(Washington Post) U.S. Data Aiding Macedonia - Military Shares Intelligence on Rebel Forces

[Paola Lucchesi <paola.lucchesi at mail.inet.it>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31724-2001Mar20?language=printer

U.S. Data Aiding Macedonia
Military Shares Intelligence on Rebel Forces

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 21, 2001; Page A01

TETOVO, Macedonia, March 20 -- U.S. forces in Kosovo are providing
aerial photos and other military intelligence to Macedonian army
officers preparing an offensive against ethnic Albanian guerrillas,
Macedonian officials said today. The assistance more deeply involves the
United States in a risky attempt by this country's government to quickly
stamp out a conflict before it expands into a new full-scale Balkan war.
    "There are daily exchanges of intelligence information with the
Americans," said a top Macedonian official, responding to questions
about who operated a drone aircraft that was roaming lazily today over a
mountaintop outside Tetovo where guerrillas have been dug in for the
past week.
    "They are helping not only with photographs but with data from other
sources, on [guerrilla] logistics routes, reinforcement and ammunition
supplies," said the senior official, who spoke on condition that he not
be identified.
    Macedonian officials say they are using the U.S. intelligence to
help lay the groundwork for a major offensive against the guerrillas,
which many Macedonian and Western officials say might cause extensive
civilian casualties. The aim is to quickly choke off the insurgency by
ousting the guerrillas from a half-dozen villages where residents have
been supplying them with food and helping to dig trenches.
    The guerrillas, however, say they won't easily be dislodged. Today,
in an apparent signal that they can expand the fighting at will, weapons
fire erupted near a crossing on the Yugoslav border. Guerrillas have cut
down trees to block roads into their zone of control and claim to have
laid mines. They appear to have withdrawn from the two villages closest
to government forces, possibly to strengthen their defenses.
    Fighting burst into the open in Macedonia last week when the
guerrillas staged a string of attacks against security forces around
this city. The rebels, who have taken the name National Liberation Army,
say they are fighting to end oppression of the country's Albanian
minority by the majority Slav population.
    The NATO alliance has rejected any suggestion that its peacekeeping
troops in Kosovo, a province of the Yugoslav republic of Serbia, will
enter Macedonia and take on the guerrillas. But the troops have worked
to block passage of guerrillas into Macedonia from Kosovo and have been
sharing intelligence data with Macedonian units in the field.
    At the Pentagon, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a senior spokesman,
confirmed that the United States is operating drones and helicopters
along the border. "They are focusing more of their looking and
observation capabilities along that border in order to get a leg up and
see what's going on, with as much warning as possible," he said.
    Asked about the comments by Macedonian officials, Quigley said, "I
am not aware of any unilateral U.S.-to-Macedonian exchanges." But he
said it is possible that the Macedonians had received information from a
U.S. officer seconded to a NATO unit, and so working outside the U.S.
chain of command.
    NATO used drones extensively during the 1999 Kosovo war, in which
its planes bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days to end repression of Kosovo's
Albanian population by the Yugoslav army. Now it is using them against
Albanian guerrillas. The drone spotted outside Tetovo today was about
five miles inside Macedonian territory.
    Today, after a visit to the capital of Skopje by European Union
security chief Javier Solana, the government announced it would postpone
the planned offensive for 24 hours, saying it was offering the
guerrillas a chance to surrender or leave the country. Macedonian
officials said another purpose was to give civilians time to leave
villages that are likely to be shelled or assaulted by special police
and army units.
    "It is a very, very delicate situation . . . a delicate line on
which we have to walk," said one top Macedonian official. The government
is determined to oust the guerrillas and replant the Macedonian flag, he
said, but "we want to avoid pictures of burning homes" and dead bodies.
    The government has been preparing its attack for the past two days,
bringing tanks, heavy artillery and hundreds of special troops into this
city. This afternoon, tanks and cannons mounted atop armored personnel
carriers began an intensive bombardment of a village on the outskirts of
Tetovo, setting several small houses aflame. They also machine-gunned a
horse that came suddenly into view on the side of a hill overlooking the
city.
    Hours later, someone shot at a bus along the road between Tetovo and
the capital, and shots were fired by unknown persons close to
Macedonia's border crossing with Yugoslavia, the Interior Ministry said.
    Officials said the government is keen to distinguish its looming
military action from the brutal assaults by Yugoslav forces on ethnic
Albanian communities in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. Those attacks shocked
the West and provoked the 11-week NATO bombing campaign that ended with
the deployment of NATO peacekeeping troops.
    This time the West's attitude is different. Macedonia has an
elected, democratic government, albeit one still mired in many of the
conventions of communist bureaucracy. And the West's patience with the
region's ethnic Albanians is vastly diminished. Some of them have
ruthlessly attacked ethnic Serb civilians inside Kosovo and fired not
only on Macedonian units but also on Yugoslav forces on Kosovo's
periphery. Officials fear their goal may be the future creation of an
Albanian super-state.
    The European Union's Solana made the West's frustrations clear in
his visit to Skopje. Rebuking calls from the guerrillas for
international mediation of their struggle, Solana said the rebels were
terrorists who "have to be isolated."
    Solana, who was NATO's secretary general during the Kosovo war, said
at a news conference that the Macedonian government should not negotiate
with the guerrillas. He said the government had a right to defend the
country from terrorism however it could, as long as it used force
proportionate to the threat and in concert with Western principles and
values.
    He later qualified the statement by telling Spanish radio that "the
solution has to be political," because "the Balkans have suffered too
many wars already."
    Military leaders would prefer to safeguard their own troops by using
artillery bombardments to flush guerrillas out of villages and across
the Macedonian border into Kosovo, one official said. But such an
indiscriminate attack would risk killing civilians in at least four of
the six or seven villages in question.
    On the other hand, the official said, if there is no bombardment,
the government worries about taking huge casualties as its inexperienced
troops engage in house-to-house fighting. "We have to go into the
villages if you want to win the battle, but we frankly have doubts about
our capability to handle the terrain," an official said.
    While it prepares for the fight, the Macedonian Slav-led government
took some comfort from a joint call for peace by leaders of the largest
two ethnic Albanian political parties.
    The statement also called for faster reform of Macedonian economic
and political policies that the leaders said encourage systematic
discrimination against ethnic Albanians.

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company