Word: albanians
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...NATO has hoped to avoid throughout the past decade. But the fact that such an eventuality now appears to be upon us is in no small part a product of NATO's failure, out of concern for the safety of its own personnel, to do two things: Tackle the Albanian extremism incubated in its Kosovo protectorate, and lend a firm hand to Macedonia's efforts to stop it from taking root...
...NATO was certainly well-advised to press Macedonia to begin addressing the grievances of its Albanian minority - after all, it is those grievances that have created fertile soil for the extremists to grow their insurgency. NATO was also aware that the ham-fisted Macedonian military might make a mess of a counterinsurgency campaign against the lightly-armed but mobile guerrilla forces and cause civilian casualties that would irreversibly radicalize the Albanian population...
...combination of NATO's squeamishness and the opportunism of the ethnic-Albanian politicians in Skopje has created a situation where the guerrillas are increasingly being treated as a legitimate party to an armed conflict. That situation was once intolerable to both NATO and the majority of Macedonians; now the alliance appears to have rethought its position...
Monday night, Macedonians stormed their parliament building and forced the president to flee. They were protesting a cease-fire he'd agreed to, at the West's insistence, with ethnic-Albanian rebels. Is Macedonia's slide into a full-blown civil war now unstoppable...
...Andrew Purvis: The protests were certainly extremely worrying. If there are further public protests in the streets of Skopje, then it may well be unstoppable - particularly if those spill across the river into the ethnic-Albanian side of the city. The protests at parliament were a venting of frustration at the government and at NATO. Although all NATO did was ferry the rebel fighters away from the town of Aracinovo, from which they could strike at Skopje, further up into the hills, that was perceived by the Macedonian Slavs as the Western alliance siding with the insurgents...