The European Union's envoy in Macedonia, Mr Francois Leotard, spent his first day of work yesterday trying to get support for a peace conference as fighting flared in northern regions.
Tension remains high in the country. Macedonia's Slavs are furious with NATO for evacuating rebels from a village close to the capital, Skopje, this week - particularly as the same rebels, now camped in the village of Nikustak opened fire on government forces yesterday.
The rebels say they will step up the conflict and strike inside Skopje itself, unless they are included in peace talks - something Mr Leotard has ruled out.
In Macedonia's northern hills, rebels have also re-occupied villages near the town of Tetovo, where they evacuated under fire from government forces a month ago. Mr Leotard, a former French defence minister, is trying to succeed where previous envoys have failed, in convening talks between mainstream Albanian parties and the Slav-dominated government.
He welcomed moves announced by the US to freeze the bank accounts of the rebel UCK organisation and ban its leaders from visiting America.
Not all ethnic Albanians think the move will work because the UCK has inherited a powerful fund-raising operation dating from the Kosovo war, in which many of the same fighters saw action.
Rebels now in the hills have their uniforms, food, weapons and radios paid for through a system of voluntary taxation from ethnic Albanians working abroad.
This system, first set up for the struggle for Kosovo, is the so-called "homeland fund". At any one time, more than 100,000 ethnic Albanians from former Yugoslavia, mostly Kosovans, work abroad in Europe and the US. Many pay a voluntary "tax", about 5 per cent of their income, to the UCK, with the money funnelled to its headquarters among a group of ethnic Albanians based in Geneva.
"This is a well-developed operation," said Tim Judah, author of Kosovo, War and Revenge.
"The money for this war comes from the same places as before, Switzerland and the US. I don't think there's much anyone can do to curb it."
The money is in turn channelled to village-based organisations for the purchase of weapons, which are in plentiful supply in Eastern Europe.
More than one million guns were stolen from the government in Albania during the 1997 uprising, and more are available from stores of impoverished former communist states.
"We have a diaspora," Mr Shevket Musliu, former leader of the UCK faction fighting against Serbs, said earlier this year in the Presevo Valley. "The diaspora can see we are fighting for our country. We are supplied with weapons and we have many different routes."