Word: albanian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Western alliance in Macedonia is less physical than political. Some 400 British troops are due to be deployed in the former Yugoslav nation in advance of an eventual 3,500-troop contingent whose mission, innocuously dubbed "Operation Essential Harvest," involves collecting and destroying weapons voluntarily tendered by ethnic-Albanian guerrillas. They're not there to disarm anyone, NATO spokesmen insist, and they'll stay only 30 days. If the guerrillas choose to hang onto their weapons and the fighting starts up again, the Western troops will simply pack up and go home - possibly taking with them whatever credibility NATO...
...There is certainly no shortage of scenarios that could see a resumption of hostilities. After all, the peace agreement on which the whole operation is based was signed not by the guerrillas, but by ethnic-Albanian political parties who'd been part of Macedonia's democratic political process, rather than waging war in the hills. NATO leaders coaxed and cajoled the Macedonian authorities into accepting a deal to substantially improve the political lot of their Albanian countrymen, a deal the alliance hopes will persuade the guerrillas to lay down their arms - or, more correctly, turn them over to NATO soldiers...
...NATO is not sending its troops in as lambs to the slaughter. The rebels have so far proved politically adept at couching their demands within the frame of what might be acceptable to the West. For example, a separate Albanian territory in Macedonia was a non-starter, so instead the guerrillas announced that they were simply demanding greater civil rights in the Macedonian constitution. And that responsiveness to Western concerns makes them unlikely to resist disarmament altogether - after all, the current peace deal has been crafted precisely in order to remove the political grievances they cite in order to claim...
...having a problem putting down its guns, even though most of those it claims to represent have long since turned against violence. Over in Spain, the militant Basque separatists of the ETA present the same problem. NATO plans to disarm Albanian rebels in Macedonia appear somewhat optimistic, despite last week's political peace agreement. And the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad appear to have no shortage of young Palestinians willing to blow themselves up in order to make a bloody political point...
...success of Macedonia's insurgency may lie partly in the fact that when Albanian nationalists in Kosovo first sent a guerrilla army into the impoverished former Yugoslav republic, they found a huge pool of young Albanian men willing to join up. They were driven by a long-held sense of political and cultural grievance against the Macedonian authorities. But for many, the decision may have been made easier by the mass unemployment that left little hope of finding a job. Guerrillas always imagine themselves in heroic terms, and they have a sense of purpose that beats sitting around waiting...