S. military intelligence in the region.
Prime Minister Georgievski said talks would be held next week with the authorities in neighboring Yugoslavia to consider "joint operations".
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