An Olive Branch in Balkan Conflict

Government leaders proposed major concessions to this country’s ethnic Albanians on Wednesday in an effort to head off a slide toward civil war by defusing support for a guerrilla insurgency.

The Macedonian Slav parties that dominate a new multiethnic unity government have adopted a peacemaking agenda in which “the only goal is to make the Republic of Macedonia the kind of place Albanians want to see,” Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski told reporters before an evening meeting of leaders.

To reach that goal, Albanian will “most probably” be declared a second official language, alongside Macedonian, and the Macedonian Orthodox Church will lose its privileged place in the constitution, Georgievski said. It is also likely that the constitution will be revised to ensure equality in the standing it gives to Macedonian Slavs and ethnic Albanians as nationality groups, he added.

The points raised by Georgievski address several key complaints made by ethnic Albanian political parties in the fractious ruling coalition as well as by guerrillas who have been battling government forces since early this year.

The guerrillas say they are fighting for equal rights for ethnic Albanians, but Macedonian Slav leaders say the rebellion is aimed at splitting the country. At least one-quarter of the nation’s 2 million people are ethnic Albanian.

Georgievski’s declaration also appeared to meet a key demand of Western powers, which have urged Macedonia to take swift and dramatic steps to ensure equal rights even as it battles the uprising. But the concessions risk provoking a backlash among the nation’s majority Slavs, who fear that such changes might diminish their rights or undermine the country’s unity.

President Boris Trajkovski, meanwhile, proposed a partial amnesty for the guerrillas. In a letter to NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, Trajkovski said an amnesty could be granted to the rebels except for key organizers and those responsible for killing Macedonian soldiers.

Asked about the amnesty proposal and the possibility of granting the guerrillas safe corridors to retreat into neighboring Kosovo, Georgievski replied that “in principle, if this is a part of the peace solution, I think it should be supported.”

Such a deal would be modeled after a similar, largely successful effort that has defused an ethnic Albanian guerrilla insurgency in southern Serbia by allowing demobilized guerrillas to enter Kosovo under monitoring by the NATO-led peacekeeping force there. Kosovo is a largely ethnic Albanian province of Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.

Georgievski described Macedonia as already in “a bloody war.”

“We practically have an armed rebellion of Albanians,” he said. “That motivated this idea to find a peaceful solution, both short-term and strategic, to this crisis.”

Slav parties in the ruling coalition also “have obligations toward the international community” to “come to terms with Albanian demands,” Georgievski said. “In any case, the Republic of Macedonia should be firm in completely destroying the terrorists.”

Despite that tough talk, Georgievski appeared to recognize that there could be protests against his government’s sudden shift.

“Some would say that Macedonia would capitulate . . . with this peace agenda and that in three years what is happening now will return even more fiercely,” Georgievski said. “But it is obvious that this is the only solution that we have at this moment.”

In a deal brokered by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, key leaders of ethnic Albanian and Macedonian Slav parties agreed Tuesday to set aside a bitter dispute over a joint declaration signed last week by ethnic Albanian politicians and a guerrilla leader.

That agreement avoided the threatened collapse of the unity government. As part of the bargain, the Slav parties agreed to speed up legislative reform efforts aimed at addressing ethnic Albanian grievances and to achieve “substantial progress” by June 15, when EU leaders hold a summit in Stockholm.