August 28, 2001
NATO troops are in Macedonia to uphold a ragged ceasefire between the government and ethnic-Albanian rebels. So far, with success. But the danger of a Macedonian civil war has not passed, and such a war could re-ignite the whole Balkan region.
Hulking transport planes roar into Skopje airport. French foreign legionnaires and British paratroopers in their red berets, part of a NATO force that will soon number 3,500, jump out to unload their equipment. Behind them, helicopter-gunships belonging to the Macedonian government, which for the past six months were pumping rockets into rebel positions in northern Macedonia, sit silently on the hot tarmac.
NATO's mission in Macedonia sounds impossible. Within thirty days, its soldiers are to oversee the disarming of ethnic-Albanian guerrillas, thereby preventing another Balkan civil war. Even the most basic element of this limited task is contentious. Government and guerrillas have given widely different estimates of the size of the rebel arsenal. NATO has said it proposes to collect 3,300 weapons. The Macedonian government has claimed the rebels hold as many as 70,000 machine guns, rifles and other weapons. The prime minister, Ljubco Georgievski, has called NATO's target figure "ridiculous and humiliating".
Despite one death—of a young British soldier killed when Macedonian youths threw a concrete slab through the windscreen of his vehicle—things have so far gone fairly smoothly. On Monday August 27th, NATO reported that its soldiers had already collected 400 items from the rebels, including two tanks, two personnel carriers and 130 mortars. NATO liaison-officers had met with the rebel leader, Ali Ahmeti, last week to arrange the handovers. While black-uniformed, pistol-toting guerrillas stood outside nattering with British soldiers, negotiators shared chocolate biscuits and thrashed out the details of how the National Liberation Army (NLA) would give up its weapons.
The NATO force is in Macedonia to uphold a precarious peace deal. On August 13th, the Macedonian government signed a pact with the country's ethnic-Albanian political parties, which paved the way for a ceasefire between the NLA and the Macedonian army. To keep all those safety catches on, however, they will have to calm extremists on both sides. The same day this week that NATO officers were meeting Mr Ahmeti an ancient church was blown up in the town of Lesok, clearly by people opposed to the ceasefire, but whether they were Albanian guerrillas or Slav-Macedonian provocateurs is uncertain.
Macedonia's troubles began only recently. The country was the poorest of the former Yugoslav republics, but since independence in 1991, it has been unusually peaceful—at least by Balkan standards. As Bosnia and Croatia burned in the early 1990s, Macedonia remained tranquil. Even the conflict in neighbouring Kosovo in 1999 failed to spark violence there, despite an influx of 300,000 Albanian refugees, which aggravated Macedonia's existing ethnic tensions.
Most Macedonians are Slavs, speaking a language similar to Bulgarian. But about a third are ethnic Albanians. The two groups follow different faiths: Slav-Macedonians are mainly orthodox Christian, while Albanian-Macedonians are mainly Muslim. Slavs dominate the government and civil service, while Albanians do a lot of cross-border trading.
Albanian nationalists in Macedonia have three main demands. They want the constitution to define Macedonia as a state whose people include both Slav-Macedonians and ethnic Albanians. They want Albanian to be made an official language, and they want a state-funded university where courses are taught in Albanian.
None of these demands sounds immoderate, but many Slav-Macedonians fear that they are merely a first step towards the break-up of their country, with Albanian-dominated areas joining a "Greater Albania". They guard their nationhood jealously, not least because they feel insecure about it. Many of their neighbours dispute the existence of a unique Macedonian culture or language. Bulgarians scoff that Macedonians are no different from themselves. Greece objects to the name "Macedonia", which is also the name of a region of Greece.
Macedonian Slavs and Albanians rubbed along fairly well for a decade, under a series of ethnically mixed governments. But early this year, an Albanian guerrilla movement started to grow and to arm itself, using bases on both sides of the border with Kosovo. Deadly skirmishes broke out around Tetovo, the largest ethnic-Albanian city, and Macedonia lurched to the brink of civil war.
Outsiders, fearing another Balkan inferno, rushed to mediate. This month's peace deal, signed under pressure from Europe and America, accepts most Albanian demands. Ethnic Albanians were promised state funds for a university and more jobs in the army, police and civil service. Local authorities are to be granted more autonomy, and the Albanian language is to be given official status in areas where a fifth or more of locals speak it. This is a reasonable compromise, but not everyone in Macedonia is reasonable or wants to compromise.
On the Slav-Macedonian side, the president, a Methodist minister called Boris Trajkovski, is the leading moderate. But within his party are many Slavs who regard the peace deal as a betrayal. These radicals look to interior minister Ljube Boskovski as their leader, although he does not openly embrace their support. Many have guns and are prepared to use them—perhaps 10,000 people in a country where the regular army is only a little larger than that.
On the Albanian side, a shadowy group called the Albanian National Army (ANA) has claimed responsibility for some recent killings of Slav-Macedonian troops. Is the ANA a violent splinter from the NLA, a sort of Albanian equivalent of the Real IRA of Northern Ireland? Or is it a secret wing of the NLA, causing mayhem on behalf of Mr Ahmeti, to make him seem more moderate by comparison? Or is it, as the latest conspiracy theory has it, an invention of Slav-Macedonian hard-liners, eager to create their own excuse for breaking the ceasefire?
NATO may find it hard to disarm the NLA. In any case, success will be difficult to gauge. The rebels say they have 2,000 guns; Mr Boskovski claims they have 85,000. No matter how many are handed over, the NLA will always be able to buy more. Both Albanian and Slav-Macedonian extremists are thought to be involved in organised crime, so both have the necessary money and motive to foment chaos.
If NATO troops are forced to remain for longer than the promised 30 days, to create a buffer between the two sides, this could lead to a de facto separation of rebel and government-controlled areas of Macedonia: an obvious first step to partition. And off the record, NATO commanders fear that the Slav-Macedonian militia, angry at the cordial relations between the outsiders and the NLA, may start taking pot-shots at NATO troops. This could force them to return fire, and so compromise their neutrality.
The grim truth is that violence has been seen to pay in Macedonia. The NLA's demands are no different from those that peaceful ethnic-Albanian parties have been making for a decade. But the peaceful politicians were ignored, whereas the NLA has extracted big concessions in six months. Somehow, NATO has to prevent others from taking this lesson to heart.
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