Rebels Lose Strongholds in Army Assault

Setting farmhouses and cars afire, Macedonia’s ragtag army captured a string of guerrilla strongholds in the wooded heights above this city Sunday in defiance of international appeals for restraint in the Balkan region’s latest ethnic conflict.

Hours into the first major infantry assault of the nation’s nine-year history, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said the army took “key positions” from ethnic Albanian rebels, who returned fire before retreating from mountain villages they had occupied for nearly two weeks.

But he did not declare the offensive over, and it was far from certain that the Slav-dominated government could achieve its aim of expelling the insurgents from this southernmost of former Yugoslav republics.

European and United Nations officials had tried to discourage Sunday’s assault. They feared large-scale civilian suffering that would only inflame the 6-week-old uprising by the National Liberation Army, which advocates equal rights for Macedonia’s disaffected Albanian minority.

The government, however, yielded to pressure from Slavs to try to crush the rebels, whom it calls separatists and terrorists.

The army sealed off some villages under attack, making casualties and damage hard to assess. Kosovo Television, in the neighboring Serbian province of Kosovo, said 20 Albanians, including 11 children, were wounded in the fighting and evacuated there.

A hospital in Tetovo said it treated a Macedonian policeman and four civilians for gunshot wounds. They were caught in a cross-fire between panicked troops in the city and rebel snipers on a ridge above the municipal stadium. Two soldiers were wounded by rebel fire, the government said.

The offensive, cheered on the streets here by Macedonian Slavs as if it were a spectator sport, deepened this country’s ethnic divide. The Party for Democratic Prosperity, one of two Albanian parties represented in Macedonia’s multiethnic parliament, suspended its participation in the legislature to protest what it called the army’s aggression.

In Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it was “extremely concerned” about the intensified clashes and urged both sides to “spare and protect the civilian population.”

Nikola Dimitrov, national security advisor in Macedonia’s government, said the army used the “proportional amount of force” needed to flush out the rebels, who countered with mortar and machine-gun fire.

But the army’s long-range tank assault from Tetovo, which lasted 90 minutes, appeared to have set ablaze more than a dozen subsistence farms scattered along mountain ridges in a 2-mile-long arc north and west of the city.

That set the stage for the infantry advance. About 200 soldiers in a motley array of uniforms--some wore sneakers--rumbled through Tetovo and into the mountains in Greek armored personnel carriers. The convoy was led by two Soviet-era T-55 tanks and six 155-millimeter cannons mounted on Bulgarian trucks, one of which blew a tire and had to turn back.

The infantrymen, who ranged in age from 20 to 50, climbed out at each village, sometimes gasping for breath as they hiked the steep inclines, and dug in behind piles of dirt, dumpsters and tree trunks to avoid rebel snipers.

Reporters who followed the advance as far as Gajre, on the first ridge above Tetovo, saw a desperate farmer spray a thin stream of water from a garden hose in a futile attempt to save his burning barn and the cattle inside.

The guerrillas fought back before abandoning Gajre, damaging an armored personnel carrier as the government column broke through their roadblock, Macedonia’s MIA news agency reported.

Army officials said troops also occupied the villages of Lisec, Lavce, Selce, Drenok and Teke. They captured Tetovo Kale, an ancient Turkish fortress that fell into rebel hands earlier this month.

That apparently left the village of Germo and a few others in rebel hands. In the only hint of a government setback, the rebels claimed that their fighters surrounded a group of infantrymen who had been set down near Germo by helicopter.

The rebels, who say they number a few thousand, have close ties with the now-disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, whose two-year insurgency against the Yugoslav army succeeded in 1999 when bombing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization drove Yugoslav forces out of Kosovo.

Many of the rebels in Macedonia fought alongside the KLA and returned home emboldened to press long-standing Albanian demands for equal employment opportunities and recognition of Albanian as an official state language. Albanians, who make up about one-fourth of Macedonia’s 2 million people, have coexisted in relative peace with the Slavic majority since Macedonia’s independence in 1992 but say they feel like second-class citizens.

Georgievski’s government became alarmed about guerrilla activity last May with the discovery of arms caches in the mountains above Tetovo. But the prime minister was reluctant to crack down for fear of tearing apart his governing coalition, which includes the political party of ethnic Albanian leader Arben Xhaferi.

What may have changed the prime minister’s mind is his advisors’ conviction that the growing insurgency, which the government estimates at a few hundred fighters, is still small enough to wipe out.

“If we win, this could be the beginning of the end of Albanian militaristic extremism in the region,” Ljubomir Frckovski, a former foreign minister, wrote this weekend in the newspaper Utrinski Vesnik.

That assessment is disputed by Xhaferi, who is under growing pressure from his followers to quit the government, and other Albanian politicians.

Imer Imeri, head of the Albanian party that abandoned parliament on Sunday, said last week that the number of guerrillas “is growing enormously” and that “the entire Albanian population will take up arms” unless the government soon makes concessions on their grievances.

But despite coaxing by European leaders, the government refused last week to consider political reforms as long as Tetovo remained under rebel siege.

“To do so would mean we are giving legitimacy to the terrorists, which is unacceptable,” Dimitrov, the national security advisor, said Sunday.

The divisions were visible on the streets of Tetovo on Sunday. Slavs, a minority in the city, cheered as the tanks rolled through their quarter. Albanians gathered in their own neighborhoods and watched in dismay as the farmhouses of their ethnic kin burned in the distance.