Both Sides in Macedonia Hold Out Hope for Peaceful End

Jolted awake by a dawn barrage of tank and mortar fire, Muazam Zesnuli predicted, correctly, that his barn stood no chance against the Macedonian army. So he raced to free his herd--a horse, two cows and a donkey--before huddling with his wife and two children in their basement.

Ten hours later, the ethnic Albanian family emerged unharmed to find the barn burned and the farmhouse pocked with bullets and littered with broken glass. But that was not the end of their ordeal.

Paramilitary police were waiting with two buses to remove the Zesnulis and 58 other residents from the village of Gajre, the main battleground of Sunday’s assault on ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the mountains ringing Tetovo, the second-largest city in Macedonia.

Since the latest Balkan insurgency began six weeks ago, at least 25,000 ethnic Albanians have fled this former Yugoslav republic, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency. Thousands of others have left the conflict zone for shelter elsewhere in the country. Sunday’s operation in Gajre was the first reported case of forced displacement by the police.

But while the burning farms and uprooted villagers look a lot like scenes from the Kosovo conflict of the late 1990s, Macedonian Slavs and Albanians said Monday that the violence has not yet pushed their country beyond hope for a peaceful settlement of the conflict over rights for the Albanian minority.

“Neither the Macedonians nor the Albanians want a war,” Zesnuli, a 40-year-old subsistence farmer, said at his family’s temporary lodging here six miles south of the combat zone. “If the government takes the first step to give us equal rights, the Albanian people would ask the guerrillas to stop the fighting. It could all be over in a minute.”

That was the same message that President Boris Trajkovski heard in strong terms Monday night from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s secretary-general, George Robertson, and the European Union’s security affairs chief, Javier Solana, who arrived for talks with leaders of the Slav-dominated government and the opposition.

Referring to gains by the Macedonian army in Sunday’s offensive, Robertson told reporters, “They have taken the military high ground above Tetovo; now is the time [for the government] to take the political high ground.”

The hills above Tetovo were relatively quiet Monday, with only sporadic shellfire heard in the distance. The rebels appeared to have abandoned seven villages after 12 days and retreated higher into the snowcapped peaks along the Kosovo border, perhaps into Kosovo itself.

Slavic-language newspapers acknowledged Monday that the guerrilla offensive has pushed long-standing Albanian grievances to the top of the political agenda. Trajkovski, they reported, was ready to address those grievances in negotiations with all political parties, including Albanian ones.

The Albanians have a long list of demands that the simplest of Albanian farmers can rattle off: recognition of Albanian as a second official language, more power for local governments, an Albanian-language television station, public funding for an Albanian-language university, an internationally monitored census, a change of the constitution to put all ethnic groups on an equal footing as citizens of Macedonia.

Unlike their ethnic cousins in Kosovo--a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic--who were under repressive Yugoslav rule, the Albanians who make up at least a quarter of Macedonia’s population of 2 million are represented in parliament and the government.

But their complaints of discrimination have been exploited in the past year by the National Liberation Army, a rebel group with close ties to the Kosovo Liberation Army that battled then-President Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslav army in 1998 and 1999.

Hundreds of black-clad guerrillas appeared in a string of Albanian mountain villages in northwest Macedonia last month.

“We don’t want war, but we understand why they are fighting,” said Arben Ibrahimi, a 34-year-old forest ranger from Gajre, a farming village dotted with a few weekend villas below Macedonia’s main ski resort. “They are our brothers.”

He and others from Gajre said rebels just outside the village resisted Macedonian infantrymen for two hours Sunday before retreating. Villagers, huddled in basements, said troops then entered the settlement, shooting at houses and vehicles.

“The shooting was out of control,” Ibrahimi said.

Reporters who entered the deserted village Monday, before the army sealed it off again, saw burned barns and the carcasses of cattle and sheep. Most homes appeared to have been hit by bullets, but only a few were demolished--including a new, three-story villa that was gutted by fire.

But the fighting differed in important ways from the early Yugoslav attacks on ethnic Albanian villages in Kosovo. The rebels in Gajre did not attempt to hide among villagers, and civilians did not appear to be targets of army gunfire, residents said. No one was reported injured in Gajre, and overall confirmed casualties Sunday were light; no one was killed and 10 people were wounded--three rebels, two soldiers, one policeman and four civilians.

Robertson commended what he called the government’s restraint.

Macedonia promised to compensate villagers for destroyed property.

When the shooting was over, police evacuated 62 villagers on what the government Monday called a “humanitarian mission.” But villagers said the police ordered them onto buses. They ended up at a police station in Tetovo, where male villagers were subjected to tests to identify anyone who had been firing weapons. No one was mistreated, the villagers said, but they were held for more than four hours.