At its yesterday's session the government decided to withdraw the proposed Public Information Law. This was stated yesterday by the deputy Prime Minister Zoran Krstevski. Krstevski proposed that the draft Public Information Law be withdrawn, and the new concept of the law be determined at one of the forthcoming sessions of the government.
"We decided to withdraw the proposed law as there were many criticisms of the proposal. In preparation of the new proposal we will take into account all of the criticisms provided by the public and experts," deputy Prime Minister Zoran Krstevski stated yesterday.
The government recently proposed a Public Information Law, which provoked numerous negative reactions both in Macedonia and abroad. The proposed solutions were condemned as attempts to limit freedom of information and a threat to introduce classification of journalists to "suitable" and "unsuitable" ones.
The experts, both in the country and abroad, were divided regarding whether the Public Information Law is necessary at all, as some of them believe that the existing legal provisions are sufficient.
"Aware of the grave nature of the current situation in the country we shall have a fully legitimate communication with the president of the republic, Boris Trajkovski. We are a serious political party and know the meaning of political responsibility. In the situation where the state is facing the danger of destabilization and war, we are fully aware that Mr. Boris Trajkovski is carrying out the function of the president of the state. Nevertheless, we do maintain our well-known assessment of the character of the presidential election in 1999," Branko Crvenkovski stated.
The office of president Trajkovski stated that Crvenkovski had turned over the material in connection with wiretapping. "The president expressed his well-known view that it is necessary to fully clarify this case and that that should take place through the regular legal procedure, while the political aspects of the affair should be handled in the parliament," the statement says.
"I suppose that the chief of the state within the framework of his authorities will urge that the case be clarified. Based on what he said, he hasn't changed his opinion that the wiretapping was a violation of democracy and human rights. However, it is well-known that president's authority is limited," Crvenkovski stated.
The SDSM refused to recognize legitimacy of president Trajkovski after his election in late 1999, because of "election fraud, violence and terror at polling booths". Hitherto the SDSM referred to the chief of state as "citizen Trajkovski".
According to Ahmeti, in that part of Greece, referred to by him as "Cameria", there are almost a million ethnic Albanians and their national rights need to be "won and defended" by the members of "already established and well-trained UCC".
"Albanians in Albanian lands in the Balkans must have their rights and that is our demand," stated Ahmeti.
As was reported by the MIA, he stated that "only the full acceptance of the UCK demands will lead to the end of war in Macedonia" and that the rights of Albanians in Greece would be defended in the same manner as the "threatened rights of Albanians in Macedonia."
Quoting intelligence sources, recently the Macedonian weekly Zum claimed that the establishment of non-governmental organizations of ethnic Albanians in Greece could be expected soon, to be followed by military activities for the achievement of the true goal of UCC - the secession of a part of Greece and its annexation by Greater Albania.
On April 21, 2001, Greek journalist Dimos Varikios claimed that several days earlier Greek border authorities had confiscated a truck full of weapons with UCK insignia, which according to him had entered Greece from Macedonia.
"It is irresponsible to dismiss this idea as anachronistic in the situation when we have constant arguments within our family. There are examples of successful and peaceful changes of borders and exchanges [of territory and population]. Otherwise, how do you propose that Macedonia survive as a state 50 years from now?" Georgi Efremov stated yesterday at a press conference.
The idea about exchanges is not an official view of the MANU and was never mentioned in a written document. That would happen if at least a half of 38 members of the Academy's assembly supported this idea. That idea needs to first get "legitimacy" by its inclusion in the document analysing the state of current inter-ethnic relations and future prospects for Macedonia, prepared by the Center for Strategic Research. According to the statement by the Executive Council of the MANU, that idea has hitherto not been presented to the Assembly.
According to the idea, in case it is accepted, Macedonia would cede to Albania a part of western Macedonia - Debar (without Mavrovo and Reka region), a part of Gostivar gravitating towards the Sar Mountain. From there, the border would go along the river Vardar north to the border crossing Jezince, including Tetovo and the villages in the Polog valley, where the ethnic Albanian population is concentrated. In return Albania would cede its part of the banks of the Ohrid and Prespa lakes, including Podgradec and Mala Prespa, where ethnic Macedonians live. Ethnic Albanians from Kumanovo, Skopje, Veles, Bitola, as well as Kicevo, and Struga regions and other regions where they are a minority, would move to the part of western Macedonia that would be ceded to Albania, while ethnic Macedonians from Tetovo, a part of the Gostivar region, Polog and Debar, would move to Skopje and parts that would belong to Macedonia. A peaceful exchange of population should take three months.
"However, that is only one of 25 options that are proposed as a solution for the problems. It is the task of science to offer possible solutions. I do not believe that any potential solution should be rejected in advance. This is nothing new. The same proposal was made in the past by Todor Petrov, the president of the World Macedonian Congress, and lawyer Aleksandar Tortevski," Efremov said.
He claims that the exchange would not imply giving up European democratic achievements and integration processes.
"The integration of Balkan countries is one issue, and the survival of this state a totally different issue. The Balkans should be integrated in Europe, but the state also needs to survive. We want that Macedonia survive as a state fifty years form now. There are examples of peaceful exchanges. Ten years ago Czechoslovakia peacefully divided into two states," he said.
According to him there would be no danger of war and bloodletting.
"This is the beginning of the 21st century. There has been enough killing. People should think differently. There can be no comparison with the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences Memorandum. That solution sought to built a large state, and this is an option for a peaceful resolution of problems," the president of the MANU claims.
"This proposal is not realistic, since it is not based on realistic premises. But, as an idea, it deserves to be developed into more detail," claims academician Blaze Ristovski. Georgi Stardelov said that this is not a serious idea. "There is a definite lack of seriousness there," Stardelov said.
Stojan Andov, the president of the Macedonian Parliament, characterized the idea of the MANU as "civilizing".
"The text of the proposal is very interesting and provocative, but it is not irritating. I suggest that this idea be investigated further, as it contains all the civilizing principles that we have opted for as a state. We must realize that there are no hotheads in the MANU, only people with a long-term view of the trends, and situation and we need to talk to these people and understand their ideas. Before judging the idea, we should carefully think about it," Andov stated.
According to the leader of the SDSM, Branko Crvenkovski, this is the idea that would provoke war and suicide of Macedonia.
"That is a crazy idea that can only occur to that type of people. This idea should be buried from the start. It is tragic that this idea has now come from our own side. We have opened ourselves the Pandora's box about redrawing of borders. The evil with drawing of maps on scraps of paper by Tudman and Milosevic will happen to us as well. How can we tell 200,000 persons to leave their homes and all their property, to load whatever they can on a tractor and move? It is tragic that we haven't learned anything from the tragic events in Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia...," Crvenkovski said.
He announced that the SDSM would demand that the leading state officials take a stand regarding this idea, so that the citizens can see for themselves who supports what. According to him, the international representatives in the talks about the solution of the problems so far haven't mentioned anything similar.
"That idea would make the cooperation in the wide governing coalition impossible," Crvenkovski warned.
Spokesperson of the VMRO-DPMNE Igor Gievski stated that the idea is unacceptable.
"We cannot accept such ideas. Our party advocates the preservation of Macedonia as a state, her integrity and sovereignty. We proved that by confronting the terrorists," he said.
Naser Zimberi from the PDP said that such an idea is unacceptable for ethnic Albanians in Macedonia.
"The whole time there is talk about the preservation of the territorial integrity of the state and now something else is on offer. That will not be accepted by anyone among the ethnic Albanians," Ziberi said.
"That is an idea of some 'grown' children," Bilall Lutviu from the PDSh assessed.
Petar Gosev from the LDP believes that this idea is scandalous as "no one gave anyone the right to cede parts of territory and that cannot pass without consequences".
by E.Z., B.I., and M.P.
Yesterday Bitola was quiet during the day, but riots of outraged residents of Bitola are again expected in the evening. Stevo Penderovski, spokesperson of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, yesterday confirmed that there were indications that the disturbances would continue for another night. During the disturbances yesterday there were claims that the mob would head towards some of the villages with ethnic Albanian population located along the Macedonian-Greek border, but that did not happen.
Yesterday, ethnic Albanian pupils from primary schools did not attend classes. There were attempts to reignite some of the burnt houses, but the police prevented them.
Spokesperson Penderevski yesterday stated that in the disturbances, which started around 8pm, and ended at 1am, 14 persons requested medical assistance, four of them with bullet wounds. The police took into custody five persons, suspected of shooting from the crowd. All of them were later released. Four burglaries took place during the disturbances - one of an apartment, one of a shop and two of attorney offices. We found out that the family of the deputy minister Muarem Nexhipi was evacuated and found refuge at his birth place, the village of Grncari in Prespa, while about 4,000 ethnic Albanians who live in the Bitola region left the region to stay with their relatives in western Macedonia.
Penderevski explained that the Police had not used tear gas to disperse the protesters due to fear that they could start shooting randomly at the citizens.
Outrage and disturbances took place in other towns and cities in the country. In Resen yesterday two objects were set on fire, and shop windows of three shops were smashed. Molotov cocktail was thrown at the door of the mosque in Stip, while in Tetovo the unfinished wall of the Sarena Mosque was damaged.
Penderevski stated that yesterday the Police discovered in the Skopje district of Cair a canvass bag in a ditch, containing several grenades, landmines and bombs.
by B.G., Z.P.B., and I.K.I.
Outraged members of the security forces and citizens gave Trajkovski and Georgievski a thirty-minute deadline to address them. Otherwise, they were going to reject their legitimacy. "Resign", "treason", were the most frequent cries that followed the mention of the names of the president and the Prime Minister. Most damage was inflicted on the entrance door, hallway, several meeting rooms, offices, and the Parliament restaurant. Some members of security forces expressed their outrage by shooting in the air.
The spontaneous protest of hundreds of ethnic Macedonian residents of Aracinovo was transformed into a mass outpouring of rage once they were joined by members of security forces. Residents of Aracinovo previously met with Boris Trajkovski and demanded to be built new homes.
"We cannot return there anymore. We were expelled by our former neighbors, ethnic Albanians. They arrived armed and told us to get lost. There must be a solution for us," they said.
At the same time members of the Police from the police station at Avtokomanda who participated in the battle for Aracinovo were arriving. They were armed with handguns and machine guns and demanded to be explained why they had to stop their shootout with the terrorists and allow them to leave, together with their weapons, to the Lipkovo region.
"We had them surrounded for two weeks, for two days had a fierce fight, we entered the village and after difficult fighting managed to surround them. They started to surrender. Then we got the order to hold fire. And now we are supposed to provide security and evacuate them in air-conditioned buses together with weaponry they used to shoot at us," shouted outraged policemen.
After them members of reserve and active police and army forces started arriving to the demonstration in front of the Parliament in small groups. The protest reached its culmination between 9 and 10pm, when the protesters heard the news about the murder of one policemen and wounding of three of his colleagues in the Tetovo region.
Cries "give us arms", "treason", "resignations, resignations", "Boris-traitor", "Ljubco-traitor", "Branko [Crvenkovski]-Shiptar" [Albanian], "Trajkovski, do not spit on graves of Macedonian policemen", "the Macedonian name will not die"... were followed by the smashing of the entrance door to the parliament building, and demolition of the parliament entrance hall and offices. Almost all the windowpanes on the parliament building were smashed by stones. Several protesters were hurt by the broken glass. The reporter of the BBC was attacked by the protesters and ended up with a concussion, just like the journalist of "Macedonia dnes", who was hit a by a stone in the head.
About 200 soldiers of the Army of Macedonia as well as other police units started arriving to the parliament building. The leader of MAAK-Conservative party, Straso Angelovski, at one moment tried to exploit the protest for the promotion of his party, but the participants prevented him from doing that. Around midnight the protesters asked to go to police stations in the city where volunteers would be given weapons. However, thanks to cool heads of the leaders of the protest, that was avoided.
"We must not do that without a permission from the leadership; we must not allow that the protests get out of control," they said.
At that time, it was announced that the former president Kiro Gligorov and Archbishop of the Macedonian Orthodox Church Stefan, as persons who could calm down the heated atmosphere with their authority may address the crowd. Around 2am there was no danger from new incidents except that protesters upon leaving demolished several shop windows on the stores in the City Trade Center.
Our sources claim that before the start of the evacuation of the terrorists, there were several hundreds of them in Aracinovo. They were well-armed and fortified. On the other side, the Macedonian security forces included 150 special forces soldiers trained for anti-terrorist fight, in addition to unspecified number of regular and reserve policemen. According to well-informed sources, during the first day of the action the security forces made gains and took control of about 7 to 8 percent of houses in Aracinovo. Military sources claim that with the inclusion of helicopters in the attack on Aracinovo, a success was achieved. However, considering the speed of the action, the liberation of the village could have taken days to accomplish. Another option was to stop the action and withdraw forces.
We have learned that Javier Solana tacitly agreed with the assertions of the Macedonian side that they were able to finish the action in Aracinovo in several hours, one day at most, but did not give his permission for an attack that could last for days.
We have learned that the EU threatened to annul the association agreement with Macedonia unless the authorities signed the ceasefire agreement and the agreement regarding evacuation of terrorists from the village. In addition to that the EU threatened to immediately introduce sanctions and an arms embargo against Macedonia. Similarly, it was necessary to cease fire in order to accomplish Trajkovski's disarmament plan, according to which terrorists are supposed to be disarmed by NATO.
Before the main attack on the village, UCK members agreed to withdraw from Aracinovo, but together with their weapons, since they did not feel defeated.
Pieter Feith, NATO representative, in motel "Belvi" acted as an intermediary between the Macedonian side, NATO and EU representatives, and achieved the agreement according to which the Macedonian side was supposed to provide buses and trucks for the evacuation. Terrorists demanded that drivers be ethnic Albanians, the Macedonian side demanded that drivers be ethnic Macedonians who speak Albanian, but later gave up this idea for security reasons. As a compromise it was decided that theterrorists be transferred to Nikustak. Terrorists demanded to stay in Mojanci and Orlanci, and the Macedonian side demanded that they be transferred to Kosovo. While the Macedonian negotiators insisted that all of that be finished by 6pm, otherwise they were going to continue with the attack, in Brussels George Robertson made the political decision to order NATO to provide technical support, i.e. drivers, buses and trucks and to accomplish that through bilateral agreements between Macedonia and certain NATO-member countries. That is why a meeting of all NATO countries with participation in KFOR was held in Skopje. At that meeting the participants discussed the modes of agreement with the Macedonian side. Since none of these representatives accepted such an agreement on bilateral basis, following Robertson's request to Washington the Americans accepted that their soldiers from the base Petrovac participate in the technical part of the agreement. But not as KFOR, only as NATO forces, for which the bilateral agreement between NATO and Macedonia was immediately reached. The agreement with the Coordination Body of the Macedonian Government was that UCK members leave weapons in trucks and then enter buses unarmed.
According to the agreement, the terrorists were supposed to be taken to Nikustak and then the vehicles were supposed to return empty via Kumanovo to Petrovec.
Americans arrived to Aracinovo with 7 or 9 small buses, each with the capacity of 20 passengers. Four UCK members who had been gravely wounded also joined the convoy.
Due to the blockade near Nikustak, the convoy traveled from Aracinovo to Belimbegovo, then towards Belvi, and then went to Nikustak, where the terrorists were unloaded.
Yesterday, according to diplomatic sources, in Aracinovo there were no representatives of NATO, EU or OSCE, and Army sources claim that Macedonian police will enter the village today.
"Preparations have been going on for a while and services informed all the key people in the top of the Macedonian authorities about them. All the information was passed on to Kiro Gligorov, while he was the president of the state, and to the then Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski, as well as later to president Boris Trajkovski and current Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski. Earlier this information was used to take appropriate measures and to destroy these groups of extremists and keep them under control," claim our sources.
According to them, ethnic Albanian extremists in Macedonia started with preparations for the accomplishment of their goals as early as during the former Yugoslavia. They continued with their activities after the proclamation of the independence of Macedonia. The then state leadership knew that there were attempts to smuggle weapons to Macedonia, that lists of volunteers for paramilitary formations were being compiled and that ethnic Albanian population was recruited for participation in those formations. Such paramilitary formations were destroyed in 1993. The case "paramilitary" ended up in court, as the organizers were arrested and found guilty of endangerment of the state order. The defendants claimed that the trial was a political show trial and that lists of volunteers and arms cashes were supposed to be used for defense against an attack by the Yugoslav People's Army, which at that time was leaving Macedonia.
A year later, Macedonian forces carried out a large action in the village of Radolista, near Struga. The residents of the village prevented police from entering the village. Consequently, about 1,200 policemen surrounded the village and carried out the search of the houses. In 1999 a big action was carried out in the village of Frangovo in which a large quantity of weapons and ammunition smuggled from Albania was found.
Attempts to organize paramilitary formations, according to our sources, were blocked until 1999. Starting with 1999 Macedonian security forces stopped taking appropriate measures despite continuous inflow of information by the competent services, according to which ethnic Albanian citizens of Macedonia were trained in camps in Kosovo. They were given a financial compensation for that. At the same time, in the villages on the Sar Mountain, in Lojane, Tanusevci, Aracinovo and others, bases for paramilitary formations were established, and these bases are these days used for attacks on our security forces.
In the spring of 1999 the security services knew that paramilitary formations had their headquarters in the refugee camps for refugees from Kosovo - Stenkovec, Mala Recica, Cair...
"Until 1999 NATO was applying pressure on the extremists to refrain from opening another hotspot besides Kosovo. The plan of the extremists was to simultaneously open fronts in Kosovo and Western Macedonia. That failed because organized measures were undertaken. Borders were completely blocked for the smuggling of weapons and for illegal crossings. After the calming of the situation in Kosovo, services received and passed to the state leadership information that military activities of the extremists would start on the northern portion of the border, in the part bordering Kosovo. This part was selected because it allowed them to withdraw from Macedonia using preselected corridors in case the situation became unfavorable for them," claim our sources.
The Macedonian public learned from the most recent interview of Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski for the Macedonian TV that the UCK had taken responsibility for the murder of three policemen in Aracinovo that took place in January 2000, but that fact was not taken seriously. The state leadership blamed "old structures in the Ministry of Internal Affairs" for this case. The UCK claimed responsibility for the rocket attack on the police station in Oslomej and for the attacks in Kumanovo and Tetovo. There is evidence for all this in the archives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other security services. All of them were informed daily, claim our sources.