Going Behind Enemy Lines in Macedonia

The two-room school is empty, its windows shattered by the blast of a mortar round that landed outside the front door. As ethnic Albanian rebels fight to hold their ground here, only three people in the village remain unarmed.

One is an English teacher, an ethnic Albanian man named Azem Bajrami, who looks oddly jaunty in his blue beret, with a dark coat draped over his shoulders. At 60, he can still do a quick, weaving sprint to dodge snipers’ bullets. He did it Monday as bullets whistled overhead from Macedonian police positions about 200 yards from this mountain village, which until a week ago had 600 residents.

The two others are the last ethnic Macedonian holdouts, too old and frail to get up and leave their farmhouse as their country slips closer to all-out war.

Tomo Blazcuski is almost 88, blind in one eye, and seems a little unsure why explosions keep disturbing the silence. His house shakes when the mortars land. One hit his neighbor’s empty house.

At least one villager, a man in his 40s, has died in the attacks on Lavce and the nearby village of Selce, rebel fighters said. One of the wounded is Nessibe Ferati, a 13-year-old girl hit by a sniper’s bullet.

The blasts were coming quicker Monday afternoon, and the police snipers were at work. Yet Blazcuski was sitting on his doorstep, alone except for the rebel fighters who were eager to show four journalists how well they treat ethnic Macedonians. His wife, Trplka, was inside, perhaps asleep.

Rebels say they are fighting for equal rights for ethnic Albanians, who make up at least a quarter of Macedonia’s 2 million people. They are holding the high ground here, overlooking Tetovo, Macedonia’s second-largest city and the de facto capital of the ethnic Albanian minority.

Fearing that the ethnic Albanians want to redraw borders to create a “Greater Albania,” a move that would prompt another round of Balkan warfare, the U.S. government and the European Union have given strong backing to Macedonia’s government.

For the past week, Macedonian special police units have hammered the foothills of the Sar mountains overlooking Tetovo and tried to pick off rebel fighters with machine guns and sniper fire.

Through it all, the guerrillas have managed to gain ground and, their commanders claim, repel repeated police assaults. The rebels acknowledge only a few casualties.

But at least a dozen Macedonian army tanks have moved into position in Tetovo, their barrels pointing toward the mountains where thousands of civilians, mainly ethnic Albanians, live well within range.

Government spokesman Antonio Milosevski on Monday told reporters in Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, to expect the beginning of an operation that will “completely eliminate the terrorists.”

The government also said it is getting help from unmanned drones sent by the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo to provide aerial reconnaissance of the fighting.

The peacekeeping force, called KFOR, controls Kosovo, the province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia where many of the rebels now fighting in neighboring Macedonia also fought for independence.

“Our state is cooperating with KFOR, and we are using these shots from the pilotless aircraft,” said Nikola Dimitrov, national security advisor to Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski.

The ethnic Albanian rebel force in Macedonia’s mountains calls itself the National Liberation Army. The Albanian acronym on the crests sewn to their uniforms is UCK, the same one that appeared on the shoulders and caps of the Kosovo Liberation Army, which once fought Serbian forces in Kosovo.

The Kosovo Liberation Army was officially disbanded after North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops forced Serbian police and Yugoslav troops to withdraw from the province in June 1999. But its influence is now being felt in Macedonia. The rebels openly acknowledge that the core fighters in the rebel army around Tetovo are veterans of the Kosovo war who were born in Macedonia and Kosovo Albanians who crossed the border as brothers in arms.

The symbols of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian independence movement were evident everywhere during a two-day journey through rebel territory by mountain pony, tractor and on foot.

The few decorations on the wall of a six-table cafe in the village of Germa, overlooking Tetovo, include a small poster of Adem Jashari, founding father of the Kosovo guerrillas, carrying a machine gun.

Like many of the Kosovo rebels before them, Macedonia’s guerrilla army wears camouflage uniforms that look just like those of the German army. Germany has tens of thousands of ethnic Albanian “guest workers,” making the country one of the biggest sources of private donations used to buy arms and other supplies, such as uniforms, for rebel fighters in the Balkans.

In Lavce, the rebels have valuable equipment from a much different source: Macedonia’s police. A blue and white police car apparently was seized in an ambush last Tuesday, which marked the start of the battle over Tetovo.

“So far, they are shooting everywhere, hoping that we are somewhere,” said one rebel, Sadri Ahmeti, who in peacetime is a teacher of Albanian literature.

The morale of rebel troops near the front line seems high. And the constant, heavy explosions haven’t shaken their resolve.

Although the guerrillas have not yet clearly stated their bottom line, fighters and their civilian supporters interviewed in rebel-held territory said that a change to the country’s constitution would be enough.

The constitution declares the Macedonian language, and its Cyrillic alphabet, the country’s only official language. The ethnic Albanian minority says that denies them access to state universities and even makes visiting a doctor difficult.

Ethnic Albanians also complain that they don’t have their own state-funded university and instead are being asked to settle for one supported by Western governments.

It sounds simple to make Albanian a second official language and to recognize all the rights that would go with it. But ethnic Macedonians fear that such concessions would only lead to more demands for greater self-rule and, eventually, the country’s disintegration.

Ethnic Albanian politicians help rule Macedonia in a coalition government, but many of their people are frustrated and argue that war is the only way to win equal rights.

“I’m not saying this [fighting] is the best way,” said Nevzat Halili, 54, former head of an ethnic Albanian party that belonged to Macedonia’s coalition government until 1998. “It is the worst way. But it was the only possible choice.

“There is a great willingness to stop the war at any possible moment,” added Halili, who now leads a smaller political party.

In a better world, Ahmeti would be holding an open book. In the mountains of western Macedonia, he carries an AK-47 rifle.

“I don’t hate anyone, honestly,” Ahmeti said through an interpreter. “I’m fighting for the liberation of our territory.”

NATO’s worst nightmare in the Balkans is a war waged by guerrillas to redraw borders and unite Albanian-speaking people across the region. Macedonia’s rebel fighters insist that isn’t their goal, but Ahmeti still hopes for it.

“My wish is for all Albanians to live together,” Ahmeti said. “But we are not against international institutions, and we don’t want to fight against them to change the border. We don’t want to lose our allies.”