Macedonia Weapons Stash Raises Concern

The National Liberation Army, NLA, was an insurgency group active during the 2001 Macedonian armed conflict.

The statement, which was sent to the e-mail address of the Macedonian Alsat-M TV on Sunday, was signed by a person named Arben Selimi and contained a stamp of the NLA.

"We informed the Albanian community in FYROM [Macedonia’s provisional acronym used in the UN] that on April 28, 2010 our troops, which were guarding a supply point of the NLA, ran into an ambush set by the armed forces of the Slavo-Macedonians,” the statement reads.

On Wednesday a cache containing various types of weapons, including sniper rifles, mortars, and missiles, was discovered by the Macedonian special police forces in mountainous terrain near the Blace border crossing with Kosovo.

The police said they clashed with the armed men who were guarding the stash and wounded at least one of them.

Macedonia’s junior ruling party, the ethnic Albanian Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, has denounced the statement as a provocation and urged people not to be deluded by it.

“There is only one legitimate NLA leader,” the party said, naming their head, Ali Ahmeti, who at the time of the 2001 armed conflict with the Macedonian security forces led the now disbanded insurgency group.

Ahmeti and most of the NLA leadership formed the DUI party after a peace agreement was signed in 2001 envisaging greater rights for the Albanian community in the country. They disbanded the NLA and abandoned all armed activities.

DUI soon became the largest ethnic Albanian party in Macedonia and was previously part of the government formed by the leftist SDSM party and is now part of the government led by the centre-right VMRO DPMNE party.

“It is obvious that this extremist group has the potential to create incidents, but the timely action of the Macedonian police, which seized all the weapons, has produced results,” Macedonian Interior Minister Gordana Jankulovska told media over the weekend.

Meanwhile, local observers warn that the incident should be taken seriously.

"The police need to explain whether the armed group that guarded the weapons was strictly a criminal group or whether it has some political goals as well,” Stevo Pendarovski, advisor to the former Macedonian President Branko Crvenkovski, told local Vreme daily.

Military analyst Blagoja Markovski, who at the time of the 2001 armed conflict was a spokesman for the Macedonian Army, told the same newspaper that today the situation is completely different from that in 2001 and that it would be hard to persuade ethnic Albanians to engage in another insurgency against the state.

“This is a group that cannot handle the democratization of the [Balkans] societies,” he said.

He urged the authorities to be more vigilant and called on politicians to keep their heads cool and restrain from provocations.