August 13, 2001
For months, Macedonia has been see-sawing between peace and war. Now it seems to be embarking on both at once. On August 13th, leaders of all Macedonia's big political parties signed an agreement on power-sharing between its two main ethnic groups. The deal aims to undercut support for ethnic-Albanian guerrillas by improving the lot of Macedonia's restive ethnic Albanians as a whole. In theory, NATO will now deploy some 3,500 peacekeepers to preside over the voluntary disarmament of the guerrillas and the reassertion of control by a new, tolerant and inclusive government. Mediators from NATO and the European Union (EU), who have spent the past seven months dragging recalcitrant politicians back to the negotiating table, should now be pronouncing victory.
But before the politicians had even signed the peace deal, their fellow countrymen had begun to make war. On August 12th, despite a ceasefire brokered by NATO, guerrillas and government forces exchanged fire just outside Skopje, the capital. By the time of the signing ceremony the next day, quiet had returned. But the guerrillas have killed nineteen Slav soldiers in the past week, and Slav politicians have vowed revenge. Slav civilians in Skopje have rioted, looting shops belonging to ethnic Albanians and ransacking a hospital thought (wrongly) to have treated injured rebels. Ethnic Albanians are equally aroused by claims that five of their kin killed by Slav police last week were not rebels resisting arrest, as the official version had it, but instead innocent civilians shot in cold blood. Macedonia's parliament has yet to ratify the deal, the fate of the guerrillas has yet to be decided, and NATO has yet to fix a date for its deployment. In other words, the conclusion of the power-sharing pact raises as many questions as it resolves.
Nonetheless, the agreement contains genuine breakthroughs on several thorny issues. Ethnic Albanians, who make up at least a third of the population, have won a promise of greater representation in the army, police and civil service. An unlicensed university for ethnic Albanians will receive official recognition and funding. Local authorities will wield more power, an alternative that Slavs found more palatable than wholesale autonomy for the largely ethnic-Albanian areas. In general, the agreement will assuage Slav fears of separatism by preserving the notion of a unitary state, while answering ethnic Albanians' complaints of official neglect and exclusion.
Striking that balance proved trickiest over the status of the Albanian language. Ethnic-Albanian politicians wanted it to become an official language, along with Macedonian, the language of the Slav majority. But the Slavs refused, on the grounds that they must zealously defend and promote their culture, including their language, since so many outsiders dispute its very existence. Macedonia has only been independent since 1991, and several of its neighbours argue that the country is just an accidental by-product of the break-up of Yugoslavia, with no identity or heritage of its own. The Macedonian language, some say, is simply Bulgarian by another name, and the country as a whole merely long-lost provinces of Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania. To give Albanian comparable status to Macedonian would have been to accept the sceptics' arguments and undermine Macedonia's claim to statehood—at least in the minds of insecure Macedonian nationalists.
In the end, foreign mediators persuaded the two sides to accept a compromise, whereby Albanian would receive official status in areas where 20% or more of the locals spoke it. Ethnic Albanians would also be able to speak their language in the national parliament, although Macedonian will remain the language of the central government. Thus ethnic Albanians will be able to use their own language for almost all official purposes, but Macedonian will still reign supreme.
The final hurdle was the question of disarming the guerrillas, who were represented only obliquely at the talks through contacts with ethnic-Albanian politicians. NATO had long promised to send troops to collect the rebels' weapons as a guarantee of any peace agreement—but had ruled out the use of force. The guerrillas said they would not lay down their arms until the peace deal was implemented. Slav politicians, on the other hand, demanded that NATO disarm them straight away. The fraught question of an amnesty was also never settled. Yet NATO officials, keen to seal a deal, simply fudged that dispute by confirming that disarmament would proceed, but without fixing a firm timetable.
That fudge is already returning to haunt NATO. The alliance is now faced with the unpalatable choice of sending peacekeepers into a budding war, or waiting and risking accusations of inaction as the situation deteriorates further. NATO leaders say they will not deploy until a durable ceasefire is in place. But the durability of any truce depends as much on the alliance's resolve as anything else. Once deployed, the peacekeepers might get caught in the crossfire or, worse, sucked into a battle with renegade guerrillas, soldiers or both. Macedonia's parliament has 45 days to consider the power-sharing agreement, giving those opposed to the deal an incentive to try to derail it before it can be ratified. Nationalist demagogues on either side will doubtless exploit the violence of the past few days to stir up public opinion against the deal.
Foreign diplomats have declared peace in Macedonia several times in the past eight months, only to be confounded by events on the ground. Received wisdom once held that NATO could have prevented several wars in the former Yugoslavia if only it had intervened early and forcefully enough. The alliance's apologists say it is hard to stop those determined to go to war from doing so. Its critics, pointing to NATO's refusal to use force in Macedonia, argue that the alliance has never tried hard enough. The next few weeks will test the determination of warmongers and peacemakers alike.
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