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Tuesday, 27 February, 2001, 23:57 GMT 00:57 UK
Analysis: Stirrings of war?
![]() Macedonian army patrol heads for the troubled border
By BBC Balkans correspondent Paul Wood
Smiling disconcertingly, Jakup told me that the Macedonian police had beaten and interrogated him for 52 hours without a break. He was smiling, he explained, because he was coming to his favourite part of the story: "I told the policeman, 'I will remember your face and someday, you can be sure, we will meet again.'"
This new ethnic Albanian group say most of their members are citizens of Macedonia but also veterans of the Kosovo conflict, having volunteered to fight in the Kosovo Liberation Army. Gun battle They say they are unable to return to their homes in Macedonia, fearful of police raids connected with their activities, so they are biding their time in Kosovo, occasionally slipping across the border with their weapons. The Macedonian security forces try to intercept them - that is apparently how a recent two-hour gun battle began in the village of Tanusevci began.
Macedonia has, so far, escaped the civil war which marked the break up of the old Yugoslav federation. Western diplomats in Skopje say they now expect sporadic clashes rather than all-out conflict. But the Macedonian Government is warning the international community not to underestimate the danger that escalating violence could destabilise the whole region. Spreading conflict The Macedonians say ethnic Albanian fighters in the Presevo valley in southern Serbia are trying to spread the conflict across the border into Macedonia. Macedonian officials say this is a deliberate strategy of the group fighting in Presevo, the UC-PBM.
The NLA has shown itself capable of carrying out operations inside Macedonia - doing far more than just crossing the border illegally. In January, the group claimed responsibility for a mortar attack on a Macedonian police station which killed one officer and wounded three others. The attack on the police station in western Macedonia was intended by those involved to be the opening shots in a Kosovo-style guerrilla campaign. A statement from the NLA said the "uniform of the Macedonian occupier would be targeted until the Albanian people were free". Bitter Albanians rivals There are, in fact, two Albanian groups recruiting people for an armed struggle in Macedonia.
The two groups are bitter rivals. There is no evidence that either of these two Macedonian groups are part of the same military command as the groups fighting in Presevo, or even that they are co-ordinating their actions in order to bring the Presevo conflict into Macedonia. But they do have close links and the same aim, which is to see all Albanians living in the same state stretching from southern Serbia, through Macedonia, to Albania itself. Different to Kosovo A low intensity guerrilla campaign in Macedonia would be much different to that waged in Kosovo. The Serbian province was 90% ethnic Albanian and the security forces could not hope to maintain control over large swathes of territory. In Macedonia, ethnic Albanians are no more than a third of the population and are concentrated in the west. The international community has also made clear its opposition to any separatist campaign in Macedonia. Nevertheless, the NLA plans to step up its activities: it is a dangerous situation for a country with such a complex ethnic mix and troubled history and which was the cause of two Balkan wars in the last century.
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