By
The Associated Press
GAJRE, Macedonia - Using armored cars for cover, government troops punched through rebel lines and moved into a hillside village yesterday, spraying houses with bullets as they spearheaded an offensive to push ethnic Albanian insurgents back from Macedonia's second-largest city.
While not claiming all-out victory, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said government forces were doing well, asserting that the thrust to "clear the terrain of terrorists ... is being carried out successfully, and already key positions have been taken."
The fighting has brought combatants into their closest quarters yet in the six-week conflict near the Kosovo border that NATO wants defused to prevent a wider Balkan war.
Macedonian troops led by seven armored personnel carriers and two tanks moved into the village of Gajre, in the hills just northwest of Tetovo, yesterday afternoon, breaking through a rebel roadblock and forcing the insurgents to pull back.
Houses and cars were burning in the village, and bullets sent roof tiles flying as troops blasted houses suspected of harboring rebels. Two helicopters strafed the hillsides.
A lone man ran to free his cows from a burning barn. He then shot a thin stream of water from a garden hose on his barn and house, in a vain attempt to staunch the flames.
After the fighting ended, dozens of terrified people who had been hiding in a cellar surfaced and rushed into the thick forest around the village.
After taking Gajre, the troops regrouped and set up positions overlooking Llavce, another rebel-held village just north of Gajre.
Reporting another government success, state television said Macedonian troops also had taken Tetovo Kale, the ancient Turkish fortress cresting a hill that it said had been a rebel stronghold.
In Tetovo, Georgievski said no police or soldiers had been killed but spoke of "reports of two or three persons wounded." He did not elaborate. Other officials spoke of one policeman and five civilians wounded. The number of rebel casualties was not known.
In Washington, President Bush offered his support to efforts to disarm the rebels.
"I am hoping, of course, that the government is stable and we're able seal off the border to prevent people and arms from getting to the rebels," he told reporters yesterday.
In Skopje, the capital, national security adviser Nikola Dimitrov pledged that government troops would "do everything to protect the civilians." The army and police were only using the "proportional amount of force" needed to flush out the rebels, he said.
"This is a fight against the terrorists, not against any single ethnic community," Dimitrov said. "We undertook this action because the long-term existence of terrorism here endangers the pillars of Macedonia's multi-ethnicism."
The government advance was preceded by an early morning mortar barrage meant to soften up the insurgents before the army's move into the foothills. Amid the thud of exploding rounds, a convoy of armored cars then rumbled down the center of downtown Tetovo before turning toward Gajre, 21/2 miles away.
As they approached Gajre, the personnel carriers stopped and about 200 soldiers disembarked and fanned out behind them. Other vehicles pulled six 155-mm cannon up the hill.
The troops looked nervous but determined. "We are fighting for Macedonia," said one soldier who refused to give his name. "For everybody here."
Slavs in Tetovo cheered the Macedonian government tanks as they clattered down the cobblestone streets, but in Gajre, ethnic Albanians expressed outrage at the attack, asserting government soldiers were targeting the houses of innocent civilians instead of insurgent positions.
"They think that every house is a bunker," said Nuri Junozic, 46.
The rebels say their aim is limited to more rights for ethnic Albanians within Macedonia, but the government accuses them of seeking independence and drawing on Kosovo for fighters and weapons.
Although ethnic relations with the majority Slavs had been relatively trouble-free, substantial numbers of the ethnic Albanian minority felt they are being treated as second-class citizens. The struggle appears to have radicalized a large segment of Macedonia's Albanians.
The government push came amid a separate move in neighboring Serbia to curb ethnic Albanian militants there. Hundreds of Yugoslav army and police troops, acting with NATO approval, rolled into two more sectors of a tense Serbian buffer zone bordering Kosovo to police the region.
Germany's Defense Ministry said Saturday that it plans to send about 100 paratroopers to Tetovo to shield its soldiers based there to perform supply duties for the NATO-led peacekeeping force in neighboring Kosovo. Most of the 1,000 German soldiers were moved from their Tetovo barracks to a more fortified site last week after it was caught in cross fire.
Britain, meanwhile, said it would send troops to join in beefed-up controls along the border with Kosovo to help prevent arms from being smuggled to the rebels in Macedonia.
