Guerrillas' Shadow Hovers Over Macedonia Peace Efforts

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The Macedonian government has agreed to a cease-fire with the ethnic-Albanian rebels of the National Liberation army, to begin at midnight local time tonight. Despite that welcome development, there's still a significant possibility of a broader conflict to come, because the guerrillas' insurgency appears to have triggered the beginnings of that by-now familiar Balkan ritual of "ethnic cleansing." The rebels reportedly expelled some 600 non-Albanians from the villages they captured on Sunday, while elsewhere in Macedonia ethnic-Albanian business owners have shut up shop and fled following threats by a shadowy Macedonian militia group. And if the chain of "ethnic cleansing" is allowed to gather momentum, Macedonia will effectively be in the grip of a civil war whose outcome will likely realize the rebels' original objective of partitioning the country — and drawing NATO into yet another permanent peacekeeping operation.

Although NATO has vowed to send a force of 3,000 troops to Macedonia to help disarm the rebels, the alliance has said it will only go in once there's a political accord in terms of which the rebels agree to be disarmed. The Western alliance had initially denounced the guerrillas as "terrorists" and "murderers," and its insistence on dialogue was aimed at pressing the authorities in Skopje to address the grievances of Macedonia's ethnic-Albanians — grievances the guerrillas had sought to exploit to build support for their insurgency. But NATO's position appears to be moving inexorably towards recognizing the guerrillas as a legitimate party to discussions over Macedonia's future. Last week, the alliance enraged Macedonians by ferrying armed NLA fighters from a village overlooking the capital to another territory held by the guerrillas, as part of a truce brokered by Western mediators. And on two different occasions, prominent European mediators have called for direct talks between the government and the rebels, only to be diplomatically corrected by their superiors.

NATO is all too aware of the palpable failure involved in legitimizing the rebels. Far from stabilizing the region's ethnic conflicts, it actually sends the message that nothing succeeds quite as well as resorting to arms — and that creates an incentive for nationalist extremists to keep on fighting to redraw Balkan borders. The Macedonian insurgency began with small groups of men infiltrated from NATO-controlled Kosovo, who then launched attacks on security force personnel. And despite some verbal wrist-slapping from NATO, the reward for that strategy may turn out to be a place at the negotiating table to determine Macedonia's future. The failure of the alliance to act on its harsh criticisms of the rebels also signaled an ambivalence to the mainstream ethnic-Albanian parties in Skopje, who have ratcheted up their political demands for a bi-national state to the point that accord seems beyond reach.

The current talks being encouraged by the U.S. involve constitutional changes to accord the Albanian minority greater rights in Macedonia. But having so successfully determined the agenda through their insurgency, it takes a substantial leap of faith (and blindness to the region's recent history) to imagine that the hard men in the hills will simply turn in their Kalashnikovs when the lawyers in Skopje have finessed constitutional changes.

NATO's reluctance to put its foot down in Macedonia is understandable: Confronting Albanian extremism — which the alliance itself appears has identified as the primary source of the current violence there — potentially exposes alliance troops to risks of a backlash both in Macedonia and in Kosovo. And there is no doubt that the Macedonian military's tendency to rain down bombs and shells on villages occupied by the guerrillas will drive many Macedonian Albanians into the arms of the rebels. Yet the absence of any strong disincentive for the guerrillas to continue fighting may be the fatal flaw of NATO's strategy, which appears to be accelerating the slide to civil war, an outcome the alliance had desperately hoped to avoid — and which would inevitably drag NATO in to clean up the mess, but only after yet another embarrassing conflagration has exploded right under the noses of the U.S. and European troops sent to the Balkans to keep the peace.