Macedonia Hits Rebels Near Kosovo Border

As Macedonian troops launched a fresh offensive with artillery, tanks and helicopter gunships, ethnic Albanian rebels said Wednesday that they were regrouping and vowed to attack again.

The government assault focused on the village of Gracani and was meant to drive ethnic Albanian insurgents from remaining strongholds along the border with Kosovo, a province of Serbia, the main republic of Yugoslavia. Macedonian police said the village had been emptied of civilians before the bombardment began.

Artillery shelling lasted for most of the day. The Macedonian forces rolled in tanks and armored personnel carriers, and two helicopter gunships hovered overhead. Artillery booms could be heard six miles away in the capital, Skopje.

Late Wednesday, one Macedonian soldier was killed and two were injured when their vehicle drove over a land mine in contested territory, military officials said.

U.S. peacekeepers in Kosovo used Humvees, surveillance equipment and two Apache helicopters to monitor clashes in the mountains above Gracani. Heavy mortar fire was heard, followed by large clouds of smoke rising from the woodlands.

“This is our final operation to . . . establish control of this stretch of land,” government spokesman Antonio Milososki said. “We want to create conditions for continuation of political dialogue.”

Commander Sokoli, one of several regional rebel leaders, said that commanders decided at a meeting Wednesday that they would strike back to reverse the government’s latest push.

“We are ready to fight a war in the areas we control,” he said, and gave the government until midnight to change its strategy of excluding rebels from talks on Macedonia’s future.

But Macedonia’s government refused to budge on the issue. Milososki declared that “the terrorists will always get the same response from us.”

The government’s attacks have met with little obvious resistance in recent days. It claims victory, but the rebels suggested that they had merely pulled back into largely inaccessible hills.