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Rebel leader insists fighters will lay down their arms for sake of peace
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By
Associated Press
ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT
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Monday August 20, 2001 |
SIPKOVICA, Macedonia - The reclusive leader of Macedonia's ethnic-Albanian guerrillas stepped out into the open yesterday, inviting reporters to his mountain hide-out to declare that his fighters will hand their weapons to NATO soldiers and honor a peace deal.
Dressed in a camouflage uniform and flanked by rebels armed with assault rifles, Ali Ahmeti, the political leader of the National Liberation Army, said the time had come to work for peace in this troubled Balkan nation.
"We will give up all our arms, because we will no longer have any need for them," he said of the rebels, who began fighting for more rights for minority ethnic Albanians in Macedonia six months ago.
Ahmeti told reporters crammed into a village school that he has begun contacts with a NATO advance team that began moving into the country this weekend to determine whether a tenuous cease-fire is holding well enough to deploy the full 3,500-troop mission.
Just hours after Ahmeti spoke, however, a firefight broke out between the insurgents and Macedonian forces in the village of Poroj, just outside the country's second largest city, Tetovo.
A senior police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Macedonian forces came under fire first, and he described the situation as "rather serious." There was no word on casualties.
An ethnic-Albanian rebel commander, also speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that ''very intensive" fighting was under way, but he did not offer details.
The fresh attack comes at a sensitive time because NATO plans to decide later this week whether to move ahead with the British-led Operation Essential Harvest. The mission would collect rebel weapons - a key element of a peace deal meant to end the country's crisis.
NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe, Gen. Joseph Ralston, was to travel to Macedonia today to take part in an assessment of the security situation.
Also yesterday, civilians blockaded the main road to the border in the town of Stenkovac for a second day, preventing NATO-led peacekeepers from traveling back and forth to Kosovo. The support base for peacekeepers in Kosovo is located in Macedonia.
Amid anticipation of the deployment, the rebels sought their moment of attention. The usually reclusive Ahmeti promised that after the peace deal the rebels would no longer be so mysterious. The insurgents, he said, want to assimilate again into society and live normal lives together with Macedonians.
"We have to think about the future, and we have to remember the past as something bitter," Ahmeti said. "We have to create the conditions to accommodate both Albanians and Macedonians."
Ahmeti deftly deflected questions about his own political future, but he clearly was king in his stronghold in Sipkovica, 25 miles outside the capital, Skopje.
Children lined up and cheered as he entered his car. Uniformed men guarded his every step in a village patrolled by rebels carrying assault rifles and grenades.
Four-wheel-drive vehicles painted in camouflage colors and bearing registration plates with the NLA emblem sped through the village, ferrying rebels to checkpoints on the outskirts.
But Ahmeti insists he is willing to give up the territory his group holds for the sake of ensuring that the peace deal works.
"This is our territory and their territory," he said of the Macedonians.
NATO repeatedly has stressed that, if the full multinational force is deployed, it will not act as a peacekeeping body separating the two factions in Macedonia and will only collect weapons voluntarily handed in by the rebels. The mission is to last only 30 days.
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