Despite Peace, Ethnic Hatred Still Splits Macedonia

At first glance, this small Balkan city seems completely recovered from last summer’s combat that emptied its broad boulevards and brought police checkpoints to placid neighborhoods.

Just a little more than a year after the first shots were fired here, shoppers throng the streets, the fruit stands brim with produce and the cafes are full again.

But a pall remains beneath the busyness, reinforcing for the West the lesson that seems to have recurred with each recent Balkan war: Diplomacy and intervention can stop the fighting but cannot heal the ethnic hatreds that fissure this region.

These divisions are even more entrenched now than they were a year ago. A recent visit to this northwestern city where ethnic Macedonians and Albanians lived side by side before the conflict suggests the depth of the schism afflicting the country.

Albanian flags, symbols of the ethnic Albanian guerrillas, still hang from houses in the city’s Albanian-dominated areas, a reminder of the residents’ sense of a separate identity. Ethnic Macedonian high school students who used to sit in classes next to Albanians now take their lessons a mile away at a primary school.

“How can we live anymore with Albanians here? We hate each other,” said Irina Nestoroska, 18, an ethnic Macedonian. “They did everything to us; we didn’t want this.”

Not surprisingly, ethnic Albanians blame the Macedonians, especially citing abuse by the police. “We have no trust in the Macedonians, and we won’t trust them for a very long time,” said Veli Pajaziti, 40, president of an Albanian neighborhood.

Macedonia, the southernmost republic of the former Yugoslav federation, has about 2 million people. At least 25% are ethnic Albanians, concentrated here in the northwestern part of the country. Unlike other Balkan nations that broke away from Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Macedonia split peacefully and, until last year, had avoided almost altogether the ethnic violence that racked the region.

After a vicious and bloody war, nearby Bosnia-Herzegovina split into an area controlled jointly by ethnic Croats and Muslims and another controlled by Bosnian Serbs. Even in towns where Croats and Muslims nominally live together, they tend to divide into different neighborhoods. In Kosovo, a province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia, ethnic animosities led in 1999 to warfare, U.N. control and the virtual segregation of Serbs and ethnic Albanians.

Observers see the same pattern here.

“Macedonia will be split into cantons--it’s really happened already, just like Kosovo and Bosnia,” said Slavko Mangovski, an ethnic Macedonian and editor of the weekly magazine Macedonian Sun. “People are resigned to it.”

Kim Mehmeti, an influential ethnic Albanian writer, agreed.

“The process of division has already started in Macedonia,” he said. “This year, Macedonia writes a double history, and the people to blame are the political elite.”

Mehmeti and others say that undercutting any rapprochement is a growing distrust of government. That is fueled by a steady stream of information suggesting that political parties--both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian--are corrupt and interested only in their own gain.

Government ‘Like a Protection Racket’

“We’re not talking about ordinary corruption--that the money that is supposed to be used to build houses is going to finance a villa. We’re talking about a government that functions like a racket,” said Edward P. Joseph, director of the International Crisis Group’s Macedonia office. “Every opportunity is used to shake down citizens for whatever they need--a license, a permit. It’s like a protection racket.”

ICG, a Brussels-based nonprofit organization, lobbied hard but with few results to get Western countries to put strings on nearly $270 million dollars recently pledged to help Macedonia recover from the damage of last year’s fighting. An additional $237 million was pledged in general economic aid.

Most worrisome for the West: The Balkans is a major transit point for smuggling guns and illegal immigrants, many of whom come from the Arab world. Although the vast majority of refugees are almost certainly escaping bad economic conditions, it is impossible to determine whether their ranks also include some who have terrorist connections.

It is not a small matter to stop fighting in the Balkans, and Western diplomats are proud that seven months of skirmishes, which ended in September, did not explode into a cycle of war in Macedonia. There remains the larger question, however, of whether such efforts can do more than delay the fracturing of the region into ever tinier countries, each with a single ethnic identity. Most policymakers agree that such an outcome is neither economically viable nor diplomatically desirable.

“I remain optimistic; step by step this is going in the right direction. But there’s still fragility and still lots of weapons,” said Alain Le Roy, the European Union’s special envoy to Macedonia, who is monitoring the peace process. “We need more discussions between the Macedonian and Albanian parties.”

But can such discussions--which Western diplomats can mandate by threatening to reduce aid--have much effect at the grass-roots level, where citizens from the two ethnic groups already appear to have reached firm opinions about each other?

On a recent afternoon in Tetovo, the future looked grim at classes attended exclusively by ethnic Macedonians, who are in the minority here.

Before last year’s fighting, ethnic Albanian and Macedonian children played on sports teams together, walked home together or took school buses that headed up into the mountain villages. The two groups rarely lived in the same communities, but the mountain hamlets often are divided by only a field. The Albanian children would get off the bus at one village, and five minutes later the ethnic Macedonians would get off at the next one.

Ethnic Macedonians Shun a High School

Now not a single ethnic Macedonian student is left at Kiril Pejcinovic, the main high school. Instead, they meet at a primary school from 2 to 7 p.m. after the younger children have gone home.

“Definitely we will not go back to the other school; our lives are not safe there. We are afraid of the Albanians,” said Sonia Stevcevska, 17, a Tetovo native.

Although she has never been assaulted by ethnic Albanian peers, Stevcevska, like several friends with her, said she felt rejected and out of place. Any good jobs in Tetovo go to Albanians, she said. She has not spoken with Albanian friends she had as a child for several years and can’t imagine what she would say to them now.

“I don’t want to live here,” she said. “There are no possibilities for success for me here. I will leave as soon as I can.”

One of the more chilling aspects of last year’s struggle was the kidnapping of ethnic Macedonians by guerrillas from the National Liberation Army. The number of people killed in the fighting was less than 100 and about 400 houses were severely damaged, according to international aid groups, but the kidnappings by the ethnic Albanian group cast a long shadow.

In some villages, young men were snatched and held for months. On several occasions, school buses were stopped and boarded by guerrillas. Although only a few youths were held for any period of time and the buses were detained for only an hour, the effect on the children was severe, said Natasa Janevska, the 33-year-old principal of the primary school.

An added trauma was the nightly gunfire, which resulted in few deaths but made parents afraid to allow their children outside.

“I think of them all as my children, and I see a bad effect for all of them,” said Janevska, an ethnic Macedonian. “The children were more full of life before; now they are quieter. If a door slams, they are startled, and they wet their beds if they are going to be away from home for the night on a school trip.”

The number of students at the primary school has shrunk from 900 before the fighting to 738 now, as some ethnic Macedonian families have left Tetovo for cities in the center of the country, Janevska said.

Such difficulties hardly surprise longtime Balkan watchers. The Macedonian peace accord was brokered by the West, which all but physically dragged political leaders to the bargaining table at a lakeside resort.

“The agreement was not worked out by Macedonians and Albanians; the agreement was drafted and brought to Lake Ohrid, and both sides were made to sign it,” saidAlex Grigorev, a program officer at the Project on Ethnic Relations in Princeton, N.J.

“Before, you could have said that they would have made it, and there’s still a slim chance that they will,” he added. “But it’s a very, very sad place now.”