Govt., rebels agree on police force, language

By Batuk Gathani

BRUSSELS, AUG. 6. Early today, a parley of sorts was structured to contain the ravages of the over six-month Macedonian civil war between Christian Serbs and Muslim Albanians.

After frantic rounds of negotiations supervised by Mr. Xavier Solana, European Union's Security and Defence chief, at a Macedonian holiday resort, senior European and NATO officials are ``cautiously optimistic'' and hopeful that the deal will be approved by the Macedonian Parliament where many Macedonian Serb parliamentarians said Albanian rebels should not be `rewarded' for their aggression. It now remains to be seen if the deal brokered will have legal authority.

In principle, the Macedonian government and the Albanians have agreed to a power sharing plan for running the police force. Though details of the plan have not been released, senior E.U. officials indicated that the new ``confidence building'' strategy calls for deployment of many international police officers in Macedonia. The E.U. will also provide facilities to train a multi-ethnic police force.

Exact statistics of the ethnic divide have not been published but an educated guess is that about 30 p.c. or a third of Macedonia's population is Muslim and the rest orthodox Christian. Today, according to Mr. Solana, both groups reached an accord on the waxing language issue. Hence, Albanian may be officially recognised as Macedonia's second language.

Power sharing proposals on ethnic lines have so far been avoided to ensure that extremist political factions on both sides of the divide do not play the race card to ensure partition of Macedonia to create so-called ``greater Albania''. The Macedonia government has consistently denounced the civil war which may ``break up Macedonia's unity and territorial integrity''.

The E.U., NATO and senior U.S. officials have over- ruled partition of Macedonia on ethnic lines. But, according to foreign observers, the ground reality is that despite all western efforts, Macedonia has already become a de facto divided country, split between a predominantly Albanian area in the west and north controlled by the NLA (National Liberation Army) of the Albanians and Slavic area in east and south dominated by the Slavic government. So far, there is no overt talk of the dreaded `ethnic cleansing' but hundreds of Albanians and Serbs have shifted to areas controlled by their own ethnic groups.

Though the extremist and Islamic fundamentalist factions of the Albanian community have often clamoured for creation of `greater' Albania, the country has not yet blown up into a Balkan style full scale ethnic strife.

It remains to be seen if yet another nasty secessionist war along the boundary between the provinces of Kosovo, Serbia and parts of Macedonia, waged by ethnic-Albanian guerillas, ends. The crises have also put the credibility and impartiality of both the E.U. and NATO on line. Lord Robertson, Secretary-General of NATO, said the other day that ``NATO is determined that those extremist elements seeking to sow instability or to advance their political agenda by violent means will be stopped, whether in southern Serbia, in the former Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia or within Kosovo''.

NATO force levels in the region have been increased and patrolling has been intensified.

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Section  : International
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