Word: macedonia
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...That's the philosophy of the "dacoit" bandits who maraud across India's impoverished northern plains. And it's a message that finds an unlikely echo in NATO's handling of the Macedonia crisis...
...Western alliance is currently patting itself on the back for acting early, so as to prevent Macedonia becoming another Balkan bloodbath. It has sent in an advance team of 400 soldiers, soon to be accompanied by a further 3,100, on a 30-day mission to collect whatever weapons the ethnic-Albanian guerrillas of the National Liberation Army deign to hand over. Of course many of those guerrillas, particularly the more militant factions based around Tetovo, are still actively using those weapons and it's hard to imagine they'll be ready to hand them over in the next couple...
...basis for believing that the guerrillas plan to disarm is a political agreement concluded last week in Skopje between the country's main parliamentary parties to greatly expand ethnic-Albanian cultural rights in Macedonia. But the guerrillas have no direct role in negotiating that agreement, and their compliance is based entirely on goodwill. It is also based, in other words, on accepting at face value the National Liberation Army's claim to have taken up weapons simply to pursue expanded cultural and civil rights within Macedonia's democracy, rather than to create a separate Albanian entity within the country...
...NATO is not sending its troops in as lambs to the slaughter. The rebels have so far proved politically adept at couching their demands within the frame of what might be acceptable to the West. For example, a separate Albanian territory in Macedonia was a non-starter, so instead the guerrillas announced that they were simply demanding greater civil rights in the Macedonian constitution. And that responsiveness to Western concerns makes them unlikely to resist disarmament altogether - after all, the current peace deal has been crafted precisely in order to remove the political grievances they cite in order to claim...
...benefit of edgy domestic constituencies, to keep its men far away from any situation that even looks like turning nasty. But, like NATO's promise to simply withdraw if fighting resumes, it's hard to take that at face value. For one thing, NATO troops have actually been in Macedonia all along - Skopje houses the major logistics base for the entire Kosovo peacekeeping operation, and they're not about to withdraw. The reason for the early deployment of the British troops may be to reassure the Macedonian authorities of Western support for the peace effort. Macedonia's parliament still...