FYROM police vow to root out ethnic Albanian guerrillas

Former-rebel-turned-politician calls Brest crackdown a ‘tragedy’

Ethnic Albanians flee the village of Lojane in a standoff between rebels and FYROM police last week.

By Kole Casule - Reuters

SKOPJE - Police vowed yesterday to hunt down ethnic Albanian militants in the north of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), a day after security forces said they killed several gunmen in what looked like the biggest crackdown since a 2001 insurgency.

But a parliamentary deputy of a party that emerged from the rebel force which battled Slav-Macedonian troops two years ago and is now in government, criticized Sunday’s operation around the remote village of Brest. He called it a “tragedy.”

“We are against any kind of armed operations and use of force. Such actions are not in the spirit of the peace agreement,” said Hisni Shaqiri of the Democratic Union for Integration, a junior party in the Social Democrat-led coalition.

“Nobody wants 2001 to be repeated,” the ex-guerrilla said.

A police official said there were no reports of new clashes overnight but signaled more action ahead. “This will not end until all militant groups are neutralized.” A shadowy group known as the Albanian National Army (ANA) said late on Sunday that two of its “soldiers” had died in the fighting, in a frontline area during the rebellion two years ago, and implicitly threatened to hit back.

FYROM officials said police backed by the army had dispersed armed groups and that they had suffered no casualties.

They said several gunmen died while resisting arrest and that police had not used any force against the population in the operation around 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of Skopje. A police official said two bodies had been brought to the capital.

But the ANA accused government forces on its website of using helicopters to blast two villages and said one civilian died.

FYROM officials say the security forces are searching for gangs claiming to belong to the ANA, which rejected the peace deal and which the UN in Kosovo has declared a terrorist organization.

“We support the wider police operation, but we cannot comment on the latest crackdown in Brest because we still don’t have a clear picture of what happened,” a Western diplomat said.

A government official said the militants had virtually no support but that locals also did not want police to take action near their homes.

“It makes them nervous and that could lead to trouble. But we are doing everything to calm villagers.”