The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in the Republic of Macedonia

Introduction

Introduction On 16 February 2001, members of a journalistic team working for the Macedonian TV station A1 claimed that they had been kidnapped by armed Albanian men, some in black uniforms, for a few hours. By all accounts this event took place in the Albanian-populated village of Tanuševci in northern Macedonia, just across the border from UN-administered Kosovo (see Figure 1).1 The crew had traveled to Tanuševci to check the veracity of information regarding the alleged existence of a Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA (in Albanian , Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës, UÇK) training camp in the village and film a report.2 (The KLA, an Albanian insurgent group that fought against Serbian forces in the adjoining Kosovo in the 1990s with a view to Kosovo’s independence, was officially disbanded under NATO supervision in June 1999.3 ) The armed men allegedly confiscated the crew’s equipment and cell phones, and told the journalists the village had been “liberated” by the hitherto totally unknown, except perhaps to NATO and Macedonian intelligence, Albanian National Liberation Army, or NLA (in Albanian, Ushtria Çlirimtare Kombëtare, UÇK) and that Macedonians were not welcome there, indicating that the village was no longer under the jurisdiction of the Macedonian state.4 Media sources proclaimed that after the journalists were released, a Macedonian Border Patrol unit entered the village and clashed with the armed group. After an approximately hour-long gun battle, the armed group reportedly withdrew into Kosovo on the other side of the border. These are the beginnings of the 2001 armed conflict between Macedonian government forces and the Albanian NLA in the Republic of Macedonia . According to the NLA, the goal of the insurgency was to secure greater rights for Albanians in Macedonia, who make up 25.17 percent of the overall population of the country.5 The decision to take up arms was allegedly motivated by the failure of the Macedonian state, ten years after independence , to pass the laws necessary to carry certain provisions of the founding Constitution into effect and hence provide the Albanian community with 2 Introduction the rights it reportedly deserved and demanded throughout the 1990s, including the establishment of an Albanian-speaking state-sponsored university and increase in the number of Albanian employees in the public sector. Macedonian officials, on the other hand, branded the NLA as a terrorist organization and the insurgency as a provocation against the territorial integrity of the Macedonian state. During the conflict, a plan for “peaceful” resolution, involving the exchange of populations and territories between Albania and Macedonia, was leaked to the press reportedly by the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The plan proposed that Macedonia should give northwestern territory, where the Albanian population is most densely populated, to Kosovo, and also give Debar to Albania in return for territories with Macedonian majorities in southeastern Albania.6 The proposal was left undenounced by Ljubčo Georgievski, Macedonian prime minister and leader of the nationalist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization-Democratic Party of National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE), and by Stojan Andov, speaker of Parliament and member of the Liberal Party of Macedonia (LPM, a junior partner in the Figure 1. Map of Macedonia. Based on a UN map, UN Cartographic Section. Introduction 3 government coalition). For fear that the conflict in Macedonia would escalate into a civil war and spread throughout the Balkans, international mediators from NATO and the European Union stepped in to help manage the crisis. Fighting between the two armies stopped a mere five miles from the capital city of Skopje before it ended on 13 August 2001 with the signing of the internationally brokered Ohrid Framework Agreement (otherwise known as the Framework Agreement; see Appendix for full text). The Agreement provided the basis for constitutional amendments, meant to clarify what was inadequately addressed in the founding Constitution and improve the overall status of the Albanian community in the country as well as that of other minorities (cf. Nikolovska and Siljanovska-Davkova 2001, Vankovska 2007).7 The conflict heightened feelings of insecurity among Macedonia’s population , and nobody inside or outside the country knew what to expect. There were speculations that Macedonia would be engulfed in civil war, be partitioned , or become a UN protectorate. In what follows, I provide an ethnographic account of the ways middle- and working-class Muslim Albanians and Orthodox Macedonians in Macedonia’s capital practiced daily life...