Nato is treading a very fine line in Macedonia. It probably has to. Nonetheless its response this week carries as many dangers as solutions. It has agreed to send in a contingent of peacekeeping troops up to 5000 strong. However, the sending of the troops is conditional the secretary general of Nato, George Robinson said, “It will happen when, and only when, this is a durable ceasefire and an agreement between all of the party’s in the [Macedonian Government] coalition and indeed an agreement by the armed extremists that they will proceed towards disarmament.”
The Nato position was arrived at after a plea from Macedonia’s President Boris Trajkovski. Mr Trajkovski called for help in taking arms from those rebels who wanted to hand them over. Secretary General Robinson said, “This is not an armed intervention. It will be a force appropriate to the task in benign conditions.”
One might well ask that if the situation in Macedonia got to a state that it fulfilled all of Nato’s conditions whether there would be any need for a Nato force to go in at all. To satisfy the Nato conditions, there would have to be a durable ceasefire based on an agreement that embraced a constitutional and political settlement between it the ethnic Albanian minority and at the Slav majority. In those conditions, who would need anyone to go around and pick up a few surrendered weapons?
It seems that Nato is necessarily playing a public relations game. It is dishing out public statements that will not frighten the horses, but in doing so it runs the danger of being accused of not offering much in the way of constructive help. The reality on the ground is different. If Nato commits troops there would be every danger that they would be fired on by any Albanian rebels who rejected the ceasefire or the political compromise upon which it was based.
The Albanian rebels are based in mountainous country on the border with Kosovo. As with most guerrilla forces, they would be hard to chase down. Indeed, one Nato official said, “We are not going out into the mountains to chase Albanians who have decided not to give up their weapons.” If this is the case, it means that any group of Albanian rebels who did not accept the paper agreement between the parties in the Macedonian capital of Skopje could fire down from the mountains without any fear of Nato intervention and with little prospect that the Skopje government could do much about it either without fear of an escalation of ethnic violence.
Rather than saying it would nto get involved in it, this very sort of escalation of ethnic violence that Nato needs to focus attention on. If a Nato force goes in to Macedonia, to be effective, it must do more than simply pick up weapons laid down by rebels who have agreed to a ceasefire. However, it appears that the paralysis induced in Western governments through fear of body bags looks like winning the day yet again in the aftermath of the break-up of what was communist Yugoslavia. Nato appears to be offering too little too late in the way of troop commitment. The only hope is that once committed the troops will do more than what is on Nato’s initial job description.
In the end, though, the avoidance of violence will not be as a result of Nato intervention. Rather it will be because of a political settlement. Negotiations between the two sides are now at a critical point. The Albanians want more autonomy, but the majority in Skopje appears reluctant to give any further ground. Invariably, when there is a significant ethnic minority (especially one that has a different language and religion) political agreement can only come with full independence or at the least a form of federation. The Slav majority in Skopje must realise that it would be better to go down that road rather than a futile attempt to hold – with or without Nato support — territory against the ethnic tide. Surely the lessons of the past six years in the former communist Yugoslavia demonstrate that.