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Five Albanians Killed in Skopje, Overshadowing Peace Talks
OHRID, Macedonia, Aug 7 (News Agencies) - Macedonian police killed five suspected ethnic Albanian combatants in Skopje Tuesday, casting a shadow over struggling efforts to end a six-month insurgency that has pushed the Balkan country towards war.
Peace talks resumed in this southwest Macedonian town following a pause designed to allow the sides to consider new demands made from Skopje on Monday that the combatants fully disarm.
The negotiations commenced after U.S. and EU peace envoys James Pardew and Francois Leotard held a long meeting with Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski to discuss Skopje's unexpected demand
Earlier, Trajkovski had met with NATO envoy Pieter Feith to clarify Macedonia's demand to disarm ethnic Albanian members of the National Liberation Army (NLA) as a condition for implementing a peace accord, western sources said.
Feith, who had arrived in Ohrid on Tuesday, was to reassure Macedonia's leaders that ethnic Albanian disarmament would be managed properly after NATO peacekeepers move in.
In Skopje, a police source identified the five killed as "terrorists," the term used by the authorities to refer to NLA combatants, who have been taking on government forces mainly in the northwest of the country.
Uniformed incursions by combatants into the capital are rare.
The Macedonian army also accused combatants of violating a fragile July 5 ceasefire 24 times overnight in the flashpoint north, army spokesman Blagoja Markovski told AFP.
The announcements dropped like a bombshell, just as international mediators worked to advance peace negotiations towards a political settlement.
As the talks resumed, a western diplomat cautiously asserted, "It seems that the process of negotiations is back on track."
The setback for the talks on Monday came when Macedonian political leaders demanded guarantees that the NLA combatants would be disarmed before a peace plan was implemented, a demand attributed by western officials to the hardline stance of Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski.
NATO said on Monday that it could send 3,500 troops into Macedonia to help disarm the combatants once a peace deal was signed; they could be deployed within 48 hours after the peace accord was reached.
Earlier, Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski, who is in the same political camp as hardliner Georgievski, told news agencies that five ethnic Albanians, among them a ethnic albania commander, had been killed in a Macedonian police operation.
In another ill-wind for peace efforts, Macedonia's media widely reported on Tuesday that parliamentary deputies had doubts over a peace deal, fearing it would divide the country into two.
Parliamentarians might not pass a peace deal unless combatants are removed first.
"The political agreement in Ohrid again uncertain," read the front-page headline of independent newspaper Dnevnik. "Without guarantees for the disarming of the terrorists there will not be a signature."
"If on the terrain the provocations continue and disarming is going to be unsuccessful, the majority of deputies might reject the political agreement," Utrinski Vesnik said.
The combatants, who launched attacks on the government forces in February, say they are fighting for rights for the country's ethnic Albanian minority, who make up nearly one third of the former Yugoslav republic's population.
Meanwhile, the only ethnic Albanian member of Macedonia's top defense body, the National Security Council, said on Tuesday that he was resigning from his post in protest to not being called to the Council's most recent meeting, which was called by Trajkovski after Monday's pause.
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