Word: albanians
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...Obviously that crucial message is more easily delivered when bullets aren't flying. When Macedonia was the sole ex-Yugoslav Republic untouched by conflict, no one wanted to rock the boat, despite ample warnings that relations between the majority Slavs and the 23% Albanian minority were volatile. "It was not the international will to hold the Macedonian government strictly to account on human rights," says Mark Thompson, Balkans program director for the International Crisis Group. Observes Henryk Sokalski, the Polish U.N. special representative who headed unpredep from 1995 to 1998: "We got a lot of visits and many great words...
MACEDONIA Widening Conflict Macedonian security forces struggled to contain the insurgency by ethnic Albanian rebels as fighting spread to the center of Tetovo and the outskirts of the the capital, Skopje. Government troops shot dead two civilians in Tetovo after they appeared to hurl a handgrenade at a police checkpoint, and Macedonian artillery fire injured 10 civilians in the hills above Tetovo. Rebel leaders observed an overnight cease-fire but later injured two policemen in separate mortar and grenade attacks near the villages of Gracane and Caska. The U.S. said it would send spy planes to monitor rebel activities...
...course, you don't have to look far to find groups of Europeans - Austrian neo-Nazis, Serbian warlords, ethnic Albanian guerillas, English football hooligans - who still cling to more restrictive, and virulent, notions of identity and nationhood. But for just as many, such boundaries no longer signify anything. Sascha Pichler, 27, was born in Salzburg, Austria to parents of Austrian, Czech, Russian and Serb descent. She spent her childhood in Malaysia, the U.S., Portugal and Germany. After earning degrees from Oxford and the London School of Economics, she moved to Brussels. She rarely sits still: since January she has been...
Exactly who "they" are and what ultimately they hope to achieve remain a mystery. What is clear is that their actions are threatening to destabilize a precarious government and ignite Macedonia's potentially explosive mix of Slavs and Albanians. A month after a group calling itself the National Liberation Army suddenly appeared, attacking a police station along the border, its numbers, strength and leadership are still the topic of heated speculation. Two days' walking in the mountains behind rebel lines revealed a disheveled band of recruits and local volunteers--some in fatigues, some in sneakers and track suits, lightly armed...
...shell was part of an attempt by the Macedonian government to strike at rebel targets above the town of Tetovo, site of the Balkans' newest insurgency. While it succeeded in panicking Albanian civilians, it left the rebels themselves more or less unfazed. Subsequent government reports that the insurgents were laying down their weapons and fleeing toward the Kosovo border proved groundless. By week's end they were back, striking at police positions in Tetovo and drawing a furious response from army tanks and artillery. "The fighters will remain in their positions," Fazli Veliu, a spokesman for the rebels, told TIME...