|
Macedonia Launches Offensive Against Albanians
SKOPJE, May 3 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Macedonia on Thursday, prior to an assault, ordered the evacuation of a village where ethnic Albanian rebels killed two soldiers.
As of 1545 GMT Thursday, the BBC and news agencies announced that an assault by the Macedonian military was underway.
According to Macedonian military spokesman Gjorgji Trendafilov, the army launched the attack "for the elimination of the Albanian terrorists."
The killing of the two soldiers - just days after the National Liberation Army (NLA) gunned down eight security officers on Saturday - initiated the latest clashes.
The two died in a firefight in the village of Vaksince, near the northern town of Kumanovo, early Thursday while returning from patrol. Another soldier fell off a troop carrier during the confrontation and was captured, defense officials said.
The interior and defense ministries later called for villagers from Vaksince and the surrounding area to quit their homes and register for temporary shelter in Kumanovo and the nearby village of Lipkovo by 3:00 pm (1300 GMT).
With the Macedonian assault underway, the government is now giving people in the surrounding area until 6:00pm (1600 GMT) to evacuate in order to give the army more room for maneuver in its operations, states the BBC.
At the end of March, the Macedonian military used artillery to sweep through nearby rebel strongholds along the border with U.N.-run Kosovo after weeks of fighting that threatened to plunge Macedonia into civil war.
State radio said two NLA members were killed in an earlier clash Thursday, adding that the rebels had declared the nearby village of Slupcane "liberated territory."
Trendafilov said the other soldiers in the patrol had succeeded in pulling back from the scene of the clashes, which occurred at around 5:30 am (0330 GMT) and joined reinforcements, including two tanks and a troop transporter.
Interior ministry spokesman Stevo Pendarovski urged the rebels, who say they are fighting for more rights for the large ethnic Albanian minority in Macedonia, not to block the evacuation and not to use villagers as a human shield.
The fighting in the north followed on the heels of two days of ethnic rioting in the southern city of Bitola, where Macedonian Slavs - who form the majority in the country - ransacked ethnic Albanian and Macedonian Muslim shops.
That violence was set off by the funerals in Bitola of four of the eight policemen and soldiers killed by the NLA near the northwestern town of Tetovo, itself the scene of heavy fighting in March.
The rebels' political leader, Ali Ahmeti, said his men had killed the security officers "in self-defense" after they entered rebel-held territory.
And the anti-Albanian backlash also flared in the capital Skopje late Tuesday, as masked and armed men attacked an Albanian cafe and shop, shooting dead one man and beating others with baseball bats.
The Albanian embassy was sprayed with bullets from a drive-by shooting the same evening.
The government denounced the anti-Albanian violence, compared by one ethnic Albanian leader to Nazi German attacks on Jews in the 1938 Kristallnacht.
But at least one local Macedonian in Bitola said he expected Macedonian paramilitary groups to form after the government was widely criticized for its "lukewarm" response to the crisis it said it had mastered by the end of March.
Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski met in Washington Wednesday with U.S. President George W. Bush, who expressed his support for Skopje's struggle and promised U.S. cooperation to "combat extremism."
Bush told Trajkovski the United States was stepping up intelligence-sharing with Macedonian forces and stands ready to provide $10 million over four years to a new multilingual university in Tetovo, an official said.
The Macedonian leader, meanwhile, said after the exchange that he had "officially asked" Bush to designate the NLA as "terrorists".
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who freely used the term after meeting Trajkovski, said he would take that request "under advisement," a U.S. official said.
Washington has urged Skopje to push ahead with a political dialogue with community leaders to address ethnic Albanian grievances.
But the ethnic Albanians accuse Skopje of stalling, while the government refuses to discuss the central Albanian demand to upgrade their constitutional status from minority to partner nation with the Slavs.
Skopje fears it would open the door to a carve-up of the country along ethnic lines.
|
