Kosovo timebomb will test Macedonia's next leader
By DOUGLAS HAMILTON
26 April 2004
Reuters
BELGRADE - The man who succeeds the late Boris Trajkovski on Wednesday to become the third president of Macedonia may have to pilot his country through the roughest waters yet in its turbulent 13 years of independence. Polls ahead of the April 28 runoff election suggest the next president will be Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski, a two-time Social Democrat premier offering "statesmanship" against the "new face" tendered by conservative rival Sasko Kedev.
While much strengthened by the ethnic peace pact that is Trajkovski's legacy, Macedonia is at the mercy of events next door in volatile Kosovo, where Albanians want the United Nations next year to agree to their demand for independence from Serbia.
The policy of Macedonia's ethnically mixed government on Kosovo is a wary neutrality and the issue of Kosovo's "final status" has been taboo for two months of campaigning.
"It's unwise to mention it," a Western diplomat explained. "If you're too tough you lose the Albanian vote. If you're too liberal you lose the other side. It's better left alone."
Fans of Crvenkovski, 41, say Kedev, 42, is a hopeless novice. Critics of Crvenkovski see him as a power-addicted apparatchik whose eight years in office yielded little, though his support for Trajkovski's peacemaking may have been crucial.
Hardly bigger than Vermont, Macedonia is the keystone of a fragile bridge of land where Slav and Albanian peoples uneasily meet. Some 25 percent of its two million people are Albanians, living in the crescent of land bordering Kosovo.
IGNITING SEPARATISM
In 1999, Macedonia was swamped by hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees fleeing Serb forces. The refugees soon went home but Macedonia's precarious ethnic peace was shattered. In 2001, Albanian rebels inspired by Kosovo's break from Serbia seized a swathe of northern Macedonia in a five-month conflict that drove the republic close to open civil war.
A fresh shockwave could come from Kosovo at any time.
Kosovo Albanian Prime Minister Bajram Rexhepi says if independence is not on the horizon by September 2005, he will back moves for a referendum to declare it unilaterally.
Former U.S. Kosovo envoy James Dobbins wrote this month that "other than continued delay", independence for Kosovo is the only viable option, and there was no doubt independence "would encourage separatist tendencies in Macedonia".
Thwarted independence in Kosovo could be even worse for Macedonia, igniting new conflict to spill over their border.
"If Kosovo were to go seriously down the toilet, the regional implications would be quite shattering," said Nicholas Whyte of the International Crisis Group (ICG).
The Ohrid peace agreement between Slav Macedonians and Albanians is Macedonia's innoculation against separatism and its recipe for a multi-ethnic democracy, which has already brought former 2001 guerrillas into government.
Many Balkan Albanians have "Greater Albania" for an agenda but a "Greater Kosovo" seems to be the aim of some.
Guerrillas of the "Albanian National Army" showed up at a Kosovo funeral this month, renewing claims to western Macedonia and southern Serbia that Kosovo and Albania formally reject.
Whatever happens on Wednesday, Macedonia will shortly have a new prime minister. Crvenkovski says he will quit politics if he loses and if he wins, he relinquishes his job as prime minister. Some in the West see current Interior Minister Hari Kostov as the man most likely to keep the spirit of Ohrid alive and Macedonia whole.