Going From Bad to Worse.(conflict with Albanians in Macedonia, National Liberation Army)(Brief Article)

Forty-two-year-old Hamdi Klenja knew it was bad when hundreds of men poured into Tsar Samuel Street in the southern Macedonian town of Bitola last Wednesday. The day before, Albanian guerrillas had ambushed and killed five Macedonian soldiers. Three of the dead came from Bitola, and now a mob was taking revenge on the town's ethnic-Albanian civilians. As they broke down his front door Klenja ran upstairs and passed his small children from the balcony to a neighbor next door. Then he jumped after them. Police stood by as looters ransacked his house, then threw in Molotov cocktails. Klenja tried to douse the blaze with a garden hose, but police ordered him to stop. "Let it burn," they said. And it did, along with dozens of other Albanian homes and shops in the city.

When it comes to winning hearts and minds, Macedonians are doing a much better job on the diplomatic front than in their own streets and front lines. As evidence of widespread human-rights abuses mounted, NATO secretary-general Lord George Robertson continued to condemn the Albanian insurgents of the National Liberation Army (NLA) for provoking the crisis. NATO pledged to tighten the Kosovo border to cut off guerrilla supply lines. The international community has supported Macedonia's government of national unity, composed of both ethnic Macedonians and Albanians, and has backed its refusal to negotiate with the NLA. But the group is increasingly hard to ignore. Last Friday a NEWSWEEK reporter saw NLA fighters dug in at the hillside village of Aracinovo, only three miles from the outskirts of the capital, Skopje. They were hurriedly bringing in truckloads of automatic weapons. Macedonian Army and police watched from a safe distance.

A series of humiliations for the military, which has few Albanian members, seems to have spurred outrages against civilians. After four months of conflict, the NLA has eluded Army pursuit and managed to fight on two fronts, near the cities of Kumanovo and Tetovo. Villages taken by the Army have been swiftly retaken by the guerrillas. The fighting has caused thousands of Albanian civilians to flee. Over protests from the Red Cross and other agencies, men have been separated from women and taken by police. Many have been beaten, even tortured. Interviews by journalists, aid workers and Human Rights Watch investigators depict systematic abuse by police and, in some cases, the Army. Many witnesses reported hearing protracted screaming from victims held in the Kumanovo police station. "One of them must have been very young, from the sound of his voice," said Zija Ismaili. "He kept ...