Word: albanian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Captain Muhaedin Bela, 35, could hardly believe what was happening to him. One of the most successful and hard-working ethnic-Albanian officers in the Macedonian air force, earlier this month he suddenly found himself handcuffed to a table in a dingy police station with his T-shirt looped over his head to hide the identities of his interrogators. The balding, soft -spoken native of the capital, Skopje, was being grilled by police and later by his own comrades about an alleged (and, Bela says, non- existent) connection with the ethnic-Albanian rebels fighting in the hills overlooking the city...
...Macedonia's government and security forces still believe they can win outright on the battlefield. Key leaders of the Macedonian Slav majority, such as Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, continue to sound off about a military solution even as they participate in on-again-off-again talks with ethnic-Albanian political parties. Those talks are a long way from conclusion, having briefly collapsed this week over ethnic-Albanian demands for veto power over major government decisions and Macedonian Slav reluctance to accept radical constitutional changes. But even as those talks continued in Skopje's cavernous parliament buildings, the government took delivery...
...What we have is an unofficial state of war that threatens each and every Albanian citizen," said Nebi Mursali, a prominent Albanian newspaper editor and intellectual. Mursali has already sent his wife and children to the relative safety of Kosovo - as have some 30,000 other ethnic Macedonians. He explains, bluntly: "I don't trust the Slavs...
...security forces' failures have, quite naturally, brought derision from the rebels camped in the mountains to the north. One commander, known as "Mjekrra" (" the beard" in Albanian), interviewed this month at a monastery high on a bluff overlooking eastern Macedonia said, "They can't fight with us. Their paramilitaries will fight with civilians - but not with us." A teenage combatant at the rebel camp looked scornfully down at a police base in the valley below, then added, "If the Macedonians lose one son or brother they will stop fighting." He claimed the authorities were using mercenaries from Ukraine and elsewhere...
...Even the demands of the more mainstream Albanian parties are unlikely to be met by the majority parties. They may agree on rewording the preamble to the constitution to make it more inclusive, but they're unlikely to accept the proposal that the constitution establish a principle that a certain percentage of government positions are reserved for Albanians, or that a permanent non-elected vice presidency be created for an ethnic Albanian. So even some of the demands coming from the more moderate side of the ethnic-Albanian community are problematic, and there's still a huge gulf between them...