Fire in the Mountains.

Sulejman Ramadani, 41, was opening his garage door one day last week when a sniper's bullet pierced his forehead. Now the engineer's two sons, 4 and 2, have no father. The Ramadanis are ethnic Albanians, like most of their neighbors in Macedonia's second largest city, Tetovo. The same is true of the guerrillas who control the heights above the city. That awkward fact hasn't stopped the sharpshooters and mortar crews from raining death onto their ethnic kinsmen below. The gunmen may eventually go after the Slavs, who make up two thirds of Macedonia's population and largely control the former Yugoslav Republic's economy and government. Right now, though, the fighters have implicitly declared war on a more helpless foe: moderate Albanians.

That ruthless tactic seems to be working. Thousands of moderate Albanians are abandoning their homes in Tetovo and fleeing in fear of their lives, despite appeals for calm from both Albanians and Slavs in Macedonia's ruling coalition. Meanwhile, more and more young Albanians are talking about joining the "liberation" forces in the hills. In Macedonia the insurgents call themselves the National Liberation Army. But their uniforms look exactly like those of the old Kosovo Liberation Army, now supposedly disarmed, disbanded and living in peace under NATO protection, across the Serb border a few kilometers to the north. Even the two groups' Albanian initials are the same: UCK.

Macedonia has been the only former Yugoslav Republic to escape the horror of ethnic war. Now it is on the verge of losing that distinction. For Europe and the United States the fear is that NATO may be dragged even deeper into the Balkan mess--or that the West would have to live with yet another abject failure to prevent a bloodbath. Although Western observers have praised the government's coolheaded response to the crisis, a local police officer or an angry young Albanian could overreact at any moment, possibly setting off a disaster.

The conflict could ultimately be an even worse disaster for the West than Somalia was. If peacekeepers try to stop the new KLA, they will inevitably incur the Albanians' wrath. Sooner or later that would mean a body count--and a very difficult political problem for George W. Bush. More than that, if NATO loses its will and pulls out, it could call into the question the alliance's very legitimacy. Meanwhile, the new KLA seems intent on spreading the conflict across the region.

"Criminals and pseudopatriots," Rauf Ramadani angrily calls the rebels. An ethnic Albanian himself (no relation to Sulejman), he is Tetovo's chief of police. "For me the most disappointing thing is that a lot of people are running," he says during an interview. The phone rings. Another relative is leaving town. "Don't worry about me! Do what you want!" Ramadani barks into the receiver, then slams the phone down.

Kosovo's UCK hard-liners have said they are fighting to create a Greater Albania--an objective that has been publicly repudiated even by the Albanian government--or a Greater Kosovo, a goal Kosovo's own political leaders have renounced. Last week in Macedonia, the guerrillas claimed to be fighting for equal rights in the form of better schools and perhaps even a constitutional rewrite to establish an ethnic federation. But foreign and local officials on both sides of the Kosovo-Macedonia border say the conflict is largely about control of a growing Albanian-run criminal empire. This is a syndicate with a difference. Its kingpins are actively seeking to destabilize the entire region.

Few civilians dare to talk even anonymously about the rackets. The Balkans have always served as a back door to Europe. But the region's fastest-growing industries--smuggling of prostitutes, drugs and other contraband of every description--have exploded since NATO drove the Yugoslav Army out of Kosovo in June 1999. The bosses are the enclave's former "freedom fighters": the KLA. In a sense they got into the business legitimately, at first creating covert networks that imported guns to fight the Serbs and exported refugees who were trying to escape Serb ethnic cleansing. Much of that traffic went through neighboring Albania, a nearly lawless place since the collapse of government authority in 1997 (next story).