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Epilogue Despite a string of tit-for-tat killings in August that seriously threatened to derail international mediation efforts, the armed conflict between the Macedonian armed forces and the Albanian NLA came to an official end with the signing of the Framework Agreement in the Macedonian town of Ohrid on 13 August 2001.1 The Agreement, brokered by the international community , was signed by late president of the Republic of Macedonia Boris Trajkovski and political leaders of the four main government and opposition Macedonian and Albanian parties—namely, Ljupčo Georgievski (VMRODPMNE ), Branko Crvenkovski (SDSM), Arben Xhaferi (DPA/PDSH), and Imer Imeri (PDP/PPD). It served as the basis for amendments to the 1991 Founding Constitution and for legislation (on, among other issues, decentralization and the redrawing of municipal boundaries) meant to address directly Albanian grievances and improve the overall status of the Albanian community in Macedonia in exchange for the NLA’s voluntary surrender of insurgent weapons to NATO and disbandment (for the full text of the Agreement , see Appendix). NATO’s thirty-day arms collection operation, officially called Operation Essential Harvest and organized in response to Boris Trajkovski’s request for NATO to assist in disarmament of the NLA, was met with anger by members of the Macedonian community. On 1 September hundreds of Macedonians, mainly internally displaced persons, gathered in front of the Parliament building in Skopje to protest NATO’s allegedly pro-Albanian involvement in the crisis and keep MPs from entering to initiate parliamentary procedures for the implementation of the Framework Agreement. Anger did not preclude sharp satire, articulating a bitterly comic and bleak view of the political circumstances in Macedonia. In early September, several Macedonianlanguage television and newspaper media groups, without participation of the Albanian-language media, organized an event inviting members of the general public to surrender their weapons voluntarily and deposit them in Epilogue 119 front of the Parliament building. The event was called Go Obravme Bostanot; the phrase translates into English as “Watermelon Harvest,” thereby mocking the NATO operation, and is widely used in Macedonia to describe the unfavorable position in which one finds oneself when dealt a bad hand—“up the creek without a paddle.” Two plastic dolls dressed in clothing bearing NATO insignia were placed in front of the Parliament building supposedly to oversee the disarmament process. Thousands of Macedonians (more than fifty thousand, according to newspaper estimates) participated in the event and deposited a wide variety of items, from rolling pins, watermelons, and vegetables to old TV antennas, music tapes, and plastic toy guns. After these “weapons” were collected, a delegation of Macedonian journalists who had helped organize the event met with the late Macedonian president to deliver a letter stating that the operation was a success and the weaponry would be passed to NATO for destruction. The “weapons” were piled onto tractors and unloaded in front of NATO headquarters in Skopje. The NATO officers on duty at the scene were also presented with a few watermelons—a gift they accepted at first but later, during a regular NATO press briefing, returned to the journalists. In late September, NATO announced that it had exceeded its goal of collecting thirty three hundred insurgent weapons, and declared Operation Essential Harvest a success. NLA leader Ali Ahmeti also announced that the insurgent army had disbanded. Under international pressure, including threats to cancel an aid donors’ conference for Macedonia scheduled for October , the articles in Annex A of the Agreement were converted into constitutional amendments and adopted by the Macedonian Parliament on 17 November 2001.2 The Constitution no longer referred to Macedonia as “the national state of the Macedonian people” and instead promoted among all peoples a sense of civic belonging to the Macedonian state. Specifically, the amended Preamble read: “The citizens of the Republic of Macedonia, taking over responsibility for the present and future of their fatherland . . . have decided to establish the Republic of Macedonia as an independent, sovereign state, with the intention of establishing and consolidating rule of law, guaranteeing human rights and civil liberties, providing peace and coexistence, social justice, economic well-being and prosperity in the life of the individual and the community.” Additional amendments mandated that in units of local self-government where at least 20 percent of the population spoke a language other than Macedonian that language and its alphabet become official in addition to Macedonian and the Cyrillic alphabet. Moreover, the Constitution guaranteed the equitable representation of all communities—and hence the [18.119...

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