Gunmen occupy Macedonian villages for third day AFP

Gunmen occupy Macedonian villages for third day
AFP - September 4, 2003

SKOPJE -- Thursday -- A Macedonian minister has held talks with ethnic Albanian villagers in a bid to defuse a tense standoff between police and gunmen occupying two small towns, officials said Thursday.

But they said gunmen from the Albanian National Army (ANA), a little known extremist group, remained in control of the villages, armed with assault rifles and grenades as police watched from surrounding positions.

As the showdown entered its third day around Vaksince and Lojane, about 40 kilometres north of Skopje, Interior Ministry representative Mirjana Kontevska said the talks were positive but inconclusive.

She said Interior Minister Hari Kostov and top police officers met village elders for six hours at the nearby town of Kumanovo late Tuesday, in the presence of European Union representative Alexis Brouhns.

The officials gave assurances that ordinary citizens were not the target of police action and reassured them that elite police units were being relocated away from the edge of the villages.

Kostov told reporters that the ANA were criminals who posed no serious danger to national security despite their political slogans calling for the unification of Albanian dominated territory in Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia.

"This criminal group is pursuing its own interests through terrorist methods and is not a threat to Macedonia," Kostov was quoted as saying in the Utrinski Vesnik daily.

Kontevska said the villagers had expressed their support for the authorities but also insisted that the gunmen were not members of any criminal gang and would put down their weapons once they thought it was safe to do so.

"The citizens said the armed people in Vaksince were ordinary citizens who were afraid that something would happen so they armed themselves. They said they had promised to disarm," she said.

The standoff comes amid a police hunt for an ANA member, Avdil Jakupi, who allegedly kidnapped two police officers last week to trade them for two captured Albanians. The officers were later freed after a police action.

The authorities believe Jakupi is hiding in the area around Vaksince and have called on him to give himself up.

But in a telephone interview with Bulgarian television on Thursday, he accused Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski of being a criminal and threatened to start a guerrilla war.

"Because of this we will rise up and start a war," he said.

"Macedonia must become a protectorate of Europe and the United States."

Foreign missions in Skopje, including the EU mission and the US embassy, have been unanimous in their support for the Macedonian authorities, describing the gunmen as criminal elements.

The ANA on Tuesday issued an ultimatum on its website for all security forces to withdraw from the northern region or face open conflict.

They later dropped the ultimatum after talks with ethnic Albanian politicians, demanding instead the withdrawal of elite police units and the release of captured ANA members.

The government has said it will not negotiate with the militia, which is listed as a "terrorist" organisation by the United Nations administration in neighbouring Kosovo and his responsible for a series of bombings this year.

Crvenkovski refused to even read their five demands when he received them on Wednesday, the Dnevnik daily reported.

Macedonia has seen a tense peace since August 2001, when the authorities struck a deal with ethnic Albanian rebels who had taken arms to demand more civil and political rights for the minority community.