Word: macedonias
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There is more than a little irony in the fact that Macedonia came apart at the 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...
...been the safety of its own personnel. And in a mean frontier town, a 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...
...territorial division, of course, is exactly what the guerrillas want, despite all protestations to the contrary. The idea that the hard-eyed men in the hills have launched an armed insurgency in order to achieve constitutional changes and greater civil rights for Albanians in Macedonia is, frankly, preposterous. This was no mass civil-rights movement that bumped into an unyielding state and then took the fateful decision to respond to violence with violence. This began with small bands of armed men dispatched from NATO-controlled Kosovo by the advocates of a Greater Albania (comprising Albania, Kosovo and those pieces...
...These insurgents, calling themselves the National Liberation Army, launched attacks on government forces, hoping to provoke a ham-fisted response that would drive Macedonia's Albanians - who have plenty of political, economic and social grievances - into the movement's arms. They also hoped to repeat the success of their de facto parent organization, the Kosovo Liberation Army, which managed to provoke such extreme brutality from the Serb authorities that NATO eventually intervened on the Albanian side...
...Every artillery round fired, meanwhile, brings fragile Macedonia closer to the precipice. "At least before everyone was living their own lives, if within their own communities," said Jabir Derala, 33, a peace activist in Skopje of mixed Albanian, Turkish and Croatian descent. "Now everybody is one sided. You can see the city is empty. Albanians are on one side of the bridge and Macedonians are on the other. " In the past, he added, "we could speak about mistrust . Now it has turned into hatred." For Captain first-class Muhaedin Bela , who says he was singled out for suspicion only because...