Mail Call.

Fareed Zakaria's April 2 column, suggesting that Macedonia might win peace by carving out an Albanian enclave, drew many diverse and animated responses. "Macedonia is not just another Balkan country waiting to explode," said one reader. Another insisted, "Changing borders there would be disastrous." A third asked for "a similar border correction" for other trouble spots. And then there was one who simply lamented, "My heart wept at what NATO is doing in the Balkans."

A New Strategy for the Balkans?

I read with much concern Fareed Zakaria's column advocating the redrawing of borders in the Balkans ("Breathing Room in the Balkans," WORLD VIEW, April 2). It will take much more than "a few new chairs" at the United Nations to establish a lasting peace in that region, and changing borders there would be disastrous--as it was when the Great Powers did so in 1878 and when dictators like Slobodan Milosevic set about creating a "Greater Serbia" in the 1990s. I cannot think of any state in Europe that is--or has ever been--"monoethnic," or why this is desirable. Multiethnicity in a society is a strength, not a weakness, as a dynamic country like the United States so clearly shows. Power should rest with citizens with clearly defined rights, backed by the rule of law. This leads to a stable civil society and is proving successful in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I am in charge of implementing the Dayton peace accords. It should serve as a model in countries, such as Macedonia, where ethnic tensions are on the rise. The international community's strategy for the Balkans is to bring the countries of the former Yugoslavia into Europe as prosperous and stable partners. Giving in to a bunch of noisy nationalists would bring us right back to square one.

Wolfgang Petritsch

High Representative

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

My heart wept when I read about what the Albanians are going through in their own country and the role NATO plays in all of it. If the Slavs and Albanians of Macedonia cannot coexist, shouldn't they be allowed to live separately and in peace? I don't understand how Albanians can live in such abject poverty and degradation in the same country where Slavs are flourishing. How could any fair-minded person expect them to live in peace? I do not appreciate what NATO is doing in the Balkans.