10 Soldiers Die in Ambush as Macedonia Nears Peace Pact

Leaders from Macedonia’s four major parties--two representing ethnic Macedonians and two ethnic Albanians--initialed a political peace agreement Wednesday even as rebels ambushed an army convoy and killed 10 soldiers.

The attack set off anti-Albanian riots in the southern Macedonian town that was home to some of the slain soldiers. Here in the capital, hundreds of youths threw rocks at shops that they suspected might be owned by ethnic Albanians and confronted police in riot gear who were attempting to control the situation.

The peace agreement, which was brokered by Western mediators, is designed to end fighting that has brought the Balkan country to the verge of civil war. European Union envoy Francois Leotard said the accord will be formally signed Monday.

The deal is a crucial step toward ending the conflict. Only when the accord is signed and a cease-fire is in place will North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops enter the country and begin disarming the ethnic Albanian rebels.

The guerrillas began their rebellion about six months ago. They say they want the government to assure the rights of ethnic Albanians, who make up at least 25% of Macedonia’s 2 million people. However, many ethnic Macedonians believe that the rebels want to break apart the country by gaining control over the areas that are majority ethnic Albanian.

“I hope it’s possible now to have peace on the ground and stabilization of the situation, but I know that it’s very complex,” Leotard said in a statement issued in Ohrid, the lakeside resort in southwestern Macedonia where the talks were held.

The agreement includes provisions granting the Albanian language greater status in areas where ethnic Albanians make up more than 20% of the population. It also includes provisions to increase by 1,000 the number of ethnic Albanians in the country’s police force and requires that some of those officers be deployed in areas where ethnic Albanians are in the majority.

Whether lasting peace is attainable, however, remains in doubt given the uproar caused by Wednesday’s attack.

During the next few days the rebels’ behavior will be a critical factor in whether politicians will be able to sell the agreement to the public and to parliament, Western diplomats said.

Ethnic Macedonian leaders already were facing a difficult task in rallying support for the deal. With the killing of the soldiers, the job gets much harder.

“It is really touch and go--how will they sell this to the public?” a senior Western diplomat said.

The diplomat noted that rebels around Tetovo, the nation’s largest majority ethnic Albanian city, do not seem to be controlled by the guerrilla leadership. Tetovo is near the site of Wednesday’s attack.

“They appear to be outside the chain of command of the rest of the guerrillas,” said the diplomat, who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of negotiations. “They have their weapons, their uniforms, and they may say, ‘Why should we give this up?’ They are very young boys, and they are not particularly politically responsible. The situation is far from over.”

NATO officials announced Wednesday that they had intercepted smugglers in neighboring Kosovo attempting to transport large quantities of arms to the rebels. The officials said they have interdicted 113 rockets and missiles as well as mortars and several thousand explosives and many other weapons over the past two months.

Kosovo is a U.N.-administered province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, and its population is mostly ethnic Albanian.

Macedonian government spokesman Antonio Milososki made it clear that many in the administration believe that the rebels must be subdued through military means before a peace agreement can move forward. However, that approach would prolong the fighting and indefinitely delay NATO’s entry into the country.

“We should have military action to control the part of our country” in the north and west, where most of Macedonia’s ethnic Albanians live, Milososki said. “I’m afraid that [the Wednesday ambush] will be . . . the largest obstacle on the road to peace. It’s obvious that, without military progress, it will be difficult to continue with political dialogue.”

The attack on the soldiers shocked the Macedonian public. It occurred about 9:30 a.m. as a convoy carrying army reservists was traveling from Skopje to Tetovo. The rebels opened fire as the convoy passed through an area where the road narrows and hills rise on either side.

The guerrillas fired rocket-propelled grenades as well as small arms, according to a Defense Ministry statement. The truck carrying the 10 soldiers was little more than a twisted mass of burned metal. A bus, which also was hit, looked similarly charred. Two of the soldiers in that vehicle were injured.

“I worked for 10 years as a judge, but what I have seen today cannot be compared with anything that is human because the two bodies of our soldiers, the soldiers of the Republic of Macedonia, were burning . . . like candles,” said Stavre Dzikov, the state prosecutor.

News of the attack sparked riots in Prilep, the hometown of some of the dead. An angry crowd trashed ethnic Albanian stores and burned a mosque.

As the rioting ran into the evening, Macedonian authorities announced that four of the dead soldiers had been identified and that three of them were Macedonian Muslims, though not ethnic Albanians. They added that the soldiers came from various ethnic groups, suggesting that some might be ethnic Albanians, and appealed to the people of Prilep to control their rage.