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Fighting Grinds On In Macedonia
LJUBODRAG, Macedonia, June 1 (News Agencies) - Macedonia's now daily clashes with Albanian rebels on Friday rumbled on inconclusively as fears mounted for the safety of some 12,000 civilians trapped by fear and fighting.
Following a familiar pattern, army spokesman Colonel Blagoja Markovski said the army responded to "provocations" from the rebels by shelling targets around the village of Matejce, 16 miles (25 kilometers) north of Skopje.
The village is partly held by the security forces and partly by rebels of the National Liberation Army (NLA), and has been the scene of shelling and bursts of machine gun fire every day since the weekend.
NLA rebels had also fired on government positions in the hills above the northwestern town of Tetovo near the villages of Brodec and Lisec, scene of sporadic rebel activity for more than two months, Markovski said.
Neither side claimed to have advanced after the clashes, and neither could produce evidence of any casualties inflicted or prisoners taken.
"We cannot say the village is completely under our control," Markovski said, almost a week after police special forces, backed by tanks and artillery, launched a drive to recapture it.
While the two forces continued to needle one another, some 12,000 villages remained in the rebel stronghold of Lipkovo, just north of Matejce, where Red Cross officials warned the situation was "desperate".
Husamedin Halili, the mayor of Lipkovo, a village in the center of a rebel-controlled pocket of territory in hills north of Skopje, told AFP earlier this week that more than 12,000 civilians were sheltering in his village.
Fierce fighting in the surrounding area had forced many Muslim Albanian villagers to descend on Lipkovo, which has so far been spared the worst of the fighting.
Halili and civil defense officials in the town have called on international groups to bring aid to the civilians, who they say are running short of food, water and medicine.
But Annick Bouvier, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said that thus far the rebels had not given assurances that humanitarian teams could gain access to the village.
"As always since the start of this crisis, we are ready and willing to send teams to assess the humanitarian needs of the civilian population, but so far the armed ethnic Albanian groups have not given security guarantees," she said.
The government has repeatedly accused the rebels of exploiting the trapped civilians as human shields against a possible government offensive, but Halili told AFP that the villagers were afraid to come out because of reports of Macedonian police brutality.
Markovski had earlier said there had been fighting during the night and that the army had thwarted a rebel attempt to bring supplies into Matejce village on horseback.
Police units backed up by army heavy weapons have been fighting daily battles with the NLA in and around Matejce since the weekend, when the rebels infiltrated the village and seized control of a monastery and a mosque on a slope above the settlement.
A member of a police special intervention unit, who asked not to be named, told AFP that there had been fierce fighting in the village itself and that a number of guerrillas had been killed. His claims were impossible to verify.
On Thursday in the hills west of Matejce, in a group of rebel-held villages, an army captain was killed when a lorry carrying supplies to troops on the Kosovo border hit a landmine.
Meanwhile, the Tanjug news agency reported that Yugoslav Defense Minister Slobodan Krapovic would visit Skopje on Monday at the invitation of his Macedonian counterpart, Vlado Buckovski.
The two ministers would discuss the "priorities of bilateral cooperation in military-economic cooperation" the agency said.
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