Albanian minority in FYROM: news and developments

[Truth Bearer]

Gunmen fire at ethnic Albanian leader of Macedonia political party


2008-05-12 18:39:08 -


SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) - Police in Macedonia say gunmen shot at the car of an ethnic Albanian party leader while he was campaigning for the June 1 general election.
Police say DUI party leader Ali Ahmeti was not hurt in Monday's shooting near Tetovo. It's not clear whether Ahmeti was near the parked car when the attackers sprayed it with automatic gunfire.
There were no immediate reports of injuries or arrests.

http://www.pr-inside.com/gunmen-fire...er-r584266.htm

[Makedonia25]

Elections and Violence. Can FYROM Rise to the Challenge?

19.05.2008 Da Skopje, scrive Risto Karajkov [Italiano]

Just a few days into the campaign ahead of 1 June early elections, Macedonia is under serious temptation.The election campaign which officially started 10 May has been marred by incidents and violence since the very beginning. Macedonia has very little time to correct things
Just a few days into the campaign ahead of 1 June early elections, Macedonia is under serious temptation.

The election campaign which officially started 10 May has been marred by incidents and violence since the very beginning.

Most incidents were reported between the two major parties in the Albanian political block, the ruling Democratic Party of the Albanians (DPA) of Menduh Taci, and the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) of Ali Ahmeti.

Incidents involving the use of firearms have been reported practically on daily basis. Exchanges of gunfire, party head offices fired at, shots at houses and shops of party members, attempts to obstruct political rallies of the opponents. A serious incident involved the complete demolition of a night club in the city of Gostivar. A man was killed in a midnight knife fight which might have had partisan pretext. All of this just in the last week.

The leader of DUI, Ali Ahmeti was reportedly fired at, during the rally of his party in the village of Rakovec, on the 12th of May. The police charged two men for the incident. One was quickly arrested and the other is at large. “They attempted on my life”, said Mr. Ahmeti.

“Mr. Ahmeti uses old tricks”, says Mr. Menduh Taci of the ruling DPA, accusing the DUI leader of trying to profit politically from the incident. Reportedly, the shooting was in the general direction of the DUI vehicles which were empty at the time. Still, a small child was reportedly injured.

This is the last thing Macedonia needs in this period of time. If the electoral violence continues Macedonia can kiss goodbye the invitation from the European Commission to open accession talks, expected hopefully this autumn. And that would be just the beginning. In the delicate situation the country is internationally – just had NATO doors slammed in the face at the Bucharest summit in April – Macedonia cannot afford to be labeled a laggard.

“Fair and democratic elections are the precondition for our Euro-Atlantic perspectives”, said President Branko Crvenkovski before the start of the electoral campaign. “Irregular elections would a step back from our goal – EU and NATO”, warned he.

The international community unanimously condemned the violence.

“These incidents are a reason for concern”, said Mr. Ervan Fuere, EU Ambassador to the country. “The elections are a test for Macedonia. We expect better, not worse elections than in 2006”, said Ambassador Fuere.

“I expect everyone to do their share and make sure the campaign goes as it should”, said from Brussels Mr. Javier Solana, the European Commission foreign and security policy chief.

The OSCE, the major international organization in charge of election monitoring, joined the chorus of concerns.

“We are concerned by the worsening of the security in the north-west part of the country”, says in a written statement OSCE chief in Skopje, Mr. Giorgio Radicati. “Citizens must feel safe to vote on election day”, underscores Mr. Radicati’s statement.

The first contingent of OSCE’s election monitoring mission has already arrived and been deployed across the country. The balk of them, some 250, will arrive shortly before election day. The monitoring effort will be reinforced by a significant number of local observers, as many as 3,500, coordinated by a local organization, Most.

Macedonia has very little time to correct things. If violence stopped right this moment, the assessment of the elections will have already been affected. If they continue there can be no doubt that the damage will be huge.

Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski talked yesterday with the leaders of DPA and DUI and asked them to use their influence and put an end to the violence. The diplomatic core had a meeting with President Crvenkovski the same day and expressed serious concern.

Although violence was used mostly in the Albanian camp there were smaller incidents in the Macedonian block too, indicating to a dirty election campaign.

Why does Macedonia repeat the same mistakes? The 2006 elections were assessed as free and fair, with a few minor incidents. Why can’t the country rise to the challenge?

Part of the answer, but definitely not the full answer, lies with the very charged political atmosphere surrounding these elections.

If the polls are to be trusted the winners can be seen quite ahead of time and this certainly makes many people very nervous. According to forecasts, the coalition led by VMRO and Prime Minister Gruevski is a certain winner in the Macedonian camp with a difference as much as 2,5 – 3 to 1 against the opposition social democrats (SDSM).

In the Albanian camp the difference is much smaller. Several polls gave lead to opposition DUI but by a far smaller margin. However, it is clear that if VMRO wins in the Macedonian camp, they will choose to partner with their traditional ally DPA, no matter what the vote count.

This was the cause of the crisis after the last national elections in 2006. DUI won the majority in the Albanian block but did not get into the government. VMRO decided to coalesce with DPA. DUI got enraged and kept raising tensions for several months before they calmed down. This time they said, they would not accept such a scenario.

Yet that scenario is quite likely. The only reason Prime Minister Gruevski decided to go for early elections was because he was convinced of his big advantage over the social democrats. He said he wanted a stronger majority in parliament so that he could sped up reforms held by the opposition.

“This will the first time that citizens vote “for”. So far they have always voted “against” a government in office”, said Prime Minister Gruevski.

That might be true, but it won’t be enough if the elections are seen as irregular.

“It is important that we all win, that the country wins in these elections” says President Crvenkovski.

http://www.osservatoriobalcani.org/a...ew/9592/1/216/

[Bardas]

We Albanians hate terror

The six-month war between ethnic Albanians and Macedonian forces ended in 2001 with the signing of a cohabitation agreement. In spite of this the country still suffers from political tensions: the Albanian Liberation Army of Kosovo and Macedonia claims that the rights of ethnic Albanians are being ignored by the Macedonian authorities. In November 2007 Macedonian police launched an armed offensive on the Albanian village of Brodec in Kosovo. They were looking for terrorists. Local man Ziber Ziberi says that of the five killed and 13 arrested, not one was a terrorist.


An Albanian man sifts through the rubble of his destroyed house.

At 6am our village, Brodec, was attacked without warning by Macedonian special police. First they shelled us from the surrounding hills, then they came in with helicopters and armed vehicles. The noise was unbearable. My wife, children, mother and mother-in-law ran to a small space under the stairs to hide.

They remained hidden there for several hours – the shelling lasted from early morning to 3pm. My son was ill at the time and he should have been taken to a doctor, but it was impossible to move from the shelter.

There are 300 children in the village; they were supposed to go to school that day, but instead they ran to hide in cellars. The shelling made holes in the walls of our houses, but it was our mosque that took most of the damage. You could literally see through it. The house of my immediate neighbour was burned to the ground by a fire that spread after a grenade hit. The flames were so big we couldn’t put them out.

Fortunately, the winds were not strong that day, otherwise the whole village would have burned. My neighbour has six children – his daughter was supposed to get married this year. Now they are left with nothing. As their neighbours we are the only ones they can turn to for help. Nobody from this village will seek compensation for the damage from the state authorities. We have come to expect nothing from Macedonia.

In the afternoon the shelling stopped and the police entered the village. The streets were swarming with them – all we could see was uniforms. They entered houses, searching for people and beating some of them up. Five people were killed, one of them butchered with a knife.

The police behaved like animals. My youngest son, who is four, saw them as they entered our house. Now he wets his bed every night. He is afraid of the dark and of police uniforms. I fear he will suffer from this for the rest of his life.

The police said that they were looking for criminals. Indeed, there were some criminals – smugglers from Kosovo, who occasionally come to our village from the mountains across the border. They stay for a while and then disappear. But we never support them – we are peasants and we hate terror.

Who could hate terror more than us, the Albanians? We survived the war in 2001, when our families fled and sought refuge in Kosovo. Men from our village remained and fought for the rights of all Albanians. You must understand, our war was not fought for territory. We don't need land – we only seek our rights.

In 2001 Macedonia agreed to grant amnesty to Albanian fighters. But now they are retaliating – I believe it's their revenge.

There are 1,300 people living in Brodec – all of them Albanians. Most have Macedonian citizenship, but some don’t, because Macedonia refused to grant citizenship to Albanian nationals after gaining independence from Yugoslavia. My mother only received citizenship recently, after a long struggle with the authorities. She was stateless for 17 years.

The Macedonian police arrested 13 of our men and boys. My brother among them. Not one of them is a member of a criminal group. Actually, the criminals the police were looking were never caught. The police have taken innocent people to prison, and convicted them of terrorism. Some of them are too young to be terrorists – one of them is even handicapped.

The police gathered them together in the courtyard of my mother's house and left them lying on the bare ground. It was November, and they were on the ground for several hours, lying in their own blood. There were also dead bodies among them.

They have been in prison for several months now, and the court process has not yet started. Why do they keep them there? My youngest son keeps looking for his uncle around the village. We told him that he had gone away, but he asks about him every day. With my nephew it's worse. He has stopped going to school, and he doesn't learn anything any more. He ony wants to see his father.

We try to visit my brother in prison as often as possible. We have to shout through a glass wall to talk to him.

My mother has not visited the prison yet. She has not seen her son since last November. It would be no use taking her with us beacuse she is ill and has hearing problems; she wouldn’t be able to talk to him and she would only cry. She doesn't speak much, but she cries a lot.

Since the attack 10 more people have fallen ill and died in the village. I’m sure it's because of the terror they went through.

The police behaved as if they themselves were terrorists – they were wearing masks on their faces. Whom do they fear? Us? We provide for their paychecks. We pay the taxes in this country.

It was all a farce. Innocent people are now behind bars while the criminals the police were looking for walk free. What good could accession to the European Union and Nato be for Macedonia if there is no justice for us, the Albanians?

http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?pag...id=599&catID=2

[TALOS]

Skopje. The MPs from the Democratic Party of Albanians /DPA/ will boycott the Macedonian parliament, the party’s leadership decided at its Friday meeting in Tetovo, Focus News Agency’s correspondent in Skopje reported.
DPA Deputy Chairman Imer Selmani said that the boycott would continue until the acts on the Albanian language and flag, and on compensation for the former National Liberation Army were included in the parliament’s agenda and Kosovo’s independence was recognized. The DPA MPs will not return their MP mandates.

http://www.focus-fen.net/?id=n145811



so who will become the hardline albanian party? it was the DUI, but its gone quit since its collaboration with nationalist Gruevski. So now the DPA will fill that role? Wasnt slav soldiers collaborationg with DPA nutters against the DUI voters during the elections? Now DPA is ditched out of the government..

on man, what a bordelo that country is.. i think Albanian showtime will start soon..