Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------------------------Poised on the edge of a Balkan mire
Special report: Macedonia
Richard Norton-Taylor
Thursday August 16, 2001
The Guardian
Nato troops under British leadership are poised to enter Macedonia on the back of a huge assumption: that the ethnic Albanian guerrillas will voluntarily give up their weapons, having achieved all the political and constitutional reforms they wanted.
Asked yesterday what the rebels would be gaining by handing over their guns, British defence sources said: "Trust and honour in the western world and status achieved in an honourable fashion."
They were referring to the peace agreement signed on Monday, which protects the rights of the minority Albanian population.
This, said the sources, would allow the ethnic Albanian National Liberation Army - dismissed not so long ago as "terrorists" by Lord Robertson, Nato's secretary general, but now called "insurgents" - to give up their weapons to Nato troops with honour intact.
This was the optimistic picture being painted yesterday as the EU offered aid money and Nato governments prepared to dispatch thousands of troops to yet another Balkan state. They insisted that it was not a peacekeeping operation; the troops were not going to provide reassurance, or even security, to either side in a conflict that has been raging for months.
There would be no "green line" separating the two sides: the troops were not there to protect territory, and it was not even a disarmament operation.
But British defence sources accept that there are risks involved. They come from Albanian extremists not prepared to go along with their leaders, and there is the worry of a reaction from Macedonia's slavic majority who think that Nato and the west have treated the NLA with kid gloves.
Nato commanders have a very rough idea of the number of weapons in the hands of the guerrillas - "a small number of thousands, mainly small arms" is how defence sources estimated it - but the borders with Kosovo and Albania itself are difficult to police. Even if the NLA does hand over all its weapons - and it is a big if - more will be easily available.
If Nato did not to go in, they say, it would be worse: if the crisis continued unchecked it would have serious implications for Kosovo and beyond.
Lord Robertson in particular has been pressing for an early deployment of Nato troops to keep up the momentum provided by the peace deal and to avoid a security vacuum.
To minimise the risks, Brigadier Barney White-Spunner, in command of what Nato describes as a strictly limited "weapons collection" operation, will make a detailed assessment of the situation on the ground next week, including talks with ethnic Albanian leaders.
The Macedonian government and security forces will have to honour an amnesty for ethnic Albanians who agree to give up their weapons, and the ceasefire will have to hold.
British defence sources provided a detailed account of the history of Albanian guerrilla groups, which received funding from countries as diverse as Switzerland, Turkey and the US.
The NLA, they said, had been planning attacks in Macedonia for five years. They conceded that some of its leaders had been members of the Kosovo Protection Corps, set up as an incipient civilian police force in the Serbian province from members of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army, which was backed by the Nato allies during the war against Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia in 1999.
Nato's interpretation, or hope, is that the NLA believes it has too much to lose by reneging on the peace settlement. The coming weeks will tell. The troops will be lightly armed, not equipped for combat. Their rules of engagement will allow them to defend themselves if they come under fire but the assumption is that the security environment will be "benign".
When asked what the response would be if the NLA started shooting at Nato troops, the sources said that the operation would be terminated. "They are not equipped to [make a] transition to any other mission; they are not mandated to do any other job," they said.
But they conceded that in such an event, hard choices would have to be made. Nato officials, on the surface optimistic, have been careful to warn of the danger of being sucked into a much larger and longer-term mission.
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