Word: macedonians
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...seams in the same week that Yugoslavia moved to send Slobodan Milosevic for trial in the Hague. Milosevic may be history, but Macedonia now appears irrevocably bound to repeat the horrors of the Balkan wars of the last decade. Milosevic, of course, has had no hand in the Macedonian tragedy. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for NATO...
...sheriff whose priority is keeping out of harm's way is always in danger of being ineffective - or worse. NATO feared that aggressive peacekeeping and enforcement would provoke attacks on its troops not only in Macedonia but back in Kosovo; by dithering - and legitimizing the rebels by pushing the Macedonian government reluctantly into cease-fire agreements - it has all but ensured the territorial divisions it desperately wanted to prevent...
...this week said it would send about 3,000 troops if the parties reach a deal and rebels agree to lay down arms - it's increasingly apparent that many in 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...
...There are other signs of desperation. Macedonian police recently began handing out automatic weapons - about 2,000 so far - to "reservists," especially those who belonged to Georgievski's VMRO-DPMNE political party. Similar efforts in the early '90s had sped the descent into war in nearby Croatia and Bosnia. Graffiti signaling the emergence of Macedonian Slav paramilitaries is scrawled in Cyrillic on walls in Skopje's tumble-down neighborhoods. And when the government recently asked for some of the weapons distributed to "reservists" to be handed back, it had only minimal success...
...Prime Minister this week denounced the NLA as the "Talibans of Europe," and compared their leaders with Hitler and Slobodan Milosevic. "Their philosophy - territories, ethnic entities, religion, heroin and weapons - must be cut down at the root. Europe is too narrow to be their home as well." Ordinary Macedonian Slavs in the streets of Skopje appear equally unwilling to face the possibility that the rebels, whatever their motives and however murderous their tactics, cannot be "crushed and destroyed," at least not by them. (NATO forces could manage the task, but the alliance insists it won't intervene until the shooting...