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Macedonian Lawmakers End Fourth Day of Ongoing Peace Debate
SKOPJE, Sept 5 (News Agencies) - Macedonian lawmakers ended a fourth day of debate on implementing the peace accord with the Muslim Albanian minority here late on Wednesday.
With about eight deputies left to address the assembly on whether elements of the August 13th framework peace agreement should be enshrined in the constitution, parliament speaker Stojan Andov called the session to a close.
The debate was set to restart at 11 a.m. (4 a.m. EST) on Thursday and sources close to the parliament said a long-awaited vote could take place by mid-afternoon.
The crucial parliamentary debate, delayed by nationalist concerns over the peace plan, continued Wednesday into a fourth late-night session after failing to end Tuesday as originally scheduled.
Western diplomats are confident the parliament will back the August 13th accord, paving the way for NATO forces to start collecting arms from Albanian soldiers again in the fragile Balkan country.
But amid a tight 30-day timetable to implement the accord and signs that the debate was nowhere near ending, patience was beginning to run thin.
"There's a frustration because there's a sense that the vote is going to be 'yes,' so why don't they just get on with it?" one senior Western diplomat told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
NATO officials say the British-led "Operation Essential Harvest", which last week began a 30-day mission to collect some 3,300 Albanian weapons, can resume immediately after the vote is taken.
"We are very much looking forward to the decision of the Macedonian parliament, so that we can get on with the next phase of our job... We intend to move very quickly indeed," said NATO spokesman Mark Laity.
Under the peace plan, aimed at ending a seven-month uprising, Macedonia is to amend its constitution to boost the rights of its large Muslim Albanian minority. In return, Albanian activists are to surrender their arms.
The parliamentary debate, a preliminary discussion on the principle of changing the constitution, began last Friday, after NATO collected some 1,200 arms from the activists in a first phase of disarmament.
But the debate was suspended Saturday by the parliament's nationalist speaker, Stojan Andov, and only resumed on Monday after pressure from Western politicians and assurances by President Boris Trajkovski.
The leaders of the assembly's four main parties, two Macedonian and two Muslim Albanian, signed the August 13th peace accord.
Three of the parties will back the plan. But attention has focused on nationalist Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski's VMRO-DPMNE, which includes hardline deputies against the deal.
"The framework agreement... entirely destroys the existing constitution and creates a constitution that does not exist in any other country," said VMRO-DPMNE deputy Vasil Gadzovski Wednesday.
A two-thirds majority is needed in the parliament before the assembly can begin to amend the constitution.
As the NATO mission continues in Macedonia, European and U.S. politicians have begun discussing what could come after the Alliance operation, which has a strictly limited mandate ending on September 26th.
Ministers from Britain and France visiting Macedonia this week refused to rule out the possibility of a further NATO military presence after that date to protect unarmed civilian monitors from the European Union (EU), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
But NATO spokesman Yves Brodeur said Wednesday that NATO has no plans to extend the existing weapons collection operation in Macedonia beyond the September 26th deadline, nor is it considering any new mission.
Operation Essential Harvest is "a specific mission during a fixed period and that has not changed," he said. "What happens once the mission ends depends on the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia."
"It will be up to the [Macedonian] government to decide how it wants to... take advantage" of the appeasement the NATO operation had brought about, he added.
Asked whether the European Union could take over in Macedonia once the current mission ends, Brodeur said the issue was not discussed during a NATO permanent council meeting Wednesday.
In a sign of the continuing tension in Macedonia, NATO officials said Wednesday they had rescued a Muslim Albanian policeman attacked by Macedonian paramilitaries, their first such engagement on the ground.
No one was injured in the attack Tuesday, in which the Muslim Albanian was ambushed while driving along the main road linking Skopje with the flashpoint northwestern town of Tetovo, said a spokesman.
On Thursday, EU foreign policy chiefs Javier Solana and Chris Patten are to travel to Skopje to meet the country's leaders ahead of a weekend meeting of EU foreign ministers where Macedonia will be a key issue.
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