A Battleground With Unmarked Front Lines

Uncanny silence in the late afternoon is the first sign that something is wrong.

The broad main street is lined with cafes and small stores that ought to be thronged with people. But the flies find few cups of sugared espresso to land on because only a table or two is occupied.

Once in a while someone hurries past. Outdoor socializing is as much a part of the culture in landlocked Tetovo as it is in any beach town, but no one lingers.

Macedonia’s conflict has been neither as widespread nor as brutal as those in other Balkan countries. But its second-largest city, barely an hour from the capital, Skopje, is an urban war zone where even close to the city center, locals cannot be sure exactly where the front lines are.

It is in Tetovo and surrounding small towns that the National Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian guerrilla force, is fighting Macedonian military and police. The guerrillas say they only want equal treatment for the ethnic Albanian minority. Ethnic Macedonian political leaders fear that the guerrillas want to split the country. There is a tentative cease-fire while international negotiators try to bring the two sides to an accord.

But almost every day, there are reports of gunfire, shootings and deaths. At times, the two sides have exchanged small-arms and mortar fire a few minutes’ drive from the center of town.

At first glance, there are no obvious signs of war here--no soldiers and no visible front line. Petunias, roses and marigolds grow in well-tended gardens.

At close range, small signs emerge--a bullet hole in a telephone pole, a trashed car, a downed power line.

The tension is all the more striking because just 16 miles away in the town of Gostivar, another community with a large ethnic Albanian population, the mood is completely different. There, the cafes are full of mixed groups of ethnic Albanians and ethnic Macedonians.

It is only deep into a conversation that the conflict’s toll becomes evident there too.

Nasif Selimi, a middle-aged ethnic Albanian man burned brown by the hot Macedonian sun, talks at length about his hopes for peace. It turns out that he has a personal stake: 10 days ago, one of his two sons left home.

“He came to me and said, ‘Father, I have no more friends here--they have all joined the NLA; I am going too.’ ” Selimi has not heard from him since.

Nearby, at a cafe frequented by many ethnic Macedonians, 18-year-old Mariana Velickovski hugs an Albanian friend and says she does not want to talk about the fighting. But after he leaves, she says: “I am scared. I don’t know why, but I am scared and I am ashamed of how Macedonian people are behaving.”

She is frightened not so much by threats to her safety but by the sense that her world is changing and that the conflict cannot be kept at bay.

In Tetovo, a stroll down the street is a lesson in vulnerability.

The Drenovec neighborhood is a subdivision a mere 10-minute drive from downtown. The few men gathered in the downtown cafes say a house in the neighborhood was set on fire earlier in the day but that the area is safe.

In the late afternoon, the streets in Drenovec are bright and quiet. Well-kept houses, many with cheery, Mediterranean terra cotta tile roofs, sit close together. There are more people on the streets here than on the town’s main boulevard. They gather at small corner groceries or stand at the edge of the sidewalk.

Some of them are recognizably ethnic Macedonian because they are wearing small gold crosses--a symbol of the Orthodox Church. Most ethnic Albanians are Muslims.

A little farther into the neighborhood, the people vanish. But the houses are still pleasant; cars sit undisturbed in small driveways. It is very quiet.

Then, on one block, several houses are shuttered, and at the end of that block, there is a trashed car. One front tire is gone, its windshield broken and its foam seats ripped to shreds. A telephone wire trails on the ground nearby. Across the street is a burned-out house; perhaps the one that was the subject of the cafe conversations.

It is hot and very still.

A shot rings out, fired from the direction of the city stadium and a Macedonian police checkpoint. It smacks into a telephone pole at head level. Two journalists on the street dash toward the burned-out house.

Instantaneously, two men in black T-shirts and black pants and casually holding AK-47 assault rifles appear by the house. A moment later, the two visitors are led down cement steps into a basement.

A total of six men are here, NLA fighters who patrol this edge of the neighborhood.

What the civilians did not know was that the street is an unmarked border that divides the neighborhood between an ethnic Macedonian area to the south and an Albanian area that extends many miles to the north, almost to Kosovo, the majority ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic. It is contested ground, and even during a cease-fire shots are often fired here.

In some individual blocks, international monitors say, the border is even less defined--there may be both Albanian and Macedonian homes.

The NLA soldiers appear well dressed, polite and calm. Most of them wear a uniform of black fatigues, including a black T-shirt with the guerrilla army’s symbol: the letters UCK and a double-headed red eagle.

For most, the logo is printed on their shirts, but some have a patch that is sewed on. A couple of them wear baseball caps, and several have ammunition belts around their waist.

Some wear black army-style boots; others are in sneakers. Every one of them is carrying an AK-47. They shake hands politely and offer their guests Coca-Cola, which is surprisingly cold, even though there is no electricity on this side of the line.

They crouch much of the day in a concrete trench that leads into the basement. Graffitied on the wall is the word “Hoxha,” the name of one of the NLA leaders, and UCK, the Albanian acronym for the National Liberation Army.

They are young, between 17 and 25 years old, they say.

“I am 20 years old, and I would like to go with a beautiful woman to America,” says a tall, lean fighter with brush-cut hair. “But I must fight for our rights, not for me, but for my children. I don’t have children yet, but I want my children to be free when I have them.”

He speaks English, which he learned in a village primary school. It is halting but good.

He cares what Americans think of the NLA and says repeatedly, “Please, tell George Bush that we are not terrorists.”

“We don’t kill Macedonian women and children, only Macedonian military and police,” he says. Most of the reports of NLA attacks occur around government checkpoints.

A few worn-out couch cushions are on the cement floor along with cigarette butts and chips of brick, cement and other debris. The brush-cut fighter is one of several who are cleanshaven; only a couple sport beards. One of the most striking things is how clean and well groomed the fighters are--especially given the dilapidated state of the building and the neighborhood, not to mention that they are in battle.

They report the shot to their commanding officer on their cell phone. A car goes to fetch him from a command post minutes away. They seem to drive fearlessly in the area they control.

He arrives with about 20 fellow fighters, and everyone gathers in the basement of the house next door. A few fighters are in the kitchen eating a meal out of cans. It is dark in the basement.

Ground-level windows are covered. Everyone sits on a beat-up couch and on the floor while the commander is quickly briefed.

He is young but has the confident air of a man in control. He carries a cell phone and has no gun.

“A nurse was hit yesterday,” he says. NLA fighters don’t dwell on the fact that if there was no fighting, no lives would be in danger.

This war “is for our children,” says a burly young fighter as he goes back on patrol.