Brussels, NATO and EU warning

You are on the brink of the precipice

BRUSSELS – Increasingly worried by the fall of the Macedonian crisis, NATO and the European Union are multiplying the interventions and appeals to the parties so that “the worst is avoided”. In Brussels, the Atlantic Council met, at ambassadorial level, the EU Political and Security Committee to review the events of the other night in Skopje and to repeat the appeals for calm that had been launched by the European foreign ministers already on Monday. In a statement signed by Mrs. Anna Lindh, Swedish Foreign Minister and current EU president, by Javier Solana and Chris Patten, representatives of the EU Council of Ministers and the Prodi Commission for foreign policy, Macedonians are invited to “seize the remaining possibilities of peace” and the violence of the other night in Skopje is condemned, where thousands of protesters have demanded the resignation of the government accused of having allowed the Albanian guerrillas to withdraw with their weapons from Aracinovo , the township near the capital they occupied since June 8th. The declaration calls on the Macedonians to “stop at the edge of the precipice”: a clear message directed to the whole country. But the evacuation of Aracinovo embarrasses NATO very much. The enraged crowd from the “rescue” of the Albanians barricaded in the township has in fact also accused the local representatives of NATO, so much so as to provoke yesterday a fine-tuning of the Alliance, entrusted to the spokesman Yves Brodeur. “It is not correct,” said Brodeur, “that we have helped the Albanians to save themselves.” We acted at the request of the Macedonian authorities and with the full support of the whole national unity government. NATO intervened only to facilitate a solution “. In other words, NATO men would have acted only at the request of the Macedonians. Atlantic sources then confirmed that the negotiations for the evacuation of Aracinovo were attended “indirectly” by Dan Speckhard, Peter Feith and Hans Joerg Eiff, respectively number two of the Alliance responsible for Political Affairs, the special envoy for the Balkans and the permanent representative in Skopje. The Macedonian Interior Minister, Ljube Boskovski, had said in the morning that NATO had “forced the government to authorize terrorists to leave Aracinovo”. The incidents of the night convinced the British Foreign Minister, Jack Straw, to postpone the planned visit yesterday and today to Skopje to meet with President Boris Trajkovski, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski and the leaders of the main parties.

July 27 2001