World

Call For War In Macedonia

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

June 6, 2001 / 9:37 AM EDT / CBS

Macedonia's prime minister Ljubco Georgievski called on Wednesday for the declaration of a state of war to help the country combat ethnic Albanian rebels who killed five soldiers overnight, his spokesman said.

In a possible further sign of unrest, a gunman in a car fired shots toward the office of Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski Wednesday evening.

Trajkovski was in his office, which is housed in the building of the Macedonian parliament in central Skopje, at the time of the shooting, but no one was hurt. There was no explanation for the shooting.

"A strong military response is the only way to achieve peace," Georgievski's spokesman Antonio Milosovski told reporters.

Milosovski said declaring a state of war would allow the military to call up all able-bodied men to fight.

A two-thirds majority vote in parliament is needed to approve such a declaration.

Col. Blagoja Markovski said ethnic Albanian rebels attacked government troops and injured three policemen and three soldiers late Tuesday on the battlefield just outside the city of Tetovo, in northwestern Macedonia.

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A rescue team dispatched with a military escort to evacuate the wounded, then ran into another ambush, and the soldiers were mowed down by machine-gun fire from rebel positions.

Ljubco Georgievski

Macedonia called for a state of war in early May after a rebel attack killed eight soldiers but was dissuaded by Western powers, who argued it would inflame the situation, alienate ethnic Albanians and complicate the search for peace.

The attacks marked an escalation in Macedonia's months-long conflict between government forces and ethnic Albanian militants, who say they are fighting for broader rights for their community.

The insurgency erupted in February, claiming the lives of more than a dozen government troops and at least as many rebels.

The government, dominated by the majority Slavs, regards the rebels as terrorists bent on seizing control of a large piece of Macedonian territory and merging it with neighboring Albania and the adjacent Kosovo province in southern Yugoslavia.

The other major battle zone, northeast of the capital, Skopje, also was tense, with occasional gun fire exchange. Resisting a series of government offensives, the rebels remain entrenched there in a cluster of ethnic Albanian villages, together with a few thousand civilians.

The lagest city in the northeast, Kumanovo, which is controlled by the government, has suffered from acute water shortages because rebels control a reservoir that supplies the city with drinking water.

Macedonian authorities have threatened to wipe out the rebels and end the insurgency, which many fear could spread to other Balkan regions.

Ethnic Albanians make up about one-third of the population in this country of 2 million.

Macedonian state radio reported three of the dead soldiers were from the southwestern town of Bitola. When several soldiers from that town died in clashes last month, riots erupted in Bitola, with Slavic residents damaging the shops and homes of local ethnic Albanians.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Macedonia on Tuesday, talking to his counterpart, Vlado Buckovski, who appealed for the United States to help stem the influx of money and weapons sent by ethnic Albanian émigrés from the West to the rebel movement here.

The government also requested U.S. assistance in training Macedonian army commando units.

The United States and its allies have condemned the violence in Macedonia and urged the Slav-led government and ethnic Albanian leaders to work out their differences peacefully.