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EU Envoy Holds First Meeting With Macedonian President
SKOPJE, June 29 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The European Union's new envoy for Macedonia, Francois Leotard, held a first one-hour meeting Friday with Macedonian President, Boris Trajkovski, a day after he arrived in Skopje.
"We had lengthy discussions about issues that concern us today, notably relations with the EU," said Leotard following the meeting.
The former French defense minister said the two discussed constitutional issues, referring to Albanian demands to turn Macedonia into a bi-national state, news agencies said.
Leotard arrived Thursday in Skopje for a four-month mission to try to salvage peace between Macedonia's Slav majority and Muslim Albanian minority after a week in which the West has seen its efforts to avert civil war go horribly wrong.
"Macedonia is the last domino in the Yugoslav crisis, if it falls the wrong way, the other dominoes could follow," Leotard told the French daily, Le Figaro.
"Failure in Macedonia could call into question all that we have achieved, at the price of great difficulties and pain, in Bosnia and Kosovo," he said.
"We can see emerging elements of tension that we saw in Bosnia at the beginning of the crisis. One of my first duties is the prolonging of the ceasefire," he added.
However, there is no genuine ceasefire in force in Macedonia presently. Even as Leotard arrived at Skopje airport, fighting between Macedonian security forces and Albanian activists continued around the country.
Macedonian helicopter gunships were involved Thursday in exchanges of fire with Albanian activists near Macedonia's second-largest town, Tetovo, news agencies reported.
Meanwhile, NATO says it is still preparing to send 3,000 troops to the country. But their mission will only be to disarm the Albanian activists, and they will only be deployed if and when a peace deal is agreed.
There is no peace deal on the table, and no immediate prospect of one.
Leotard, acting as EU security affairs chief Javier Solana's personal envoy, will now attempt to jump-start peace talks that broke down after the Albanian side demanded the right of veto on all laws, and the Macedonian army started a disastrous offensive on the village of Aracinovo, an activist stronghold, six miles from the capital.
In another move, Macedonia on Friday demobilized thousands of police reservists "in order to make space for the implementation of President Trajkovski's peace plan" to end the Albanian uprising, Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski said.
"We are taking this very risky action in order to help the peaceful option," said the minister.
Several thousand police reservists were mobilized earlier this month to protect the capital after hundreds of Albanian activists occupied a town on the very edge of the capital and threatened to mortar bomb it.
The activists were evacuated Monday by U.S. troops from the town under a NATO-brokered deal to remove the threat, although the fact they were allowed to take their weapons sparked riots by Macedonian Slavs in the capital, reported western news agencies.
The Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly also called on Macedonia to protect the rights of Albanians and to ensure that they were properly represented in public bodies including the police and army.
With growing international pressure on the Macedonian government to solve the crisis, Trajkovski praised Thursday moves by U.S. President George W. Bush that bar Americans from any transactions involving the property of known Albanian activist leaders and restricts their entry into the United States.
The Macedonian President called on European states to follow the same path in choking off funds to Albanian activists.
He singled out Germany, Belgium and Switzerland as countries used by the activists as safe havens for their funds.
"I hope that the world will recognize the root of the crisis in Macedonia," Trajkovski said, news agencies reported.
On Thursday, NATO secretary-general George Robertson endorsed Bush's decision and said that the European Union was "already looking at visa restriction and at closing off money supplies."
But some Western officials have expressed exasperation with Macedonian officials.
Peter Feith, NATO special envoy to Macedonia, was quoted in the Dutch newspaper, Allegemine Dagblad, as saying that although Trajkovski is "ready to seek a peaceful solution ... many ministers in his government think that a military solution can be imposed."
"The problem is the Macedonian government," Feith said.
The Albanians, nearly 30% of the Macedonian population, some of whom have been fighting since February, are demanding more rights for their minority group and more formalized international participation towards prospects for peace, as they state they are treated as second-class citizens.
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