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Macedonia Seizes Rebel Villages
NEAR VAKSINCE, Macedonia, May 25 (News Agencies) - Macedonian forces seized two northern villages held by Muslim Albanian rebels on Friday, as thousands of civilians poured out of the area, government officials said.
"Police have entered the villages and there is nobody there. Everyone has gone, the civilians and the rebels," interior ministry spokesman Stevo Pendarovski said.
Thousands of civilian refugees left Vaksince and Lojane during a government offensive on Friday in which tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships were used against suspected rebel positions.
Colonel Blagoja Markovski, spokesman for the Macedonian army, told the AFP news agency that government forces had won back control of Vaksince, Lojane and Rudnicka Colonija, a smaller village between the two.
Several more villages further south remain under the control of the Muslim Albanian rebels.
But if the government victory is confirmed, it will be a major boost for the embattled coalition government and allay fears about the safety of civilians trapped in the conflict zone.
Thousands of Muslim Albanian villagers poured out of the rebel-held area Friday as Macedonian troops battled their way into the villages under heavy cover fire from tanks and artillery.
Two Mi-24 helicopter gunships flew over Vaksince, north of Skopje, and strafed rebel positions on its outskirts with rockets, drawing heavy automatic fire from rebel positions in the settlement and hills beyond.
Smoke rose over the village as heavy caliber artillery fell and two BTR armored cars on the outskirts fired bursts of large caliber rounds from their turret canon.
AFP saw around 1,400 civilians leave Vaksince as government forces arrived. They were escorted by police on foot for five kilometers (three miles) over fields and were taken in buses to safety.
Markovski said 3,000 civilians had left the area.
As thunderstorms swept in and doused the smoldering village at around 6:30 am (1630 GMT) the guns fell silent. Government forces remained in their position there.
"Saving the civilians' lives is the biggest victory of the campaign so far. Not only are we liberating the villages that were occupied ... but we succeeded in getting 2,000 civilians to pull out," said government spokesman Antonio Milososki.
Macedonia launched the offensive on Thursday as a political storm broke over a move by two Muslim Albanian political parties to negotiate directly with the rebels, destabilizing an internationally backed attempt to isolate them.
Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski accused the two party leaders involved of inciting their people "to wage war on Macedonia" and of taking their parties, which have ministers in the ruling coalition, "into a terrorist organization".
The move by Arben Xhaferi of the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) and Imer Imeri of the Party for Democratic Prosperity (PDP) to sign an accord on "common action" with the rebels provoked international condemnation.
Ahead of the assault the government, anxious to maintain international sympathy and avoid radicalizing other Albanians, repeatedly urged civilians to flee the villages.
Defense Minister Vlado Buckovski said once they were gone it would be "easy to handle the terrorists".
Local ambulance crews treated the refugees, visibly exhausted from their ordeal. Police separated the men from the women to screen the males for those suspected of rebel involvement but said most of the refugees would be free to go.
Both the rebels and mainstream Albanian parties are seeking a change to the constitution that would give Macedonia's large ethnic Albanian minority the same status as a nation as the majority Slavs and make Albanian an official language.
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