Metastasis in Macedonia

"The project of Greater Serbia," I was once told by one of the many pessimistic intellectuals in Skopje, "has within it the incurable tumor of Greater Albania. And this cancer will metastasize in Macedonia." The "logic" of enclosing all contiguous minorities into one state, and mustering them all under one flag, was the essence of the Milosevic scheme until it brought destruction on itself. The urgent question now is whether the large Albanian populations living next to Albania in Kosovo and Macedonia have assimilated this lesson or have decided to try to improve on it.

Writing from Tetovo in northwestern Macedonia seven years ago [see "Minority Report," April 18, 1994] it was extremely easy to predict that before long there would be trouble between the Slavic and Albanian populations. The city is semicircled by the Sar Mountains and surmounted by an old Turkish fortress; the mountains are the frontier with Albania and Kosovo. Between 70 and 80 percent of the people of Tetovo are Albanians, and their schedule of grievances was classically nationalist, at least as adumbrated by their spokesman Menduh Thaci, whose name you will be reading again in the newspapers. (He is a kinsman of Hashim Thaci, founder of the Kosovo Liberation Army, whose Albanian initials, UCK, have been adopted by the new guerrillas operating in the hills above Tetovo.)

Eighty percent of local state jobs were filled by Macedonian Slavs...the police were racist...the Albanian language was not properly allowed in schools and there was no Albanian university...the number of Albanian books in the national library was 150 out of 250,000 (someone had counted them)...Albanians were described as a "minority" in the Constitution, along with tiny groups like Egyptians!... On the table as we spoke lay an Albanian national flag. One could see where this was going. And one could see it, too, when interviewing Ljubco Georgievski, who was then the leader of Macedonia's right-wing opposition party VMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) and is now Prime Minister. From his point of view, the minority was already demanding too much and demonstrating more dissatisfaction with each successive concession. This is the classic formula, where both sides feel themselves to be the endangered ones.

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