Macedonia Near Ruin, Albanian Politician Says

His face is rigid from Parkinson’s disease, and his words come in hoarse whispers, far behind his racing thoughts. But it’s impossible to miss the panic in Arben Xhaferi’s eyes or the urgency of his message: Macedonia is running out of time to reform.

Xhaferi, the country’s leading ethnic Albanian politician, appears to be the only player in touch with Macedonia’s Slavic leaders, as well as a nascent guerrilla movement fighting for the country’s disaffected Albanian minority and the Western officials scrambling to contain the latest Balkan bloodshed.

Since the guns erupted more than a month ago, he has been pleading with all three sides--for the rebels to back off, the government to convene talks on bettering the status of minorities, the West to facilitate those negotiations and help make any agreements stick.

“I think we have only a month to do that,” he said in an interview Thursday, explaining that the rebels who withdrew from the edge of this city Sunday have offered to wait that long before any new offensive.

“The offer is very rational,” he said. “If we fail with our negotiations, their numbers will increase very fast,” bringing “total ethnic war” to the former Yugoslav republic.

President Boris Trajkovski has hinted at talks but insisted that the insurgent National Liberation Army must first be ousted from Macedonia.

As government troops battled Thursday to drive the rebels across the border, mortar shells struck just inside Kosovo, killing an Associated Press Television News producer and a teenage resident in the hilltop village of Krivenik. Sixteen other civilians were wounded.

It was the worst spillover of Macedonian fighting into Kosovo, which has been under United Nations control since NATO’s 1999 bombing raids drove Yugoslavia’s repressive army from that predominantly ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

Kerem Lawton, 30, a Kosovo-based British national, became the first journalist killed covering Macedonia’s conflict. He was wounded by shrapnel from mortar fire that hit his car. He was driven by NATO medics to Camp Bondsteel, a U.S. military base in Kosovo, where he was pronounced dead.

Macedonia government spokesman Antonio Milososki called the army drive “our final operation to establish control of this stretch of land” and “create conditions for . . . dialogue” with Albanian politicians.

But he rejected Xhaferi’s one-month deadline for reforms, saying Macedonia prefers a slow, gradual path toward European standards of behavior. “The other path might be faster,” he said, “but if emotions overcome the mind, we will face what happened in Bosnia and Croatia,” two remnants of the former Yugoslavia federation ripped apart by war.

Albanians make up at least a quarter of Macedonia’s 2 million people and share formal political power but have complained since the country won independence in 1992 of second-class status in employment, education and treatment by the police.

Xhaferi’s Democratic Party of Albanians is a minority partner in the coalition government, with five of the 15 Cabinet posts and representatives in all ministries, but it is increasingly powerless and losing popular support. Xhaferi likened inter-ethnic disputes here to a soccer game in which one team, the majority Slavs, has no goal and thus cannot be scored upon.

The Albanian party’s minority rights agenda--which includes giving more power to local governments and making Albanian an official state language--has stalled in parliament and is being usurped by the guerrillas.

One party member, Hysni Shakiri, resigned from parliament Wednesday to join the rebels and urged other Albanians to do the same. Xhaferi, replying coolly, called it “an emotional reaction.”

“I’m trying to be rational in an irrational situation,” the 53-year-old party leader said at the start of the hourlong interview at his headquarters here. “The crisis is not only a threat but also an opportunity to do something constructive.”

He is pressing the European Union’s security chief, Javier Solana, who was here this week and is due back next Wednesday, to sponsor negotiations on constitutional changes that would guarantee equal rights for all citizens.

“The concept of the state is ethnocentric but the reality is multiethnic,” Xhaferi said. “If we try to change the reality, we must ethnically cleanse the territory, which is genocide. It would be much easier to change the concept of the state and create a multiethnic constitution,” one that he said should give proportional representation to each ethnic group in state bodies and require decisions by consensus rather than majority rule.

Like many Albanians here, Xhaferi has been hardened by suffering. His late parents, both tailors, were harassed by police, who repeatedly seized their sewing machines during the Communist era. His father spent three years in jail for protesting a mass expulsion of Albanians to Turkey in the 1950s.

Xhaferi, who studied philosophy at Belgrade University, was directing cultural programming for Kosovo’s official Albanian television station in 1991 when the Yugoslav government expelled all Albanians from state jobs. He returned home to Tetovo, de facto capital of Macedonia’s Albanian community, to lead his party.

Some critics say he is trying to exaggerate the guerrilla threat to salvage his own agenda and his leadership of the Albanian community. But many concede that failure could drive him out of the government and polarize the country beyond repair.

“It’s obvious the government will have to negotiate, but with whom?” said Iso Rusi, editor of the Albanian-language weekly Lobi. “Xhaferi’s party is being frozen out of key government decisions and is in the process of disappearing.”

Xhaferi said he has indirect contact with guerrilla leaders and believes they command about 500 well-trained fighters, 90% of them from Macedonia. He disputes the government’s claim that the rebels aim to carve off the predominately Albanian sliver of northwestern Macedonia and combine it with Kosovo and Albania into one state.

He also said the government is making too much of its success Sunday in turning back the rebel occupation of villages overlooking Tetovo.

“The guerrilla is like mercury,” he said. “If you hit the mercury, the mercury splinters into many pieces, and the pieces go in different directions. This is what is happening now.”