A Balkan Beirut.(war in Macedonia)(Brief Article)

When gunfire broke out around his small house in the village of Neprosteno, Borovoj Georgievski, 58, grabbed his wife and dove for the floor. He assumed it was Albanian guerrillas of the National Liberation Army, fighting the Macedonian police. Two mortar shells landed in his barnyard; one damaged his car but the five cows, his livelihood, were unhurt. Then, oddly, the phone rang. A neighbor, an NLA guerrilla in the predominantly Albanian village, warned him to run for it. He protested that his wife was too ill, and the shooting too heavy. But the guerrilla insisted. The couple got as far as their front gate, then turned back, hiding in a cellar until the shooting died down. "I don't know what their intention was, to save us or push us out of our homes," Georgievski says. Most of his fellow Slavic neighbors didn't wait to find out but fled for the safety of government-held territory. He stayed. A few days later the guerrillas produced Georgievski as proof of how the Albanians had "protected" Macedonians who remained on their side in the village, one of many held by the NLA in the disputed area of Tetovo, Macedonia's second-largest city. "Tell them," they badgered, pressing around him outside his house, pockmarked with bullets. His wife hid in a back room. "I don't know what I am supposed to say, what I am to do," he pleaded to a reporter. With that the poor man burst into tears.

Such is ethnic tolerance in Macedonia. When a spokesman for Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski (no relation to Borovoj) issued an inflammatory denunciation of Western countries last Tuesday, it sparked a wave of anti-Western and anti-Albanian rioting. All week NATO, EU and American mediators had tried to restore a ceasefire that collapsed during the previous weekend, leading to a wave of ethnic flight. "We are the witnesses of a bloody crisis directly controlled by some of the Western so-called democratic countries," said Antonio Milososki, the prime minister's spokesman, rejecting the deal negotiators were pushing as "pro-terrorist." "Their goal is war in Macedonia, breaking up its unity and its territorial integrity." That was a thinly veiled green light to refugees from villages like Neprosteno who had just fled to Skopje. Backed by local toughs, they rampaged through the Slavic half of the capital, looting and wrecking every Albanian shop they could find, ...