Posted on 11/11/2001 1:03:39 PM PST by Pericles
Sunday November 11 4:33 PM ET
Macedonia Peace Process Lurches Into Crisis
By Mark Heinrich
TREBOS, Macedonia (Reuters) - Macedonia's peace process lurched into crisis on Sunday when security forces entered ex-rebel territory to secure a ``mass grave'' and seized ethnic Albanians for wartime offences and arms possession.
Hours later, at least 12 Macedonian civilians were taken hostage by armed men who stopped their cars as they were passing through a mainly ethnic Albanian village not far from the suspected grave site, police sources told Reuters.
``There is shooting in the vicinity,'' one source said.
The Macedonian nationalist speaker of parliament canceled a landmark session set for Monday to ratify civil rights reforms promised to minority Albanians after their guerrilla movement disbanded under NATO supervision.
A Reuters news team looking for the alleged grave site came upon heavily armed special police taking up positions along a dirt road between farm plots and pointing sub-machineguns at two Albanian men stretched face down on the ground.
Extremely tense, the special troops clad in fatigues and flak jackets levelled automatic weapons at the reporters, ordered them to put hands up and get out of the car before letting them proceed after a search and document check.
``There are armed Albanians in the vicinity and we thought you were among them. We have the job to secure this area,'' the commander of the unit told Reuters.
A special policeman prodded the head of one of the prone ethnic Albanians with his boot for several seconds. The detainees' car, which had no number plates, was to one side.
Police sources said seven ethnic Albanians had been arrested near the alleged grave outside the village of Trebos for possessing automatic weapons as well as for suspected attacks on Macedonian civilians during the seven-month conflict.
Western sponsors of an August peace deal were alarmed when the rightist interior minister announced police would start excavating the suspected grave on Monday in an area inhabited by edgy ex-guerrillas before MPs had ratified the reforms.
SPECTRE OF RELAPSE INTO VIOLENCE
The move by Ljube Boskovski, a combative hard-liner who proposed the peace accord, raised concern about violence between police and demobilised rebels angry over a lack of amnesty promised by the government under the peace plan.
An aide to President Boris Trajkovski, a relative moderate, said he had endorsed Boskovski's plan.
``Macedonia is a sovereign state and we cannot have the attitude of a protectorate,'' Boskovski said in a shot at Western peace overseers deeply resented by many Macedonians for pushing the government into concessions for peace with rebels.
Macedonian media have run a series of unsubstantiated stories this month saying 13 Macedonian men they previously reported to be held prisoner by guerrillas had been executed and thrown into one or more mass graves near Trebos.
In another step peace sponsors feared would be provocative, Boskovski said 24-hour police patrols with powers of arrest would begin on Monday in five pilot villages in ex-insurgent territory, even though an amnesty was not in force.
Western diplomats suspected Boskovski's moves, defying an agreed procedure for coordination with NATO, OSCE and EU liaison teams, was aimed at provoking violence by ex-guerrillas to halt adoption of reforms at the last minute.
``OSCE, NATO and EU offered in our meetings with Trajkovski and Boskovski this weekend to assist in securing the grave site if the undertaking was done in a non-confrontational matter but they rejected it and chose to act unilaterally,'' one worried Western envoy said on Sunday night.
Parliamentary speaker Stojan Andov said the assembly would not vote until one of two main ethnic Albanian parties whose leaders co-signed the peace accord dropped its opposition to slight dilutions of two constitutional amendments.
The overall two-thirds margin -- 81 votes -- needed to amend the constitution can be mustered alone by the two largest Macedonian parties and the ethnic Albanian DPA party who have grudgingly settled differences over preamble rewording.
Macedonian Soldier Wounded (The First Round of Al-Qaeda's Winter Offensive)
Yugo intelligence has warned of the influx of Al-Qaeda cadres entering the Balkans since the air war in Afghanistan. These cadres are linking up with Albanians of the KLA in Kosovo and streaming over from Kosovo into positions around Tetovo. Tensions have been fanned by reports in nationalist media, dismissed by diplomats and even the moderate defense ministry as anti-reform disinformation, that rebels are remobilizing with reinforcements streaming in by night from Kosovo.
The Yugoslavs and FYROMacedonians were stunned that NATO chooses to ignore this information, and even ridiculed it; NATO to FYROM: Those rebels are hairy Albanians not Osama bin Laden's mujahideen. This has forced Yugoslavia and FYROM to unite military and intelligence resources.
NATO is either blind or politically compromised due to its past support for the Albanians.
NATO is finished as a force in the Balkans. The Albanians have taken their measure of NATO's capabilities and have brushed them aside. NATO will be left alone for now until the word is given Christmas time by Al-Qaeda. Camp Bondsteel will provide a plump feast for the holidays for Al-Qaeda's allies the UCK Albanians (KLA).
I can not stress the following point any stronger. The attacks will follow Ramadan as the Koran instructs:
" slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and pay the alms-tax, let them go their way. Allah is forgiving and merciful." (9:4, Quran)
Camp Bondsteel's supply life line passes through the ambush country of Kacanik.
Al-Qaeda will strike where the striking is good. The Barbarians are at the gate.
More to come.
Only the Kosovo Liberation Army defends innocent Albanian women and children in the Tetovo Republic from these Orthodox madmen that seek to pave the Balkans with littered bones and bloodshed. Funded and trained by the United States, these veteran UCK warriors prepare to launch a Winter offensive to defend the borders of Greater Albania.
The KLA High Command this weekend issuing directives for combat elements to begin a general mobilisation -- and for K-6 cells to liquidate Slavic intelligence assets and revisionist elements. The Tetovo Republic now off limits to all Slavs -- Macedonian police officers to be shot on sight -- per these orders.
Skopje has proven themselves untrustworthy in the peace process -- thus the descendents of Ancient Illyria are forced once again to rise up and slay the invader. As the weather cools, the Balkans simmer...
Millions to die in the Third World War. While the Western bought and paid for media gush over phantom victories by the Potemkin village army of the Northern "Alliance," KLA/UCK cadres begin to move towards the high ground that commands the various canyons and valleys in the theatre. Under this media blackout they seek to stun the world once again with a modern day blitzkrieg that shakes the region.
The West under the gun now. When a half dozen fronts explode at once, America will be relieved to know that her Balkan Southern perimeter is defended by the KLA. US support for these freedom fighters is money well spent -- Washington should fear not, Macedonia will be destroyed.
The forces of freedom on the move. Europe trembles.
By Brian Murphy
The Associated Press
ATHENS — About 130 years ago, as Ottoman rulers struggled to hold together their crumbling Muslim empire, a noted writer and political adviser returned from central Europe with a gloomy report.
"I passed through the lands of the infidels," wrote Ziya Bey. "I wandered in the realm of Islam. I saw nothing but ruins."
Fast-forward to contemporary Afghanistan.
The night the U.S.-led bombing began Oct. 7, Osama bin Laden released a videotaped diatribe with a similar lament about perceived inequalities.
His array of grievances reached back to the demise of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. Ever since, he claimed, the Islamic world "has been tasting humiliation and degradation" against the West's wealth, might and technological achievements.
But there was a time the Ottomans were the ones feared and admired — to a degree that still resonates with Islamic scholars, Balkan nationalists and terrorists such as bin Laden.
A vast empire takes shape
The Ottoman Empire, named for its founder, Osman, was not the first major Muslim domain. As early as the eighth century, the Muslim Moors began conquering Iberia, now Spain and Portugal. They remained until the late 15th century.
Founded on the remains of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman world reached its zenith in the 16th century. Its reach never extended as far east as Afghanistan, but it was vast all the same: from the Balkans and the Crimea in southeastern Europe to the heart of the Middle East: the Holy Land, the Muslim pilgrimage cities of Mecca and Medina, and the Nile basin.
The most illustrious Ottoman leader, Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, declared himself Islam's supreme caliph, or Islamic leader. He was no less audacious with his grand projects of construction and culture. The empire's seat of power — Constantinople, now Istanbul — became a center for the arts and literature that rivaled cities in Renaissance Europe.
The mosques built by Suleyman's chief builder, Sinan, are considered some of the world's greatest architectural triumphs, including the Suleymaniye Mosque that rises over Istanbul's Golden Horn.
The walls of Jerusalem were Suleyman's work. Eventually, however, corruption among the rulers and unrest in the provinces began to erode the empire. The Crimea and Black Sea territories were lost in 1774 after war with Russia. The Greeks waged a successful revolt for independence in the 1820s. Ottoman control then began to crack in Egypt and the Holy Land, which is now Jordan and Israel.
In 1833, Czar Nicholas I of Russia described the Ottoman Empire as "the sick man of Europe."
Ottoman influence lives on
The ailing empire lost most of its European territory in the 1912-13 Balkan wars and then sided with the losing German-led alliance in World War I. The peace treaties in 1918 formally dismantled the empire, leaving European powers free to exert control over former Ottoman lands. The Holy Land, with its nascent Jewish community that would later become Israel, came under British rule.
Meanwhile, a group of Western-influenced reformers, called the "Young Turks," overthrew the last sultan and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk established the secular Turkish Republic in 1923.
The influence of the Ottomans, however, is unmistakable today.
It's in the rhythm of the folk music in Bulgaria. In Greece, it's the sprinkling of Turkish- and Arabic-based words. In Jerusalem, the rules laid down by Ottomans cover the guardianship of holy sites such as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional burial place of Jesus. And Ottoman battlefields shape modern politics.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic rose to prominence by whipping up Serbs' nationalist fervor in Kosovo Polje, where Ottoman forces defeated a Christian army led by Serbian Prince Lazar in 1389.
Armenia has pressed a global campaign to recognize its claim that 1.5 million people were killed by Ottoman forces between 1915 and 1923. Turkey says the death count is inflated and Armenians were killed or displaced as the collapsing Ottoman Empire tried to quash civil unrest.
"The past dies rather hard in the lands ruled by, or even impinged on by, the Ottoman Empire," said Rhoads Murphey, a professor at the Center for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham in Britain.
Legacy a root of present woes
Even the lives of contemporary figures offer a bridge to the Ottoman past. The late Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, capital of present-day Macedonia, under Ottoman rule in 1910. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia was born as the Ottoman Empire was retreating.
Bin Laden, too, seems to draw inspiration from the empire's glory and its role as the last bastion of the centuries-old caliphate system, which used Islamic law to shape judicial and political tenets.
"It was the last, great Muslim empire. After this we see the former Ottoman lands redesigned into the versions of the modern nation states with the notions of ethnicity and nationality," said Cornell Fleischer, a professor of Ottoman history at the University of Chicago.
But there's also a strong link between the Ottoman legacy and the region's troubles, experts say.
Pivotal periods that shaped modern Europe — the Renaissance, Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution — barely penetrated the Ottoman Empire. Its collapse left behind a political and cultural vacuum that was easily manipulated during the past century's two epic chapters: the European power plays leading to World War II and the Cold War.
Then came events that further added to the sense of alienation: the dizzying pace of modernization and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower.
"The contradictions besieging the Islamic world make this stage especially critical, as do the dramatic changes in the world order, which have placed the Islamic nations at the crossroads of confrontation," wrote commentator Osama El-Dhazali Harb in the respected Al-Ahram newspaper.
Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
Anarchy in Macedonia: Albanians Ill-Treat the Christians
London Times/New York Times
London, Oct. 18 -- The Balkan states correspondent of The Times reports a condition of chronic anarchy in Macedonia, owing to the lawlessness of the Albanians, whose attitude toward the Christian population is worse than that of the Kurds toward the Armenians.
That is the first paragraph of the article published in The New York Times, October 18, 1901.
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