Word: slavs
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...NATO's hopes still rest on a political solution being hammered out between the Slav-dominated parties and those representing the ethnic-Albanian minority. How are those talks going...
...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 power...
...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...
...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...