Cease-Fire Violations Continue in Macedonia

Ethnic Albanian rebels lobbed mortars at Macedonian police positions near Tetovo, the country’s second-largest city, straining a shaky truce that has coincided with peace talks, state radio reported Saturday.

News of the cease-fire violations came as a key European envoy announced plans to travel to Macedonia to bolster Western peace efforts for the troubled Balkan nation.

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana will fly from Ukraine to Macedonia today to attend the talks in Ohrid, said his spokeswoman, Christina Gallach.

“He wants to support the negotiations at this particular moment,” she said. “We hope for final progress as soon as possible.”

The rebels launched gun and mortar attacks against Macedonian police positions near Tetovo, an ethnic Albanian city in the northwest, Macedonia’s state-run radio said Saturday. No casualties were reported.

The truce was agreed to last month to make it possible for talks to start between majority ethnic Macedonians and the ethnic Albanians.

The talks on a complex, Western-designed peace plan are focusing on increasing the number of ethnic Albanians in the police force. Western mediators discussed deploying dozens of foreign police experts and officers to help carry out reforms if the rival sides agree on a peace plan, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The officers and experts would come on top of the estimated 3,000 North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops that the proposed peace plan envisages to help disarm the ethnic Albanian rebels.

Ethnic Albanians are demanding that their sizable community--at least one-fourth of Macedonia’s 2 million people--be proportionately represented in police forces, especially in areas where they are the majority.

They also want to independently elect police chiefs who would answer to local leaders rather than the central government in the capital, Skopje. The ethnic Albanians also demand that the rebels become members of the police force once a peace deal is reached.

Ethnic Macedonians see these demands as part of an ethnic Albanian strategy to ultimately break away northwestern regions where the restive minority lives and where the rebels already control chunks of territory.

Several northwestern villages populated by ethnic Macedonians have been cut off for days by the rebels. Authorities dispatched a humanitarian convoy Saturday with 40 tons of food and medicine.

The insurgency, which began in February, has left dozens dead and thousands displaced. The rebels say they are fighting for more rights.