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Hundreds of Albanian villagers from Macedonia flee amid growing tension |
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February 27, 2001
PRISTINA-(AP) - NATO-led peacekeepers have increased patrols of the Kosovo-Macedonia border amid reports of hundreds of ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing a tense Macedonian village, international officials said Monday. More than 300 people have fled to Kosovo, said a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency, Astrid van Genderen Stort. They left the village of Tanusevac after tensions rose following the killing of a young Albanian man last week, she said. The latest arrivals went to the villages of Debelde and Vitina, 50 kilometers (30 miles) southeast of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo province. Most of the arrivals were woman and children; the men stayed behind. Van Genderen Stort quoted the refugees as saying that Macedonian forces had sent reinforcements to Tanusevac, which is located on the border. Peacekeepers have increased their ground and air patrols along the border, said Richard J. Heffer, a spokesman. With the coming of spring, when travel conditions improve, NATO will increase its surveillance, he said. There are about 45,000 NATO-led peacekeepers based in Kosovo and another 4,000 in Macedonia. A new group of ethnic Albanian guerrillas, calling themselves the "National Liberation Army," has been operating in the village. Ethnic Albanians make up about one fourth of Macedonia's 2 million people. They live mostly in the west of the country and often have been accused by Slavs, the Macedonian majority, of links to organized crime based in Kosovo. The Macedonian Albanians openly supported the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army in the latter's 1998-99 war against Serb forces. Kovoso is a province of Serbia, which is the dominant republic in Yugoslavia. NATO launched a 78-day bombing campaign in 1999 to halt Serbia's crackdown on Kosovo Albanians. About 300,000 Kosovo Albanians fled into Macedonia during the crackdown. |