For Ethnic Albanians, 2 Slain by Police Rise to Martyrdom

Every insurgency thrives on martyrs. A month into the Balkans’ latest armed uprising, Macedonia’s restive Albanian minority Friday buried and immortalized its first two.

Razim Koraci and his son Ramadan died Thursday at a Macedonian police checkpoint. In a scene captured by television cameras and aired within hours to an alarmed populace, police stopped the victims’ gray Suzuki compact in this embattled city and asked for identification.

The son, in his mid-30s, leaped from the vehicle with a snarl on his face and what appeared to be a grenade in his right hand. Bending to one knee, he tossed the object at police officers. It did not explode, and seconds later father and son perished in a hail of gunfire.

But instead of declaring them guerrilla heroes, Tetovo’s ethnic Albanian community insisted Friday on portraying the Koracis as innocent victims of police terror and manufactured evidence. If the pair were indeed armed, as film and photographic evidence suggest, their neighbors were in a state of denial.

“It was a crime against the civilian population,” declared Qenan Bajrami, 45, echoing a belief heard in many conversations amid the tombstones of Tetovo’s Muslim cemetery on a bright spring afternoon.

That belief fits with the prevailing self-image of ethnic Albanians as victims of systematic and increasingly unbearable discrimination in a country dominated by Slavs since its bloodless breakaway from the Yugoslav federation was completed in 1992.

The martyrdom of innocence bestowed on the Koracis also appears to reflect a reluctance among ethnic Albanians to embrace the budding insurgency as long as there’s hope, voiced quietly by many in the cemetery, that minority rights can be won without force of arms.

“Right now, we have a better idea than war: peaceful dialogue,” said Arben Rakipi, 17, a high-school dropout who is prime recruiting material for the black-clad guerrilla bands that began appearing in recent weeks in mountain villages overlooking this city, firing at the police.

“There’s still time for a peaceful solution,” the teenager added. “But if time runs out, we’ll all have to go to the mountains.”

Hundreds have already joined the rebel National Liberation Army, which calls itself a home-grown movement fighting for equal rights for an Albanian community outnumbered nearly 3 to 1 by Slavs. Grievances range from underrepresentation in the police and civil service to denial of public funding for their Albanian-language university.

Macedonian officials point out that moderate Albanian political parties share power with them in a governing coalition. Slavs in the government contend that the insurgency is run from neighboring Kosovo, which is still part of Yugoslavia, and aims to carve off northern Macedonia and unite it with Kosovo in an independent ethnic Albanian state.

The low-intensity conflict has driven 22,000 of Macedonia’s 2 million people from their homes, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees reported Friday. Residents of Tetovo, de facto capital of Macedonia’s Albanian community, blame the conflict for 20 deaths in the city of 200,000.

Under pressure from European Union officials who visited Macedonia this week, the government has delayed a threatened all-out offensive against the rebels’ village strongholds overlooking the city.

In turn, Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian leadership, which came to power in 1999 after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization drove Yugoslav forces from the province, called on rebels in Macedonia to lay down their arms. That statement, issued Friday under pressure from Western donors to Kosovo, also backs the EU’s demand that Macedonian leaders address minority grievances through “democratic means.”

Among those signing the statement was Hashim Thaci and Ramush Haradinaj, former commanders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the province’s officially disbanded guerrilla force.

Still, the conflict in Macedonia rumbled along Friday. Police acknowledged that they fired into Kosovo from the village of Gracani to scatter a band of rebels building fortifications just across the border.

Mortar and small-arms fire from government positions in Tetovo punctuated prayers for the Koracis as their bodies were carried in green wooden caskets and placed before a Muslim cleric, the two widows and 500 mourners. Light flashed in a hillside village high above the cemetery as one round struck near a yellow house.

On the evening TV news, a government official urged people in rebel-occupied villages to leave their homes “to stop being hostages of the extremists” and to get out of harm’s way “in the [government] operations that are due to come.”

The slaying of the Koracis has already brought home the conflict to television viewers throughout Macedonia.

Razim Koraci, about 60, had moved his extended family to Tetovo from the nearby farming village of Drenovec to escape the fighting. Mourners said he and his son had gone back to the village to check on their livestock and were returning to the city when police stopped them.

Footage of the shooting aftermath showed what appeared to be a second grenade near the men’s bodies, which lay on the street for hours. Police said there were other grenades in the car.

Stevo Pendarovski, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said the object thrown by Ramadan Koraci was a “defensive” grenade that could have killed anyone within a radius of 10 to 15 yards. It failed to explode, the spokesman said, because it had a faulty detonator or was not detonated at all.

Those assertions prompted outbursts of anger and disbelief from neighbors of the men, who said the Koracis had no connection with the rebels and were not the kind of folks who would try to kill police officers.

Even if they were, “I don’t believe a man would put his son in that kind of danger,” said Rakipi, the 17-year-old mourner. Others insisted, likewise, that the younger Koraci would not have compromised his father’s life in such a way.

The mourners were full of the kind of theories that shroud martyrs in myth: The Koracis were carrying cell phones, not hand grenades. The grenades were planted after the shooting. The police killed the pair to avenge the slaying of a fellow officer in Skopje, Macedonia’s capital, the previous day. The police were trying to provoke a guerrilla offensive that would have justified an all-out government assault.

A man who identified himself only as Muzafer, a 46-year-old electrician, said he was afraid that the killings would drive more men into the guerrilla ranks.

“It will make people more hotblooded,” he said. “None of us wants to die. But if you can’t get away from it, you have to fight.”

No one had anything bad to say about the guerrillas, who were described as fighters for a just cause. But many of the mourners said the fighting was unnecessary and made their lives more difficult.

They said ethnic Albanian political leaders, whom the guerrillas are working to discredit, deserve a chance to wring concessions from the government--a solution pressed by European leaders this week.

“The first thing is to change the constitution, to change the laws, to make everyone equal,” said Qenan Bajrami, who has two sons old enough to fight. “It’s more a problem of law than prejudice.

“The government can talk to our politicians,” he added. “But if the fighting is allowed to continue, it will be too late for that and the government will have to talk to the guerrillas,” a step officials have ruled out. “When will it be too late? When the civilian population starts joining the guerrillas.”

He was asked: Isn’t that already happening?

“Not yet,” he said. “Everybody is waiting for peace talks.”