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

2. The Eruption of the 2001 Conflict

chapter 2 The Eruption of the 2001 Conflict A few weeks prior to the eruption of the NLA insurgency in the village of Tanuševci, on 22 January 2001, one Macedonian policeman was killed and three others were wounded in an attack on the police station in the predominantly Albanian-populated village of Tearce, near the border with the UN-administered province of Kosovo in southern Serbia. The NLA claimed responsibility for the attack in a communiqué, entitled “Communiqué no 4,” sent 23 January by telefax from a cell-phone number in Germany to Dnevnik, one of the most widely read Macedonian-language newspapers in Macedonia .1 The communiqué, published in Albanian on the front page of Dnevnik and translated into Macedonian, read as follows:2 On 22 January a special team unit of the National Liberation Army supported by a group of observers with automatic rifles and hand grenade launchers attacked the Macedonian police station [in Tearce]. In the attack the opponent forces were quickly paralyzed and they did not resist while the other Macedonian forces from the other directions did not approach in time the location of the event. The attack was limited and was a proclamation to the Macedonian occupiers and their Albanophone [Albanofonskite] collaborators. The uniform of the Macedonian occupiers will be further attacked until the Albanian people are liberated. The policemen are called upon to return to their families so that they do not give their lives in vain for the illusory Macedonian plans for domination over the Albanian majority. The lethal grenade attack in Tearce marked the first time the NLA made publicly known its political agenda regarding the purported liberation of the Albanian people. In subsequent communiqués, statements of its spokesperson 38 Chapter 2 Ali Ahmeti, and commanders’ interviews circulated in the national and international media until the conflict came to a close in August 2001, the NLA asserted that it favored the preservation of Macedonia’s territorial integrity and respected NATO’s interests in Macedonia, and also described its objectives in Macedonia: status of constituent nation for Albanians, institutionalization of Albanian as the second official language, and equal participation of Albanians in state administration (see Ackermann 2001). To justify its use of armed violence, the organization referred to a so-called “reign of terror” whereby the Macedonian state had allegedly been denying for ten years since independence in 1991 the granting of greater rights to the Albanian community (Rusi 2002: 20). In the meantime, uncertainty and confusion arose over the very existence of the organization. Specifically, minister of internal affairs Dosta Dimovska disclaimed any knowledge of the existence of an organization by the name National Liberation Army and asserted that the fax number in Germany from which the communiqué had been sent to Dnevnik was nonexistent. Former director of the Intelligence Agency of Macedonia Aleksa Stamenkovski, however , asserted that while in office he had information that the NLA had been established at the same time as the Albanian Liberation Army of Preševo, Medvedja, and Bujanovac (Albanian Ushtria Çlirimtare e Preshevës, Medvegj ës dhe Bujanocit, UÇPMB), and former minister of internal affairs Pavle Trajanov stated that the two organizations operated in Yugoslavia.3 Named after the three predominantly Albanian-populated districts in Preševo Valley, a five-kilometer-wide buffer zone in southern Serbia north of Macedonia, UÇPMB was an Albanian insurgent group that announced its existence in early 2000 and operated in the valley.4 UÇPMB also enjoyed the support of some former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) men, who anticipated an eventual exchange of territories (see Judah 2002: ix) between Serbia and a future independent Kosovo.5 Macedonian prime minister Ljupčo Georgievski and his Albanian ruling coalition partner Arben Xhaferi, leaders of VMRO-DPMNE and DPA/PDSH respectively, mentioned during media appearances that they unequivocally condemned the bomb attacks. Nonetheless, inconclusive talk about whether the NLA really existed lent political life in Macedonia a strange, phantasmagoric quality, as if nobody could tell the difference between fact and fiction, real and unreal. The contours of the political landscape had suddenly become hazy, and it was unclear who the actors on the political stage really were, where they had really come from, and what intentions they really had. This spectral character of everyday life, what Aretxaga in her work on political The Eruption of the 2001 Conflict 39 violence in the Basque country calls the...