Macedonians Make Tentative Language Deal

Leaders of the main ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political parties reached a tentative agreement Wednesday on whether Albanian should be an official language of the country, one of the difficult issues dividing the two groups, according to Western envoys.

U.S. special envoy James Pardew and the European Union’s envoy to Macedonia, Francois Leotard, made the announcement after peace talks broke up late Wednesday in preparation for a national holiday today. The talks are scheduled to resume Friday.

“This is a significant development in the negotiating process. The language has always been the toughest issue, and now we have both parties agreeing,” Pardew said.

Under the tentative accord, Macedonian would remain the official language throughout the country, but Albanian would have an official status in some circumstances.

However, Pardew said the language agreement will hold only if a final peace agreement is endorsed by the four political parties that are in the negotiations--two Macedonian and two Albanian.

The majority of the country is ethnic Macedonian, but a large Albanian minority makes up at least 25% of Macedonia’s population of 2 million.

The talks, which have been intensive over the last several days, had foundered on several major issues, including the demand of ethnic Albanian leaders to make Albanian an official language on a par with Macedonian. Another issue is the role of the Albanians in the country’s police force.

With the language argument tentatively resolved, negotiators hope to be able to move on to the police issue, according to a statement from the office of President Boris Trajkovski.

The language agreement would allow Albanian to be used at the local government level along with Macedonian in areas where Albanians make up more than 20% of a municipality’s population, according to a Western official and an aide to Trajkovski, who spoke to state television. The Albanians are concentrated primarily in a swath of cities in the north near the border with Kosovo, a province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia.

In the central government, Albanian would be used along with Macedonian both in plenary sessions of parliament and in its committee discussions. It would also be possible for ethnic Albanians to obtain some legal documents, such as licenses and permits, in their own language, a Western official said.

However, in the government ministries, which regulate and oversee fields that include health, the economy and defense, the Macedonian language would be the only official one.

The negotiations over the Albanian language were so difficult because, for each side, the status of its language was a measure of its political position in the country. “For Albanians it goes to the heart of their status and whether they are viewed as second-class citizens,” the Western official said.

“For Macedonians it goes to their identity as a country, and you don’t have to talk to them for 35 minutes to know that they’re a 10-year-old country and there is a lot of insecurity about their identity and they are a people who need to have a sense of a homeland,” the official said.

Pardew warned that there is still hard negotiating ahead, and he declined to say how long that would take.

The two main ethnic groups in Macedonia have been on the brink of civil war; the conflict stems from ethnic Albanians’ frustration with what they see as inadequate rights as well as mistreatment by the ethnic Macedonian majority. Ethnic Albanians hold far fewer positions in the government, military and police proportionate to their numbers in the population.

In the negotiations, the ethnic Albanian parties are demanding greater equality.

Meanwhile, the National Liberation Army, the Albanian guerrilla force, has used firepower in a bid to gain political leverage. And it appears to many here that, more than a political solution, they want control of territory where Albanians are in the majority. Although a cease-fire is supposed to be in place, there have been almost daily violations.

The fighting has undermined the peace process and raised questions about whether any deal would even be implemented. The cease-fire violations have caused some ethnic Macedonian government officials to take the position that only a military assault will end the fighting.

Earlier Wednesday, in response to the fatal shooting overnight of a 24-year-old policeman by guerrillas who attacked a checkpoint in a majority ethnic Albanian area, the interior minister called for military action.

“The terrorists are not respecting the cease-fire,” Ljube Boskovski said.

“Macedonia should be disturbed. Macedonia cannot just stand and wait for a knife of Albanian terrorists. . . . The only optimistic option in order to have peace is to defeat the terrorists. Nobody in this state wants war, but the peace will come to this state at the moment when terrorists are defeated.”