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Macedonian President Defends Evacuation Plan
SKOPJE, June 26 (News Agencies) - Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski defended Tuesday a NATO-backed plan to transport hundreds of armed Albanian activists out of a Skopje suburb, saying it had removed a direct threat to the capital.
He warned that the reaction of an armed mob that fired into the air outside parliament and destroyed his office late Monday after the withdrawal was orchestrated by "internal" agitators who could tip the country into civil war.
"It was a success," Trajkovski said on national television, adding that the pullout had fulfilled its aim of removing hundreds of heavily armed "terrorists" from the very edge of Skopje.
The Albanian activists have been waging a tenacious armed struggle against Macedonian forces for five months in the name of winning more rights for Muslim Albanians in the country.
The fact that U.S. troops from the Kosovo peacekeeping force transported the activists with their arms back to safer terrain in the Black Mountains above Skopje enraged Macedonian Slavs, thousands of whom protested outside the parliament, letting off dozens of bursts of automatic rifle fire.
Many Slavs already see the West as pro-Albanian for backing the Kosovo Liberation Army two years ago in its battle against Belgrade's former hardline regime, just across Macedonia's northern border.
"It was the quickest and most efficient way to avoid casualties," insisted Trajkovski, whose forces lost four dead and around 30 injured in three days of heavy fighting that failed to dislodge the activists.
But for the mob of at least 6,000 furious Slavs who gathered outside the parliament building - which is also the president's official residence - the move was seen as a betrayal, and they called on Trajkovski to resign.
But the Macedonian president appealed for calm, saying that peaceful political dialogue with the large Muslim Albanian minority was the only way ahead.
He also called on the National Liberation Army (NLA) to lay down its weapons.
"I can understand the anger in front of parliament but I can't understand the firing, which could tip us into a civil war," he warned.
He said the protests appeared to have been orchestrated by "internal currents" at all level of state. He gave no hint of who might have been behind the unrest.
He said the elements had been alarmed that his peace plan to slowly disarm and amnesty activists was working and accused them of wanting to provoke a "civil crisis".
NATO, which hotly denied claims made to the angry crowd by Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski that it had forced the government to agree to the withdrawal, also said the rowdy demonstration had been the work of "agitators who have a stake in polarizing tensions between the two communities."
Trajkovski is trying to push a peace plan based on a political reform deal hammered out with Muslim Albanian politicians to address their complaints of discrimination while offering the activists an amnesty if they down their weapons.
He said the evacuation of Aracinovo - which the army suddenly attacked Friday despite Western calls for restraint - was the first step in that plan, which aims to eventually bring in thousands of NATO troops to disarm the activists.
But any future NATO deployment will meet with deep suspicion from the Slav majority, who saw the U.S. transportation of "terrorists" out of Aracinovo as a sign of collusion with the NLA.
Macedonia wanted the activists disarmed and dumped in Kosovo, an unruly U.N.-run province of Yugoslavia blamed by Skopje for starting the crisis.
But NATO negotiators, trying to repeat their success last month in defusing an Albanian insurrection in southern Serbia, persuaded the government to allow an armed withdrawal inside Macedonia as a sign of goodwill and to remove a direct threat to the capital, just a few miles (kilometers) from Aracinovo.
Fighting also flared across the north Tuesday after a police officer was killed and four injured by mortar fire late Monday in mountains above the northwest town of Tetovo.
And in Nikustak, where NATO dropped the activists, the army said it responded to sniper fire with tanks, although a spokesman said both areas were calm later Tuesday.
For its part, the Pentagon defended the use of U.S. troops to escort Albanian activists with their weapons from out of a Skopje suburb, as "the right thing to do," but insisted it did not mark a shift in U.S. policy.
The action set off the protests in Skopje by angry Slavs who blocked the path of the U.S. convoy on its return to base.
The U.S. troops - 81 soldiers in four armored Humvees - escorted buses carrying 350 activists and civilians from Aracinovo, on the edge of the Macedonian capital, to an activist-controlled village 11 miles away Monday in an attempt to defuse three days of fighting, a Pentagon spokesman said.
On its return, the convoy was stopped at a Macedonian government checkpoint where a large crowd gathered, said Rear Admiral Craig Quigley.
"Weapons were visible in the crowd, and the U.S. commander on the scene made the decision to again defuse that situation and seek another route," he said.
A Hunter unmanned reconnaissance plane sent to scout out an alternate route detected a large crowd at another checkpoint several miles away, forcing the convoy to halt until a clear route was found, he said.
The convoy, which had delivered the activists at 8 pm local time Monday, arrived back at the U.S. headquarters at Skopje's international airport at 5 am Tuesday, he said.
It was the first time the 700 U.S. troops based in Macedonia had been put in the middle of an intensifying conflict between Slav-dominated government troops and Albanian activists.
"It was a new event. We've not done this before," Quigley acknowledged.
U.S. Air Force General Joseph Ralston, NATO's supreme commander and the commander of U.S. forces in Europe, agreed to the use of the U.S. troops Sunday night after receiving a request from NATO Secretary General George Robertson, Quigley said.
Quigley said the White House was informed of the decision and that it had Pentagon approval. But it was unclear whether either President George W. Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally approved the operation.
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