An Imperfect Peace

For a rebel commander who brought his native Macedonia to the brink of civil war a year ago, Ali Ahmeti is an unusually cautious man. From the beginning of the conflict between the Macedonian government and Ahmeti's ethnic Albanian insurgents, the graying, soft-spoken former student organizer was careful to moderate his message so as not to alienate the West. He silenced talk of territorial demands by other fighters and insisted the aim was only to improve the rights of local Albanians. Now, on the anniversary of his rebel National Liberation Army's attack on the northern city of Tetovo, he continues to talk peace, but with a caveat. "Everything is going in a positive direction but very, very slowly," he says, relaxing in jeans and a quilted vest in his mountain stronghold of Sipkovica, overlooking Tetovo. He is not ready to come out of the hills just yet. "After 15 months in the mountains," he says, with a faint smile, "it's hard to get used to the town."

Or for the town to get used to him. The war he helped start displaced 170,000 people and left more than 150 dead, including up to 72 soliders and police. It also deepened the gulf between the country's ethnic Albanian and Macedonian Slav communities. Seven months after a cease-fire, Macedonian Slav hard-liners in the government are still whipping up fear and loathing of the former rebels, while Albanians, almost to a man, see Ahmeti and not the government as their main protector. Ethnic relations, says Aleksander Damovski, a director with the country's largest daily newspaper, Dnevnik, "have been set back 10 or 20 years. With one dirty war we are back at the beginning."

If peace holds this spring in the Balkan republic, analysts say, it will be thanks less to the initiative of local leaders than the carrot-and-stick diplomacy of European Union and U.S. negotiators — backed by 700 NATO peacekeepers. Under pressure, the government has in the past six months passed a raft of measures upgrading Albanian rights. This month it also grudgingly agreed to a general amnesty for a disarmed nla. In return, Western donors pledged an unexpected $515 million in aid. The money will be used to repair war damage, prop up a debt-ridden budget and, it is hoped, jump-start economic growth.

The threat of violence has not receded altogether, though. While Ahmeti insists his nla has disbanded, up to 1,000 disaffected fighters, including some ex-NLA, remain armed and at large in the snowbound mountains along the Kosovo border. In sporadic communiqués, a group identifying itself as the Albanian National Army claims to be fighting for a "greater Albania." But Ahmeti says the men have no clear agenda and little domestic support. "The Albanians in Macedonia have achieved their goal," he says. The peace agreement signed last August "is not perfect, but what remains can be handled in parliament." Efforts to establish contact with the hard-core fighters have failed, he says, though he doubts they are capable of a concerted attack. nato officials agree. Perhaps more worrying, they say, is the rhetoric coming out of Skopje.

In recent weeks, Minister of the Interior Ljube Boskovski, a hard-line nationalist, has taken to concocting stories linking Albanians to international terror. In one case, a freshly recruited "antiterrorist" unit shot and killed seven unidentified men Boskovski then claimed were Pakistani extremists planning attacks on Western embassies. They were, he said, backed by the nla. But NATO and U.S. diplomats say the whole affair looks staged to rally nationalist sympathies. The hard-liners are not done yet. Goran Mitevski, Director of Public Security, now says that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers "had communication" with NLA commanders last summer and that 80 "mujahedin" are on their way from Bosnia. He gave no details.

Such talk has found a receptive audience among Macedonian Slavs. Indeed, the Interior Minister rides his fearmongering to new heights in opinion polls. With elections due this fall, he is among Macedonia's most popular politicians.

Which is one reason why Ali Ahmeti is staying put. Guaranteeing the peace process in such an overheated environment cannot be left to the government alone, he says. Western peacekeepers will be needed for another "three years at least." Ahmeti is, after all, a cautious man.