Word: macedonias
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NATO on Friday begins its most dangerous Balkan mission yet. But the danger facing the Western alliance in Macedonia is less physical than political. Some 400 British troops are due to be deployed in the former Yugoslav nation in advance of an eventual 3,500-troop contingent whose mission, innocuously dubbed "Operation Essential Harvest," involves collecting and destroying weapons voluntarily tendered by ethnic-Albanian guerrillas. They're not there to disarm anyone, NATO spokesmen insist, and they'll stay only 30 days. If the guerrillas choose to hang onto their weapons and the fighting starts up again, the Western troops...
...There is certainly no shortage of scenarios that could see a resumption of hostilities. After all, the peace agreement on which the whole operation is based was signed not by the guerrillas, but by ethnic-Albanian political parties who'd been part of Macedonia's democratic political process, rather than waging war in the hills. NATO leaders coaxed and cajoled the Macedonian authorities into accepting a deal to substantially improve the political lot of their Albanian countrymen, a deal the alliance hopes will persuade the guerrillas to lay down their arms - or, more correctly, turn them over to NATO soldiers...
...having a problem putting down its guns, even though most of those it claims to represent have long since turned against violence. Over in Spain, the militant Basque separatists of the ETA present the same problem. NATO plans to disarm Albanian rebels in Macedonia appear somewhat optimistic, despite last week's political peace agreement. And the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad appear to have no shortage of young Palestinians willing to blow themselves up in order to make a bloody political point...
...success of Macedonia's insurgency may lie partly in the fact that when Albanian nationalists in Kosovo first sent a guerrilla army into the impoverished former Yugoslav republic, they found a huge pool of young Albanian men willing to join up. They were driven by a long-held sense of political and cultural grievance against the Macedonian authorities. But for many, the decision may have been made easier by the mass unemployment that left little hope of finding a job. Guerrillas always imagine themselves in heroic terms, and they have a sense of purpose that beats sitting around waiting...
...Still, the wider economic context in Ireland and Spain has marginalized the men of war. Eventually they simply become a nuisance factor. But the economic context in the Balkans and the Middle East, for example, is quite different. Macedonia's fragile peace has plenty of potentially fatal flaws that could cause its collapse, and the stagnant economy hardly provides a reassuring foundation for the brave new state envisaged in the political agreement. And while economics has little direct impact on the fact that Israel and the Palestinians are moving daily further away from a return to the peace process...