Fresh fighting has broken out in Macedonia today with rebel Albanian fightersthreatening to overthrow Tetovo, Macedonia’s second city. The threat comes in the wake of overnight violence which saw a night of vicious gunbattles, which raked previously untouched suburbs with machine-gun and mortar fire.
Violence also flared in Skopje last night with crowds attacking NATO and Western organisations accused of being sympathetic to the Albanian minority.
The streets of Skopje were quiet this morning as work began to clean up broken glass outside the U.S. and German embassies, and the offices of international peace monitors and foreign businesses damaged in last night’s riots.
International monitors monitoring the now broken ceasefire said their mission in Macedonia was not over, but they are taking extra precautions after the riots.
Diplomats said the government appeared to be pursuing an outright nationalist agenda in preference to granting greater rights to the large Albanian minority to secure a peace deal and end a five-month rebellion dragging Macedonia towards civil war.
The Skopje rioting, which followed a government tirade against Western mediators and NATO, was the worst nationalist violence in the former Yugoslav republic's capital in a month.
Protesters from the Tetovo region tried to storm the parliament building in Skopje to demand the security forces crush the NLA.
Police stood back and did little to stop the rampage, which was fuelled by a deep-seated fear among Macedonians that their small 10-year-old country is being ripped apart by the rebels and its nascent identity called into question.
Meanwhile, the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, KFOR, have detained 55suspected members of an ethnic Albanian guerrilla group operating inneighbouring Macedonia, it emerged today.
Colonel Manfred Junk, spokesman for KFOR, said its soldiers hadseized several automatic rifles and ammunition during the operation nearthe southern town of Prizren on Tuesday morning.
He said the arrested men, believed to be members of the NationalLiberation Army (NLA), had been on their way with 50 mules fromMacedonia to Albania via UN-protected Kosovo. They were arrested asNLA suspects, he told Reuters.
The rebel group, which emerged early this year, says it is fighting toimprove the rights of Macedonia's large Albanian minority. Members ofthe Macedonian majority sees them as separatist infiltrators fromKosovo.