Why Are We in Macedonia?
Corry, John
John Cony Why Are We in Macedonia? You probably didn't know that American boys are on patrol in this powder keg—a tiny country more important to the region's balance of power than Bosnia will...
...War here would not resemble anything in Bosnia, where the conflict is closed off in an enclave and has no major strategic repercussions...
...It's a police state, under great repression...
...The Greeks," says a Macedonian diplomat who negotiates with them, "would prefer to have Serbia as a neighbor...
...If his people were to come under attack, the sergeant would call Camp Able Sentry...
...Bulgaria, to the east, recognizes Macedonia as a state, but not as a nation, and insists that the Macedonian language is only another form of Bulgarian...
...Just south of Macedonia is the southern wing of NATO—Turkey and Greece...
...The West was preoccupied with the Persian Gulf, and the...
...According to his official census figures, there are 180,658 people in Tetovo and the nearby villages: 137,037 Albanians, and 43,621 Macedonians, Turks, Romanies, Serbs, Vlachs, and "others...
...Per capita income is supposedly $700, but other than in isolated villages, grinding poverty is not apparent...
...Tenovo has a mosque, a coffee shop, and a night club of sorts, which apparently employs youngwomen from Ukraine...
...And to the north, of course, is Serbia, which, with Montenegro, is all that is left of the former Yugoslavia...
...Rules of the New World Order apply...
...Macedonia recently deported them...
...So the Yugoslav army withdrew, leaving behind its Macedonian-born officers who chose to stay, but taking with it anything that might be of use, from the light fixtures in barracks to the air-traffic control equipment at the Skopje airport...
...Occasionally a Serb soldier will look at them through the telescopic sight on his rifle...
...The first of those troops were dispatched by the Clinton administration in December 1993...
...Two months after that, Macedonia adopted a constitution proclaiming its sovereignty...
...Milosevic, Gligorov says, assumed that Macedonia would soon collapse, either exhausted by economic problems or torn apart by tensions with its Albanian minority, and that in desperation it would ask the Serbs to return...
...They remain there two weeks, and are free to sample the delights of Skopje when they get a pass, although always they end up at the American-style Dal Met Fu restaurant in the city center, which specializes in pizza and pasta, and pretty non-English speaking waitresses in shorts and sneakers...
...95 percent of those who voted said it should...
...they also get money from relatives who left to work overseas...
...One Albanian was killed, and dozens were injured...
...Rugged green mountains crouch under an endless low sky in the countryside, and the effect is quite magical...
...He was a Slav, wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, and what might The American Spectator November 1995 33 have been the only necktie in the village...
...The greatest interest of the former Yugoslav army was in their arms...
...The Serbs arrested some of the Albanians, while others fled, or were chased, toment, but later was called back, although by then Yugoslavia had grown terminal...
...Gligorov is now a very vigorous 78, an approachable, unpretentious man and above all a survivor...
...Tito, once much admired in the West as an alternative to Stalin, had always been a disaster...
...The only possible solution is a mediator," one thoughtful Slav says, "or we will cut each other's throat...
...But the Slays who lived nearby objected...
...6G acm edonia is not Bosnia," a Western diplomat was saying in Skopje...
...Four months later, however, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic ordered the army to withdraw...
...Then the state-controlled media in Albania joined with radical Albanian politicians in western Macedonia, and told Albanians not to cooperate with the census takers...
...It found that Albanians made up not 21, but 22.9 percent of the population, a figure the Albanians once again disputed, claiming the Slav majority had rigged the census...
...The Albanians, he said loudly, gesturing toward the now silent men from the coffee house, only knew about the last 200 years...
...simultaneously, word would be passed to the Finnish general who commands the Nordic Battalion, and to the French general who is his superior in Croatia, as well as to the Joint Task Force in Naples, and to Boutros BoutrosGhali in New York...
...Most look toward Serbia, but one, high enough on a mountain that it is sometimes wreathed in clouds, is almost in Bulgaria...
...Bulgaria might object, but Bulgaria lost the last two Balkan wars, and World War I and World War II...
...But that is beside the point...
...The deputy mayor seems like an honest man, and you believe him...
...since Milosevic came to power, all traces of autonomy have vanished...
...The deputy mayor must make do with an old upright typewriter, and he wonders if he will ever get a computer...
...The rector of the university, an Albanian from the Serb-controlled province of Kosovo, was sentenced to prison for inciting unrest...
...However, Albanian politicians in Macedonia, supported by the Albanian government in Tirana, called the figure too low...
...Meanwhile, there was bickering in Macedonia about the mechanics of the census...
...We had no wish to take part in war, and we did not repeat the mistakes made in Croatia and Bosnia," Gligorov says...
...Strings of smugglers' donkeys laden with canisters of fuel cross their paths in the mountains...
...The men from the coffee house were pointing out the new schoolhouse, still only a shell, its ceiling supported by upright timbers, when a teacher came along...
...We said they could leave Macedonia peacefully, and take their arms with them...
...6 6 ife here is not bad...
...The Albanians thought the plotters might have collected a few Kalishnikovs, but that this was of no importance...
...The Army may be one of the last institutions in America that insists on proper deportment and good manners...
...We follow changes in American policy by watching Albania," a political columnist in Skopje says...
...Meanwhile, there is the threat of a massive influx of Kosovo refugees, a subject so sensitive the government fears to even talk publicly about it...
...It was a mistake to ask him for Turkish coffee...
...John Corry, our Presswatch columnist, reported last month from Zagreb...
...Radical Albanians in Kosovo organized an illegal parliament...
...Each observation post is equipped with anti-tank weapons, TOW missiles, and a .50-caliber machine gun, and he may use them as he chooses...
...It poses no threat to its neighbors—its army had only four old tanks when last counted—but it is surrounded by countries that covet it in whole or in part, or are reluctant to recognize its existence...
...If the Serbs encouraged the Kosovars to leave, perhaps with a benign ethnic cleansing, Macedonia would be overwhelmed, its resources stretched beyond endurance...
...Bosnia has changed the perception, of course, but Macedonia still appears shrouded, an improbable country with a name that recalls an old Marx Brothers movie...
...Therefore, they did not know where they had come from...
...They saw the new schoolhouse as another expression of Albanian separatism...
...34 The American Spectator November 1995...
...The curse of the Balkans is that there is truth on both sides...
...A national census in 1991 found they made up 21 percent of the population...
...They patrol in Humvees and on foot, walking with their M-16s loaded, but with the barrels pointed down...
...The Army may be one of the last institutions in America that insists on proper deportment and good manners...
...To the south, surly Greece has declined to recognize even the existence of Macedonia, while preposterously claiming it is a military threat, and attempting to strangle it with an embargo...
...Collisions are avoided when possible...
...Old animosities, if not overcome, at least were put in abeyance...
...Macedonia has been ruled by the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires, fought over by Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians, occupied by Germans, Italians, and Bulgarians, and despoiled by Tito's Communists...
...There are lovely people among both groups, but most of them simply do not like one another...
...Despite the ministrations of the U.N., European Union, and Council of Europe, even the number of Albanians in Macedonia is disputed...
...When war first G threatened the former Yugoslavia, Milovan Djilas, once the confidante of Tito but later a celebrated antiCommunist dissident, said there were only two Balkan leaders who might be able to stave off disaster...
...But none of this came to pass...
...He said he had been trained as a historian, but that he also knew a good deal about archeology, and that he had traced his family back more than 600 years...
...What would happen if Milosevic decides to tighten the screws...
...Macedonians live in part on the remittances from overseas relatives, in part on their wits, and in part on their "gray economy...
...The soldiers man them twenty-one days at a time, and then return to battalion headquarters, called Camp Able Sentry, outside the Skopje airport...
...Nobody would care about Bulgaria...
...This gives rise to endless possibilities for political mischief, and one of them would be an agreement, de facto or otherwise, between Orthodox Serbia and mostly Moslem Albania to destabilize Macedonia...
...Belgrade's nationalists could pursue the old dream of creating a Greater Serbia...
...Possibly both were right...
...But the Yugoslav army was still on its soil, and sovereignty had no meaning...
...Inconsistently, perhaps, Albanians who flee Albania for Macedonia are deported if they are caught...
...In September 1991 Macedonia held a referendum on whether it should seek independence from Yugoslavia...
...Alarmed, American diplomats warned Tirana about meddling, and eventually it stopped...
...But of course, he continued, that did not matter...
...He ruled through the army and Communist Party, and left as a legacy only some rusting, inefficient industrial parks...
...Would you like to know the new Balkan conspiracy theory...
...The spillover of war here would mean a spillover to the Aegean, to the Middle East, with enormous repercussions...
...The dignified proprietor of the coffee shop offered juice, soda, and espresso or cappuccino...
...Last February in Tetovo, the largest Albanian city in Macedonia, rioting broke out when police closed a private Albanian-language university that the government had declared illegal...
...Slays say the Albanians do not want to be assimilated, and that they hold themselves apart...
...Then he cedes western Kosovo to Albania, and also lets Albania pick up part of Macedonia while Serbia gets all the rest...
...Kosovo is wretchedly poor, and the Serbian police there have a heavy hand...
...This is women's work, and it would be unseemly for the proprietor to do that...
...Meanwhile, Mercedes-Benzes are double32 The American Spectator November 1995 parked on the narrow streets...
...They were given sentences of up to eight years the same week the new census was completed...
...Macedonia's only other option, Milosevic thought, would be to unite with Bulgaria, and that if it did, Serbia would have an excuse for military intervention...
...there was also the trial of ten Albanians, one of them the deputy defense minister, on charges of stockpiling arms and...
...N onetheless, the soldiers are happy to get away from Skopje and Camp Able Sentry...
...Delicately it was explained that espresso and cappuccino are made in machines, while Turkish coffee involved the boiling of water and the sifting of grounds...
...Tetovo is also the home of wealthy drug traffickers...
...It is under the command of the U.N.—most recently a Finnish general was in charge—which gives it the requisite neutralist sheen, although no one from Gligorov on down thinks of it as anything other than an American operation...
...But the deputy mayor is certain that the figure for the Albanians should be 20,000 higher...
...Skopje is shabby but not really poor, and its streets late at night are safer than those in New York or Chicago...
...In other words, Turkey and Greece would go at it, even if Gligorov is reluctant to quite say so...
...The idea to do it, however, originated with Lawrence Eagleburger, once an ambassador to Yugoslavia, but at the time George Bush's secretary of state...
...At the same time, it is always possible someone will take a shot at them...
...It is not by chance," Gligorov notes dryly, "that Macedonia is the only part of the former Yugoslavia where American troops are deployed...
...However, neither thing came to pass...
...What if that happens...
...Eventually it was decided there would be a joint school system for both Albanian and Slav children...
...Macedonia is against the creation of any alliances," Gligorov continues, drawing a little map in the air with a finger, "whether it is a Muslim alliance, ranging from Turkey to Albania, or any Slav or Orthodox alliance, ranging from Russia to Cyprus...
...Gligorov said they could remain if they did not ally themselves with Macedonia's own Albanian radicals...
...Meetings were held...
...The teacher was a very superior man, and he seemed to be making a great concession...
...Skopje T hat Macedonia was allowed to secede from the former Yugoslavia without bloodshed was a surprise, even though at the time it scarcely was noticed...
...About 1,400 people live in Tenovo, all of them born there, except for the older members of one family that moved in forty years ago...
...The night club was closed, and the key to the mosque could not be found, but men from the village insisted that a visitor be their guest at the coffee shop...
...It would look to Moslem Turkey for help in a conflict, and if Turkey responded, which it would, Greece would be on the opposing side...
...The 30 The American Spectator November 1995 American soldiers man observation posts, scattered across some 65 kilometers east to west, and 45 kilometers north to south, in upper Macedonia...
...Almost forty parties took part in the last election, and now some have disappeared...
...There are 1.9 million Albanians and 200,000 Serbs there...
...Outwardly, however, this is hardly apparent...
...When they return to the observation posts, they are free of their officers, and out on their own...
...In fact, it is about the size of Vermont, and it is inhabited by some 2 million-people, many of them ridden with angst...
...You probably didn't know that American boys are on patrol in this powder keg—a tiny country more important to the region's balance of power than Bosnia will ever be...
...It has a long history of tolerance...
...We did not try to confiscate their arms...
...But no one really expects an attack, and 549 Americans, no matter how well trained and equipped, would still make up a slender counter force, even if helped by the Scandinavian reservists...
...Smuggling is quasi-legal...
...Political parties espouse a good deal of what, outside the Balkans at least, would seem like nonsense, but the volume is declining...
...now they were all Macedonians together...
...Say now that these young soldiers are well behaved and polite, and mindful that they represent their country...
...On the other hand, it might have been expected that the conviction of the ten Albanians—the deputy defense minister was also the general secretary of the principal Albanian political party—would have ignited a wave of anti-Albanian feeling among the Slav Macedonians...
...It is called Tenovo, and it is some 200 years old...
...If war came to Macedonia it almost certainly would spread beyond the Balkans, and inspire world powers to choose up sides...
...People in the villages had not registered...
...It's not good, it's all right," says an Albanian in one of the villages...
...forming paramilitary units...
...The worry now is, what will happen in Kosovo...
...By contrast, Tetovo's city hall is meagerly equipped...
...He is a gracious man, who worked in a bank until he was elected to office, and now he is Tetovo's chief administrator...
...The old Balkan conspiracy theory was that the Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians would partition Macedonia...
...There can be no pro-Moslem or pro-Russian divisions...
...Balkan politics are complicated, and even bizarre...
...The Army says it is in Macedonia only to "observe and monitor," but it is not suicidal, and Mogadishu stays on its mind...
...The different populations have their problems, but basically they've always gotten along...
...S till, there is the Albanian issue, an inextricable part of the burden of myth and history on the Balkans...
...Gligorov, the Macedonian president, had talked him into it...
...Consequently, the international organizations financed a new census last year...
...Demographers and statisticians were enlisted...
...ive Gligorov the last word on this...
...One was Milan Kucan, now the president of Slovenia, and the other was Gligorov...
...Exactly 549 Americans, rotating in and out of Macedonia every 179 days, join with a so-called Nordic Battalion, made up of Scandinavian reservists, and form the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force, or UNPROFOR...
...Colloquially, Bulgarians refer to Macedonia as Western Bulgaria...
...Indeed, he would have at his disposal more fire power than that of the entire Macedonian army...
...It might also have spread paranoia among the Albanians...
...He is probably only curious, and not trying to provoke them, but they consider it unprofessional behavior...
...It is not by chance that Macedonia is the only part of the former Yugoslavia where American troops are deployed...
...The sergeant, however, does not have to ask anyone for permission to shoot back...
...Early this year, the villagers began building a new schoolhouse...
...Albanians say they will never be treated as equals, and that the Slays hold them in contempt...
...Milosevic pushes the Albanians in Kosovo south, and destabilizes Macedonia...
...A principal reason the American soldiers are in Macedonia is to separate the Turks and the Greeks...
...But modernity may be coming...
...Gligorov left the governaffect the rest of the Balkans...
...It also has a long history of political assassinations, but that's something else...
...Entrepreneurs bring in goods from Bulgaria, but now the government wants them to pay taxes...
...the first demonstrations against Communist Yugoslavia were held in Kosovo in 1981...
...Albania, to the west, has territorial aspirations of its own, and tries to incite Macedonia's Albanian minority to help it achieve them...
...The Slays blamed the arms plot on the Serbs, and saw in it another attempt by Belgrade to destabilize Macedonia...
...Macedonia suffers from what its president, Kiro Gligorov, calls "the burden of myth and history on the Balkans...
...Nonetheless, there is a breach between Macedonia's Slays and Albanians...
...Macedonia's Slays and Albanians are more live-and-let-live than almost anyone else in the Balkans...
...He was once the economic adviser to Tito, whom he tried, and failed, to convert to free-market principles...
...Under Tito, however, Kosovo at least had the status of an autonomous province...
...Banks are not trusted...
...Its neighbors would then try to pick it apart, and this could lead to that dreaded catastrophe: a wider Balkan war...
...It is impossible to discuss politics in Macedonia without someone mentioning Kosovo...
...Tito died in 1980...
...Whatever happens in Kosovo will Macedonia...
...Enter then some secular saints from the Catholic Relief Services in Skopje, who worked to bring everyone together...
...He is probably right, and you wish him and his country well, along with the 549 American soldiers...
...He was released four months later on bail, and the university is now being run out of private homes, with about 600 students in attendance, while the government pretends not to notice...
...We did not harass their families...
...The American Spectator November 1995 31 percent annually in 1992, is forecast now at 18 percent...
...In fact, they may be right about the figure, although not about the rigging, and some unknown number of Albanians probably went uncounted...
...Indeed, in the subterranean reaches of Balkan politics, one may already be in effect...
...client state...
...The government gave them chairs and desks for a classroom...
...the census started late...
...Across Lake Ohrid, under low violet clouds, is Albania...
...The people in Tenovo grow corn and melons as cash crops...
...The unemployment rate in Tetovo is about 50 percent, and young men hang around without much to do except look in store windows and gossip...
...The importance of the American soldiers lays not in their firepower, but in their presence...
...No one in Tenovo speaks English, and some do not speak Macedonian, even though Slav Macedonians live almost next door...
...it was difficult to find census takers...
...Everyone felt relieved when he left...
...At least 150,000 Kosovo Albanians have fled to Macedonia, which recognizes them as political refugees...
...The observation posts, each with ten men under a sergeant, are self-contained and efficient...
...They agreed, but then went back on their word, encouraged, apparently, by the Albanian embassy...
...Tetovo Albanians say the government provoked the rioting itself, although they are vague about why, except to say that it had to do with politics...
...We did not surround the soldiers' barracks...
...Balkans seemed incidental...
...Of course the Americans are here," he says...
...Tenovo has its rules...
...It was small, threadbare, and clean, and in ambiance rather like an old-fashioned bodega on Manhattan's Upper West Side...
...Everything has left its mark, and ancient fault lines still persist...
...They would divide the Balkans and lead to new conflicts in Europe...
...Macedonia has survived, enduring the Serbs, the Greeks, and the tortuous transition from a planned to a free-market economy...
...He is at the summer residence that was built for Marshal Tito at Ohrid in western Macedonia...
...Commissions were formed...
...They are a sign that the United States is interested in, and protective of, Macedonia, and that it wants other countries to leave it alone...
...Albania is foreign-aid dependent, and consequently a U.S...
...Sometimes they see Serb patrols on the other side of the loosely defined border...
...Inflation, 2,000 Say now that these young soldiers are well behaved and polite, and mindful that they represent their country...
Vol. 28 • November 1995 • No. 11
