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MONDAY MARCH 26 2001 First shots in a fifth Balkans war? BY ANTHONY LOYD IN TETOVO WITH a maelstrom of whistling shot and bursting shell the first battle of a new Balkan conflict spread from the outskirts of Tetovo northwards yesterday. A 7am barrage initiated the Macedonian offensive, destroying positions held by Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) fighters west of the city.

Plumes of smoke from burning houses on the hillside rose into the sky as T55 tanks and armoured personnel carriers raced through the streets, followed by columns of Macedonian infantry. Advancing eastwards, they clashed with the NLA in the village of Gjare.

In the Hotel Teke, a religious seminary dating back to the Ottoman Empire, the manager puzzled for a full five minutes over how best to explain to his 15 guests that they were suddenly in the front line of a battle between a Macedonian special police unit and Albanian rebels, before deciding that it was beyond him.

As some 30 police, wearing flak jackets, helmets and laden with a variety of hardware, turned his hotel into a military base, the thin Macedonian changed from his jeans into a threadbare suit and, without a word, served breakfast coffee.

Barely 200 yards away tank and artillery fire blitzed NLA positions on the slope above the hotel and two-way sniper fire ripped through the spring blossom in the garden. Overhead, Macedonian helicopters fired rockets on the hillside.

The mood in the hotel turned ugly as soon as the police discovered that my translator was Albanian. We were thrown out at gunpoint as the artillery barrage intensified.

Outside, apart from a few frightened groups of civilians clustered nervously around street corners, the roads were empty. More groups of Macedonian soldiers entered the town, taking up positions around the cemetery, from which they began firing northwards. Many appeared to be terrified and confused, screaming wildly at the Albanian civilians, waving their guns in every direction. As NLA sniper fire peppered the buildings around them some of these troops then fired in panic back towards the centre of the city.

In the minds of the Albanians of Tetovo, there seemed no doubt as to which side they most feared. “You want to see terrorists then here they are,” one man yelled, pointing at a band of sweating soldiers who were blazing haphazardly away at building on the northern edge of the city. “The Slavs are behaving as only the Slavs know how. (President) Bush calls the NLA terrorists but they don’t burn civilian homes and shoot women and children.”

In a crescendo of gunfire and screams, a taxi, lumbering slowly towards the hotel gates, was blasted with automatic rifle fire by the police on the hotel walls. Riddled with bullets, but still somehow alive, the occupants, an old woman and two men, were dragged out and away by the police, who then relaxed with coffee and sandwiches as regular troops bypassed the position to clash with NLA.

By early afternoon these forces, spearheaded by two tanks and six armoured personnel carriers, appeared to have consolidated positions in the village of Gjare on the east side of the city. Other units were moving in a pincer movement into engagements on the western slopes around Lavce.

More houses burned and two Hind helicopter gunships, brought by the Macedonian Government from Ukraine three days ago, took over from a pair of older Hip Mi8 helicopters to strafe rebel positions. Smoke from the NLA headquarters in the village of Selce added to the conflagration, though the movement of ambulances towards the front suggested that the Macedonians had suffered casualties.

The ferocity of the offensive seemed to spread Albanian discontent more widely through the city. "Maybe today the army will drive the NLA back from Tetovo," one man said. "But they will be back tomorrow, or else somewhere nearby, for our rights remain disrespected here."

In the north of the town three families told me that their young men had left to join the rebels. "We have waited ten years for our rights to be recognised," an Albanian mother said, "of course I worry for my son who has gone now to fight, but it is the right thing to do at this moment."

Behind her the skyline smoked and crashing detonations reverberated through the valleys while barely a hundred yards away Macedonian reservists scurried nervously around the cemetery as incoming sniper fire kicked up dust around them: a moment in a day that history could record as setting the southern Balkans alight.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-104838,00.html

-- Anonymous, March 26, 2001