Macedonia Issues Ultimatum to Rebels

After its troops blasted guerrillas in the foothills overlooking this city with tank shells Tuesday, the Macedonian government gave ethnic Albanian rebels until midnight tonight to give up or face all-out war.

Ignoring the guerrillas’ offer to discuss their demand that equal rights be assured for the nation’s ethnic Albanian minority, the government said the rebels must “surrender to responsible authorities or leave the territory of Macedonia.”

“After this deadline expires, Macedonian security forces will extend their actions against terrorist positions with all available means until their total destruction,” warned a joint statement by the police and armed forces.

As Macedonia teetered on the brink of full-scale war, Washington and the European Union threw their support behind the government, which has refused to negotiate with what it considers terrorists.

Javier Solana, the European Union’s top security official, was uncompromising in his condemnation of the National Liberation Army rebels, who insist that their goal is to win equal rights, not to break up Macedonia.

“Nothing, and I mean nothing, will be obtained by violent means,” Solana told reporters during an official visit to Skopje, Macedonia’s capital. “It is a mistake to negotiate with the terrorists, and we do not recommend it.”

A rebel communique issued before the government’s ultimatum condemned what it called “the ignorant attitude of Macedonian authorities and . . . hypocritical disregard of the demands by Albanians.”

“Albanians have no other alternative but to take up arms and fight for their rights,” the statement added, in what the rebels called “the last warning.”

At least a quarter of this nation’s people are ethnic Albanians, who have long complained of suffering from official bias. Macedonian is the only language recognized by the country’s constitution, and the ethnic Albanian minority complains of discrimination on the job, in higher education and in other aspects of daily life.

But Western governments insist that ethnic Albanians should give democracy time to resolve their grievances, and they suspect that the rebels are motivated by smugglers’ greed or extremist dreams of uniting ethnic Albanians across the region into one state. The combat zone is near Macedonia’s border with Kosovo, the primarily ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic.

Arben Xhaferi, a leading moderate ethnic Albanian politician, on Tuesday criticized the government’s hard-line stance toward the guerrillas. Xhaferi, whose Democratic Party of Albanians is a partner in Macedonia’s ruling coalition, complained that he and ministers from his party were being shut out of crucial decisions.

After about a week of fighting, the conflict between ethnic Albanian rebels and Macedonia’s security forces remains concentrated in several villages near Tetovo, the country’s second-largest city and the heart of a mainly ethnic Albanian region. But advocates of compromise fear that the conflict will spread.

If the fighting around Tetovo moves about 25 miles east to Skopje, with its large ethnic Albanian population, the world can expect to see another Balkan catastrophe, predicted Iso Rusi, editor of Lobi, a leading Albanian-language weekly in Macedonia.

“If something starts in Skopje, we are not going to have our Sarajevo,” Rusi warned in an interview, referring to the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina torn by fighting in the early 1990s. “We will have Beirut, I’m afraid. It will be a long, bloody war.”

The Macedonian government must be careful not to repeat mistakes made by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army in wars over the past decade, Rusi said.

“There is a really big danger if you start to use unbalanced force against the rebels,” he said. “Ordinary [ethnic] Albanians are living near the places where the rebels operate, and if you start killing the local people, you will provoke another reaction--an uncontrolled reaction.

“Somebody will use the fact that Albanian civilians are dying, claiming that the Macedonian police and army are not fighting the rebels but against the Albanians as a community.”

On Tuesday, Macedonian troops pounded villages in the foothills of the Sar mountains just above Tetovo with tank, artillery and mortar fire. But there was no sign of return fire during the pummeling that began at 4 p.m. and lasted nearly 90 minutes.

It was the first time that the Macedonian army has fired its weapons in anger since the country won independence peacefully from the Yugoslav federation in 1992; in previous days, the fighting involved paramilitary police. Although Tuesday’s display of firepower may have looked impressive, military analysts said it wasn’t an effective counterinsurgency tactic.

The Macedonian army appears to be unprepared to fight a guerrilla war, said Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. National Security Council aide and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“From all I can tell here, they will not be able to win a guerrilla war by using maximum firepower,” Daalder said. “It is highly improbable that just by deploying a lot of tanks and a lot of howitzers that they will be able to defeat a committed guerrilla force.”

The Macedonian army is also weakened by the same ethnic mix that threatens to explode into a civil war.

Although the majority of officers are ethnic Macedonian Slavs, ethnic Albanians account for as much as 40% of the personnel in most conscripted units, said Edward Luttwak, a military expert affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“You can’t send units that contain 35% or 40% Albanians against Albanian insurgents,” Luttwak said.

The army probably will deploy the Macedonian Special Forces, a battalion-size unit that consists primarily of ethnic Slavs, he said.

“This is a pretty good infantry, but it is not an elite force or a commando unit,” Luttwak said. The unit was trained by a NATO aid mission.

The U.S. is providing about $13.5 million in military aid to Macedonia this year, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday.

The U.S. and its allies are considering additional steps to meet Macedonia’s need for more military “hardware, logistics, expertise and more information-sharing,” Boucher added. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization already is sharing intelligence with the Macedonian military, he said.

There is no chance of any intervention by a NATO-led peacekeeping force on duty in Kosovo, he said.

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Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.