Bush Pledges Support for Macedonian President

President Bush met Wednesday with Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski in a bid to prevent sporadic waves of ethnic unrest in the Balkan nation from erupting into war.

The U.S. effort to support Trajkovski, a Methodist minister, is one of the strongest foreign policy initiatives yet taken by the Bush team. It also signals that the administration intends to remain an active player in the Balkans, despite calls during last year’s U.S. election campaign for a diminished role.

The United States views Macedonia as the one potential success story in the volatile region, although tensions are high in the former Yugoslav republic after renewed ethnic violence over the weekend.

Bush told Trajkovski that he was “very impressed” with the Macedonian government’s efforts to organize a political dialogue between a wide range of majority Slav and minority ethnic Albanian political parties, according to a senior administration official who asked to remain anonymous under informal government policy.

Bush “stressed the importance of breaking the cycle of violence, the potential cycle of violence, and the importance of leadership in uniting the people,” the official said.

The U.S. president also pledged $10 million to help fund a multilingual university over the next four years in the Macedonian city of Tetovo, home to one of the country’s largest ethnic Albanian communities. The pledge comes on top of more than $50 million in U.S. economic and military assistance this year and follows an administration commitment last month of $5.5 million to pay for police training and community self-help programs for ethnic Albanians.

Macedonia for the most part has avoided the ethnic conflicts that have plagued neighboring Balkan nations, but combat between government forces and militants supporting greater rights for ethnic Albanians flared in February and March.

After the 30-minute Oval Office meeting, Trajkovski said the “very strong U.S. commitment” was critical to his efforts to build a country based on equal citizenship for all ethnic groups. Albanians account for at least a quarter of Macedonia’s 2 million people.

Trajkovski also asked Bush for Macedonian membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, support for greater U.S. investment in the struggling Balkan state and a formal U.S. designation of the National Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian extremist movement, as a terrorist organization.

Trajkovski told reporters he was very concerned about violence that erupted in his nation over the weekend. Eight members of Macedonian security forces were killed and disfigured Saturday in an ambush by ethnic Albanian militants near the border with Kosovo, a province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia and an ethnic Albanian stronghold.

Bush called the attack “an act of horror,” the senior administration official said.

The grisly killings triggered reprisal attacks Tuesday and Wednesday, when hundreds of young masked men wielding automatic weapons and baseball bats attacked and set fire to dozens of Albanian shops and homes in Bitola, about 70 miles south of the Macedonian capital, Skopje.

Armed assailants broke into an Albanian pizzeria late Tuesday in a Skopje suburb and shot and killed a man, police told Associated Press.

One hopeful sign is that ethnic Albanian politicians have not walked out of the government or parliament. Trajkovski included Deputy Prime Minister Bedredin Ibrahimi, an ethnic Albanian, in his delegation for the Washington talks.

To prevent troubles from escalating, Trajkovski must launch the second phase of his reconciliation effort when he returns home this week, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

Critical issues include adding more Albanians to public service positions, decentralizing government powers and resources to allow greater local autonomy, allowing greater use of minority languages in education and dealing with demands for amendments to the constitution.