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Macedonia Government Splits Deepen As Violence Flares
SKOPJE, May 31 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Fighting raged on in Macedonia on Thursday as splits within the ruling coalition deepened and Albanian rebels dismissed offers of what authorities called a "partial amnesty."
An army captain was killed when his vehicle hit a mine and government forces responded with artillery fire when NLA rebels in two villages north of Skopje opened fire with machine guns and rocket launchers, an army spokesman said.
The Muslim Albanian NLA is fighting for independence from Macedonia but some of its commanders have reportedly said they were protesting bad treatment and discrimination from the authorities.
While the fighting continued, the slow progress on the military front and the near deadlock in the political process continued to drive wedges between the members of a fragile government of national unity.
Macedonian Slav and Muslim Albanian parties were already at loggerheads over the latters' support for dialogue with the rebels, but on Thursday tensions between rival Slav movements boiled to the surface.
Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski claimed that the Social Democrats (SDSM), the ex-Communist party led by former prime minister Branko Crvenovski, had undermined the Slav position on reform by being soft on military action.
The heads of the four main parties in the coalition are in talks led by President Boris Trajkovksi to discuss ways of meeting Muslim Albanian demands for greater minority rights.
Georgievski, who wants to defeat the rebels with military force, said the SDSM, which controls the defense ministry, had failed in its task to such an extent that it was now almost inevitable that every Albanian demand would be met.
"It is probable that we will have to drop the preamble to the constitution, or announce a second constitutive nation. It is very likely that we will have to announce a second official language," complained Georgievski.
But a leading member of one of the Muslim Albanian parties in the coalition said the prime ministers remarks - coming, as a grudging response to international pressure, rather than a gesture of good will - were unacceptable. "We cannot accept the way Georgievski speaks about this," said Azis Polozhani of the Party of Democratic Prosperity.
The hard-line Georgievski accused the defense ministry of withholding supplies from front-line units. But Branko Crvenkovski, the leader of the SDSM, placed the blame for the crisis squarely on Georgievski, who led a previous governing coalition of his nationalist VMRO-DPMNE party and the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA).
"We have only been in the government for two weeks. No one is stopping Georgievski if he wants to solve the crisis with war," he told reporters.
Georgievski brought the SDSM and the Muslim Albanian Party of Democratic Prosperity (PDP) into the coalition to form a government of national unity and isolate the rebels. But the DPA and PDP have always opposed using military force to dislodge the activist NLA from its strongholds in hills north of Skopje, splitting the coalition along ethnic lines.
The BBC online service said commentators see the split in the Macedonian government and calls from within to give Albanians more rights a major shift in the government's approach to Albanian demands, which has so far been unbending.
The preface to Macedonia's constitution stipulates that "Macedonia is the nation state of the Macedonian people", and downgrades the Muslim Albanians, who make up between a quarter and a third of the population, to minority status.
Elected Muslim Albanian leaders have long demanded that their community be given equal status as a constitutive nation of Macedonia, and that their language be officially recognized.
Their political frustration has fed the flames of an armed uprising, which since mid-February has pitted Muslim Albanian activists against government troops and police.
In a bid to defuse the crisis, President Boris Trajkovski was on Thursday preparing to draw up a deal on a "partial amnesty" which would allow separatists not suspected of "serious crimes" to lay down their arms without fear of arrest, an official in his office said.
Georgievski said of the proposed plan, "in principal, if it is part of a peaceful solution, it has to be supported", but has always rejected the idea of direct talks with the separatists.
But the separatists dismissed the offer.
"We do not accept the amnesty. We are still fighting for all our demands to be met," said Nazim Beqiri, a member of the NLA's general staff, "One of the key conditions to end this conflict is that the NLA takes part in discussions on the future of Albanians in Macedonia."
The amnesty being floated is similar to a deal offered last week to Muslim Albanian rebels fighting in southern Serbia, who were offered an official pardon if they laid down their arms and surrendered to NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo.
Hundreds did so, including their leader, and on Thursday Yugoslav troops entered the last pocket of territory once controlled by the activists. Trajkovski has written to NATO Secretary General George Robertson with an outline of his amnesty idea, the official said.
The amnesty plan follows an offer from Interior Minister Ljube Georgievski to allow the "citizens" of the separatist stronghold of Lipkovo, where some 12,000 villagers, rebels and refugees are said to be holed up, to leave for Kosovo.
If the people accepted an humanitarian escort to the frontier they would not face "police formalities" he said, in a plan which senior officials admitted amounted to giving the separatists a back door out of the conflict.
But on Wednesday there was no sign that anyone from Lipkovo had heeded his call, and village officials said that the civilians were too frightened of falling victim to Macedonian police brutality to leave.
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