The Next Nightmare

From the beginning of yugoslavia’s violent dissolution a decade ago, the feared endpoint was war in Macedonia. Every knowing pundit said the conflict that first grabbed the international community’s attention in Slovenia in June 1991 would roll inexorably eastward. In time, they said, it would run up against the uneasy ethnic mix in Macedonia, the Yugoslav republic cursed with a contested name and surrounded by historically ill-willed neighbors. Match Macedonia with “powder keg” on an Internet search engine and you’ll get 1,340 matches; “tinderbox” yields 332. Plenty of less shopworn slogans were brought to bear by diplomats and human rights monitors who made the same plea: we’ve got to do something.

So the international community did something, but perhaps not enough. They ladled an alphabet soup of international bureaucracy onto the potential trouble spot, beginning with “fyrom,” the initials of the awkward circumlocution — Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia — meant to assuage the Greeks’ opposition to the use of the very name Macedonia. Then there was unprofor, the United Nations Protection Force — later unpredep, for U.N. Preventive Deployment — which put a Nordic battalion and an American task force along Macedonia’s northern and northwestern borders from 1992 until 1999. There was the OSCE — the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe — and its presciently named Spillover Monitor Mission to Skopje. There were dozens of worthy initiatives to bolster democracy, promote understanding, and damp down ethnic strife. But now tank shells are flying again, and the real prospect of more widespread killing looms. So what came of all that effort to make Macedonia the star pupil of the troubled western Balkans? Was the problem intractable? Or was the response inadequate?

There’s no simple answer, especially now that the most recent conflict — between Kosovo-backed Albanian insurgents and Macedonian forces around the northwestern town of Tetovo — is smoldering rather than blazing. What is certain is that nothing highlights Macedonia’s problems as starkly as armed conflict, which is why the international community is scrambling to prove that whatever its grade on conflict prevention, it can do better in conflict management.

There are some encouraging signs, especially the near unanimity in condemning the use of force by ethnic Albanians in Macedonia. “This situation in Macedonia could spell strike three for the Albanians altogether,” says Baton Haxhiu, editor of Kosovo’s leading daily Koha Ditore. “Our reputation is being ruined. Our Western friends are turning into enemies.” Russian President Vladimir Putin, in Stockholm to meet with leaders of the 15 E.U. countries, said — with an eye to his own problems in Chechnya — “these aren’t rebels, but terrorists.”

Putin is not alone in thinking the Americans have given Albanian terrorists too much succor. But across the international community there was general agreement on the best holding pattern: keep arms and men from Kosovo out of Macedonia, back the Macedonian government in its fight against the insurgents, and hope the government wins.

NATO’s Secretary-General George Robertson last week agreed with E.U. foreign ministers on a clean division of labor: NATO’s prime focus is to patrol the border between Kosovo and Macedonia and offer intelligence and other support to Macedonian armed forces. The E.U., meanwhile, is concentrated on lowering the political temperature in Macedonia itself. “We can’t fall into the trap of over-reacting and following the rebels’ tracks into a broadening of the conflict,” said Wolfgang Petritsch, the former E.U. negotiator on Kosovo and now the High Commissioner for Bosnia-Herzegovina. “We’ll see soon enough what effect cutting off the border will have.”

It won’t be easy. The mountainous, heavily forested terrain is tailor-made for insurgency, and some of the trails and networks the Kosovo Liberation Army (k.l.a.) used to transport arms into Kosovo in the late 1990s can be followed the other way. Robertson issued a call for more troops to strengthen the stretched resources of the 42,000 kfor troops currently in Kosovo, but none of the countries deployed, least of all the United States, expressed any enthusiasm about beefing up their presence there. NATO officials say they’re “not talking about thousands of troops,” and that they’re confident someone will pony up; in the meantime, patrols along the border have already been increased. The U.S. has the additional political task in Kosovo of convincing Albanian leaders, including former k.l.a. chief Hashim Thaci, to discourage their followers from heading south. “The discrimination that the ethnic Albanians face in Macedonia cannot match up to what the Serbs have had to endure here in Kosovo,” said a senior American official. “The strategy of extremism can no longer be replicated.”

In Macedonia the lead actor for now is the European Union. The full panoply of the E.U.’s unwieldy foreign policy apparatus was funneled into Skopje last week: High Representative Javier Solana, Commissioner Chris Patten, Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh and Bodo Hombach, special coordiNATOr of the Stability Pact. All left behind strong messages of support for the Macedonian government, while urging it to speed up its desultory efforts to meet longstanding Albanian demands for better political and economic standing in the country.

Obviously that crucial message is more easily delivered when bullets aren’t flying. When Macedonia was the sole ex-Yugoslav Republic untouched by conflict, no one wanted to rock the boat, despite ample warnings that relations between the majority Slavs and the 23% Albanian minority were volatile. “It was not the international will to hold the Macedonian government strictly to account on human rights,” says Mark Thompson, Balkans program director for the International Crisis Group. Observes Henryk Sokalski, the Polish U.N. special representative who headed unpredep from 1995 to 1998: “We got a lot of visits and many great words complimenting Macedonia. But it was more verbal support than anything else.”

“Conflict prevention isn’t sexy,” sighs one official of the OSCE. “If it’s successful, nothing happens.” Ibrahim Mehmeti, director of media projects for the non-governmental Search for Common Ground, has worked the last seven years to promote multi-ethnic journalism in Macedonia. “If we’re successful only as long as we don’t have conflict then we’ve failed, along with the OSCE, the U.N. and everybody else,” he says. But he’s convinced that the media in Macedonia would be even more inflammatory than it is now if not for efforts like his. “The tension is growing, unfortunately. But we think the citizens on both sides are more mature than the politicians.” Perhaps. But unless the weapons fall silent, maturity will not be enough.