Word: macedonia
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...weapons used in this insurgency came from Kosovo is testimony that the Western alliance may not have been entirely rigorous in its disarming of the Kosovo Liberation Army or the policing of the KLA's heirs. More recently, when NATO mediators brokered an agreement requiring guerrillas in Macedonia to retreat from villages around Skopje, those insurgents carried their weapons onto buses ferrying them to a safe haven despite NATO's initial insistence that they could not board the vehicles armed. In other words, NATO doesn't have much of a track record of standing up to armed Albanian extremists...
...best, the "peace deal" being brokered in Macedonia is a misnomer. At worst it may be a recipe for marching NATO troops with a milquetoast mandate into the middle of another Balkan bloodbath...
...involve the ethnic-Albanian guerrillas of the National Liberation Army, whose insurrection has brought the former Yugoslav republic to the brink of civil war. It is, therefore, not a peace deal, but a political agreement between the country's main parliamentary parties to substantially expand the cultural rights of Macedonia's Albanian minority...
...Macedonia's parliament will be given 45 days to adopt the political agreement expected next Monday. And during that time, NATO plans to coax the guerrillas into standing down and disarming. Of course, there are grounds to believe the guerrillas may be willing to do this: For a "Greater Albania" insurgency exported from neighboring Kosovo, they will have done extraordinarily well if they keep the deal. Most important, it will have made them an indispensable factor in the stability of Macedonian political life - this despite their habit of driving non-Albanians out of the villages they've captured. Guerrilla commanders...
...agreement brokered by Western mediators may be an important step forward in providing a new political framework for coexistence between Macedonia's ethnic communities. But whether it's actually a peace deal remains to be seen...