Macedonia’s Leaders Sign Deal Paving Way for Peace

Macedonian political leaders signed a peace deal Monday that is widely viewed as a critical first step toward ending a six-month conflict with ethnic Albanian rebels and averting the fifth Balkan war in a decade.

The success of the deal will hinge on the guerrillas’ leaving occupied land and handing over their arms to North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops. Terms of the disarmament and an amnesty for the rebels are still being worked out, and those issues are likely to be as difficult to negotiate as was the peace deal itself.

Also uncertain is the willingness of the Macedonian parliament to pass laws necessary to implement the deal. Legislators are scheduled to act on the agreement within 45 days.

“This agreement is a first and crucial step in taking the country away from civil war and returning it to normality,” NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said during a news conference after the low-key signing ceremony.

“There is a light at the end of the tunnel--a dark tunnel--but it must be implemented quickly,” he warned.

The peace agreement would grant more rights to the country’s large ethnic Albanian minority. It would elevate the legal status of the Albanian language and require that more Albanians be given jobs in the country’s police force and that Albanian police be assigned to work in communities with majority Albanian populations.

Macedonia has about 2 million people, of whom at least 25% are ethnic Albanian. Until six months ago, when ethnic Albanian rebels took up arms to fight for more rights, the country was viewed as a rare Balkan success story because it was the only area of the former Yugoslav federation to have avoided a war when the federation broke apart in the early 1990s.

Negotiating the deal signed Monday has been a top priority for the European Community and the United States because of fears that without a political resolution to the conflict, a civil war could ravage Macedonia and destabilize neighboring states in southern Europe.

Macedonian politicians made no effort to broadcast the accord to the public. The time and place of the signing were kept secret until the last moment because the government feared a backlash from the public, some of whom believe that their country has been forced into humiliating concessions on minority rights by Western negotiators.

In a blunt exhortation to Macedonia’s leaders, Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, said after the signing that they now must make an effort to explain publicly the reasons for the agreement and its content.

“With all due respect, we may sign an infinite number of agreements, but unless we move the agreements into practice, nothing is done,” Solana said.

“It’s the obligation of the leaders to lead, to explain to the people the sense of the agreement and to tell them that they have a friend in Europe, and for that [reason] they must forget about violence,” he added. “Violence in the 21st century has no place in Europe.”

The signing of the deal is one of several preconditions NATO has said must be met before its troops will enter Macedonia and begin to disarm the rebels.

Also essential are a durable cease-fire and an agreement between the government and the guerrillas, who are known as the National Liberation Army, on a disarmament plan that would include an amnesty for those who turned over their arms.

NATO has pledged that once those conditions have been met, it will rapidly deploy 3,500 troops to administer the disarmament. However, the NATO role is likely to become much wider, experts say. Many Macedonians believe that only a NATO presence will stop the fighting. At the moment, NATO has no official role as a peacekeeper.

Both the expectation that NATO will become the keeper of the cease-fire and the reality that the West has much at stake suggest that NATO will ultimately be forced to take a much more active role, just as it has in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, Macedonia’s neighbor to the north.

“We’re faced with an agreement that we pushed and that won’t work unless it’s enforced from the outside, which will take far more troops, a longer presence and a greater investment than is currently anticipated,” said Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.

“NATO may not be able to control the situation with 3,500 troops. It will almost certainly require many, many more,” Daalder said.

Macedonian politicians spoke little about the agreement’s content or the specific steps they would take next, but they did say that the accord is positive for the country.

In a brief appearance before Macedonian media after the signing, which took place at President Boris Trajkovski’s residence, Trajkovski underscored the importance to Macedonia of regaining control of its territory from the guerrillas, who have seized a number of villages in the north and west of the country.

“This is not only a political deal. This is also a peace deal that would remove the presence of the intruders in Macedonia and would guarantee its territorial sovereignty,” he said.

In contrast, Arben Xhaferi, the leader of one of the main ethnic Albanian political parties, made a point of trying to show the media what the agreement might mean in practice. When his turn came to speak, he spoke in Albanian to show, he said, in practical terms the meaning of the elevation in status of the Albanian language that is guaranteed by the agreement.

That irritated Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, who, in a less than auspicious sign for the accord’s future, walked out while Xhaferi was speaking, according to Macedonian media representatives who were present.

In a statement to news agencies, Commander Shpati, a senior officer in the National Liberation Army--which was not part of the peace talks--said he expects that the agreement will result in NLA disarmament, but only if minority rights are implemented concurrently.

Even as the deal was being signed, shots were fired at border posts and police checkpoints in western Macedonia, according to police.

The last two weeks have been the bloodiest of the war, claiming the lives of at least 20 ethnic Macedonian soldiers. The rebels do not disclose their casualties.

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The Accord

Key elements of the Macedonian peace agreement:

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* Amends the preamble to Macedonia’s Constitution to delete reference to Macedonian Slavs as the only “constitutional” people and to make the country a civic society of all its ethnic groups.

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* Creates a “double majority” system in parliament requiring that half the lawmakers voting on a measure must come from one or more minority groups for it to be enacted.

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* Makes Albanian the second official language in communities where ethnic Albanians make up more than 20% of the population. Albanian also comes into official use in parliament.

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* Provides state-funded higher education in the Albanian language in communities where ethnic Albanians make up more than 20% of the population. Previously, the state funded only lower education in Albanian in such communities.

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* Requires that more ethnic Albanians be added to the police force and that Albanian police be assigned to work in communities with majority Albanian populations.