Ethnic Albanian guerrillas say they are ready to seize Macedonia's main Albanian town of Tetovo as early as Wednesday if government forces launch a major offensive against them.
National Liberation Army (NLA) guerrillas have been creeping into the suburbs of Tetovo from the mountains towering above and fought a fierce battle with Macedonian troops late on Tuesday, for the second day running, after a deceptive earlier lull.
Monday's fighting, which reached the heart of Tetovo, ripped apart an 18-day Western-brokered truce and savaged prospects of a peace deal. Nationalist Macedonian rioters also attacked Western premises in the capital Skopje on Tuesday evening.
At least one girl was killed and 24 other civilians and soldiers injured on Monday in the heaviest fighting in Tetovo, 40 km (25 miles) west of Skopje, in five months of guerrilla warfare across the northern hills that border Kosovo.
Vlado Buckovski, defence minister of the ethnically divided Balkan republic, on Monday threatened an all-out assault on the NLA unless they pulled back from areas he says they took under cover of the truce.
A commander of the NLA's 112th brigade, which withdrew from front lines on Tetovo's northeastern outskirts after Monday's firefight, said his men were ready to move back in, and that other rebels were preparing to do the same if required.
"We have a strategy. If we have to defend people in Tetovo by moving into the whole town then we will," said Commandant Leka, a tall heavily armed man sporting a Che Guevara beard.
The NLA has seized swathes of north and west Macedonia, where most of the former Yugoslav republic's Albanian minority lives, but deny their five-month rebellion in the name of civil rights for the Albanian minority has a territorial agenda.
GUN POSTS
In the western suburb of Tece, another commander with the nom de guerre Rusi was directing local residents in erecting a heavy machine-gun post behind a sandbagged barricade.
A jeep emblazoned with the red NLA insignia and filled with fighters toured Tece, surveying the new fortifications.
"We will sort out a command structure tomorrow," said Rusi, who like Leka wore fatigues and a combat vest stuffed with grenades, clips of machine-gun bullets and other paraphernalia.
By dusk on Tuesday, the force was already in action.
"There are bullets flying everywhere," said a Tetovo student named Remzie, who lives just a few hundred metres (yards) away.
On the other side of the flashpoint town, Leka said his men had occupied a sports stadium overlooking Macedonian front lines on Monday, but pulled back after fighting died down.
NATO, which brokered the ceasefire, is trying frantically to patch it back together to avert a full-scale civil war.
But Western efforts to secure calm and agreement on a peace deal are steadily being overtaken by events on the ground.
NLA mortars slammed into the eastern suburb of Drenovec on Tuesday night, indicating their retreat had barely lasted a day.
Leka, a 35-year-old veteran of guerrilla campaigns in neighbouring Kosovo, insisted an advance into Tetovo would not constitute an attempt to extend the arc of territory under NLA control, which has extended further south this week.
"This is not a territorial war," he said, sipping a sugary fruit drink in a cafe a few kms (miles) east of Tetovo. "We just want to defend ourselves and our people from the Macedonians."
His words will be cold comfort to Western envoys, whom Macedonian leaders accuse of helping the NLA to tear the former Yugoslav republic apart by suggesting a peace deal that grants greater rights to Albanians.
As heavy fighting moved closer to the centre of Tetovo on Tuesday night, the prospect of an NLA pincer movement could be the least of the worries for the Macedonian security forces in the town.
A former accountant called Semi, armed with a Kalashnikov rifle on Tece's front lines, said there were many more like him.
"We have brigades throughout the city and they will rise up when they are needed," he said.
(Chinadaily.com.cn 07/25/2001)
