Word: albania
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...Macedonia is, frankly, preposterous. This was no mass civil-rights movement that bumped into an unyielding state and then took the fateful decision to respond to violence with violence. This began with small bands of armed men dispatched from NATO-controlled Kosovo by the advocates of a Greater Albania (comprising Albania, Kosovo and those pieces of Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and even northern Greece populated by Albanian majorities), and has ripened into a situation dangerously close to civil...
...that of a legitimate protagonist in Macedonia's future, NATO and the European Union may have already effectively conceded the carving up of Macedonia on ethnic lines. And that's another great victory for the hard men in Kosovo dedicated to the pursuit of a Greater Albania through guerrilla warfare. By looking more to the safety of its troops than the accomplishment of its mission, NATO has made sure it will remain reluctantly engaged in the Balkans for the next decade - with the real victims the region's long-suffering people...
...Proof of how bad things have become was supplied by a proposal from the Macedonian Academy of Science and Arts that Macedonia and Albania swap villages, an implausible scheme that would redraw the borders and could trigger a new round of ethnic cleansing. That idea too was dismissed, thankfully. Macedonian government forces, meanwhile, continued a two-week-old offensive along the Kosovo border that has killed several civilians and forced thousands to flee. The government accuses rebels of keeping 10,000 civilians coralled as human shields. "We can hardly wait to get orders to move on and finish...
...thing the insurgencies in Macedonia and southern Serbia have done is focused the international community's attention on Albanian nationalism. There are as many Albanians living in the states immediately surrounding Albania - Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, southern Serbia and northern Greece - as there are in Albania itself, and many of them believe it is natural that they should all be part of a single country. Of course to make that happen would require dramatic redrawing of borders, which could only really be achieved through war. The nationalists believe that, with NATO's help, they won the war in Kosovo and were...
...Macedonian democracy. Even some of the political parties that have represented them in Skopje, however, have lately been calling for the creation of a separate Albanian political entity within a Macedonian federation - an option the government rejects as the first step towards annexing part of Macedonia into a "Greater Albania" along with Kosovo...