Word: macedonians
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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...
...situation deteriorated, France might push for direct deployment of alliance troops. Still, nobody's talking about that yet - the emphasis is on getting the government to make constitutional changes to address the grievances of the ethnic Albanians, and there's some concern over the level of competence of the Macedonian government, which tends to focus either on making war or making constitutional reform, but struggles to combine the two. But there's no transatlantic split on Macedonia...
...Then, in an extraordinary televised address, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, ordinarily the chief defender of Macedonian Slav interests, suddenly announced that his government was on the verge of granting ethnic Albanians virtually everything they asked for, including formal recognition in the constitution. "We have an obligation toward the international community to create a Macedonia that will suit Albanians," he said...
...that overture too was spurned-first by leading Macedonian Slav members of the government, who accused the Prime Minister of selling out, and then by an ethnic Albanian politician who charged that Georgievski was just trying to provoke extremists. "We cannot accept the way Georgievski talks about this," said Azis Polozhani of the Party of Democratic Prosperity. "That is inflammatory talk that could push the country deeper into crisis...
...Proof of how bad things have become was supplied by a proposal from the Macedonian Academy of Science and Arts that Macedonia and Albania swap villages, an implausible scheme that would redraw the borders and could trigger a new round of ethnic cleansing. That idea too was dismissed, thankfully. Macedonian government forces, meanwhile, continued a two-week-old offensive along the Kosovo border that has killed several civilians and forced thousands to flee. The government accuses rebels of keeping 10,000 civilians coralled as human shields. "We can hardly wait to get orders to move on and finish...