SKOPJE, Oct 26: Macedonia’s political leaders on Friday agreed to key constitutional changes enshrining greater rights for the Albanian minority in a crucial deal to stop the Balkan nation plunging into renewed armed conflict.
After weeks of drawn-out negotiations mediated by the European Union, Macedonia’s top politicians agreed to the new constitutional blueprint, clearing the way for the full implementation of a peace plan, diplomatic sources said.
“We have a deal on the preamble of the constitution and on the whole constitutional package,” a source close to the talks mediated by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told Reuters.
Solana met Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski twice on Friday to try to salvage a plan under which ethnic Albanian guerrillas agreed to hand over nearly 4,000 weapons to NATO and disband — a commitment they have already fulfilled.
Hardline ethnic Macedonian nationalists had resisted making reciprocal concessions recognising greater political and cultural rights for the Albanians. Parliament still has to back the constitutional changes.
The deal was integral to a fragile August 13 peace pact, which halted a seven-month uprising by ethnic Albanians who said they were fighting for better political, language and employment rights.
It also led to the arrival of international monitors and their security arm of 700 NATO troops.
With the credibility of the latest of several flawed Western peacemaking missions in the Balkans apparently on the line, Solana swooped into Skopje on Thursday night to try to knock heads together.
The long awaited green light followed weeks of procedural stalling and a misfired attempt by nationalist hawks to have Western patrons of the peace pact repudiate the rebels as “terrorists” akin to Islamic radicals who provoked war with the United States.
NO DISCRIMINATION: Confusion swirled over an unorthodox ruling by Assembly Speaker Stojan Andov that reforms would be “adopted” in this session but not “enforced” pending a vote in a separate session.
Albanians feared this gambit would give Andov time to find a pretext not to hold the decisive voting session. They were also afraid that demobilised rebels would grow suspicious that they were being deceived in the August peace pact.
Trajkovski, in an open letter to U.S. President George Bush, expressed concern that the reforms would not get past parliament unless “the Macedonian people” retained pre-eminence in the preamble of the former Yugoslav republic’s constitution.
Bowing to mediators’ pressure for a removal of any suggestions of institutionalised discrimination to placate wary Albanians, the government agreed in August to make all communities equal, unspecified “citizens” in the preamble.
But that concession backfired badly among Macedonian politicians, media and the public.
They believed it would be exploited by Balkan neighbours who have historically disputed Macedonia’s cultural and linguistic identity and by Albanians with a higher birth-rate and ultimate ambitions to sweeping autonomy.
Trajkovski’s revised formula was “a state of the citizens of Macedonia, who pertain to the Macedonian people, Albanians, Turks, Roma, Vlachs, Serbs, Bosnians and others...”
Ethnic Albanian leaders ruled out such a change, swayed by a perception in the ethnically fixated Balkans that groups lacking “people” or “nation” designation under law tend to be treated as second-class citizens.
But Macedonian leaders had already broadly endorsed a slew of equal rights amendments assuring ethnic Albanians certified higher education, employment reflecting their one-third share of the population, and some official use of their language.
Trajkovski promised Bush the entire 15-amendment package would win the mandatory two-thirds majority without trouble but only if the preamble provision was amended.—Reuters
