I was driving on a side street in Tetovo, a predominantly Albanian town that been a ground zero for the Macedonian government’s largely unsuccessful strikes against ethnic Albanian rebels over the last four months. Ambushes by the self-proclaimed National Liberation Army (NLA) are the order of the year, claiming the lives of more than a dozen police officers and soldiers, and injuring scores more.
It’s probably not surprising, then, that government officials here are becoming increasingly jumpy. Mobile NLA fighters are withstanding even the fiercest of the army’s bombardments and are slowly gaining support from ethnic Albanian civilians, who now routinely ferry food and medical supplies to NLA members hiding out in nearby villages and mountains.
An apparent resentment of foreigners is developing, too. With an increasingly fragile week-old ceasefire eating at their nerves, Macedonian security forces have harassed or detained more than seven of us in the last week alone.
Part of that attitude may be a legacy of the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo, when most Western powers fiercely supported Albanian Kosovars in their fight against Slobodan Milosevic’s brutal regime. The fighting in the Serbian province led to more than 300,000 refugees-and almost an equal number of foreign diplomats, journalists and aid workers-flooding into tiny Macedonia.
The influx aggravated existing tensions between Macedonia’s Slav majority and Albanian minority. And although Western officials now publicly support the Macedonian government’s position that the NLA is a terrorist group, the use of American-led NATO troops to help evacuate some of the rebels from the village of Aracinovo three weeks ago has fueled local suspicion of outsiders.
Macedonians, angry with President Boris Trajkovski for agreeing to the European Union-brokered plan and for letting the rebels leave with their weapons, stormed the parliament the next day. Six foreign journalists were badly beaten in the riots which followed. At the same time, many Macedonians are increasingly scornful of international interference, arguing that their government’s heeding of international calls to use only “proportionate” force has allowed the rebels to extend the territory under their control.
Some of the anger is directed at the United States. On July 6 the car of U.S. Ambassador Michael Einik was stoned during a visit to Tetovo. A few days earlier, local media had reported that an armed man in uniform threatened to burn down the American embassy. Macedonian civilians who threw stones at Einik said it was an expression both of their fury at having been run out of their homes by the NLA and America’s perceived leniency towards the guerrillas. “Our list of complaints grows longer each day,” says one official at the U.S. embassy in Skopje. “We are seeing a real upsurge in anti-Western sentiment.”
Unfortunately, I was about to be caught in that myself. The policemen who stopped me didn’t like my flak jacket or the fact that I was carrying two telephones. They demanded I turn them over along with all my documents and follow then to the police station.
Being alone and aware of Balkan security forces’ long record of maltreatment of detainees, I panicked and started arguing with them. “You can’t do this,” I complained, in a voice far shakier than I would have preferred. “I have done nothing wrong and will not comply until you give me an explanation.” The pair, brandishing their Kalashnikov rifles, just shrugged and turned their backs to make a call on a cell phone.
My fear mounted when I realized they weren’t using their official police radio. Luckily, I was able to make my own phone call while they were busy with theirs. I just managed to tell a translator with whom I worked that I was in trouble before one of the officers grabbed the phone out of my hand and threw it in my car. “You have no rights to make a call. Do not do that again,” he growled.
A little later, I was smoking my fourth straight cigarette when the police officers attempted to grab my phones. To the horror of my just-arrived translator, the three of us began fighting over the devices in an all together humorless tug-of-war. I wanted to turn them off, they just wanted them. “I will throw you in jail if you do not let them go!” shouted the bigger of the two, raising his hand to me as he shoved me against the car. I gave up.
Still later, after a harrowing 20 minutes in a room with more than a dozen stern-faced policemen commenting on my appearance, my profession, and my “foreign-ness,” I was interrogated by a member of the much-feared DBK state-security services. He asked about my contacts with the NLA, my opinion on the situation in general, ongoing political negotiations and what NATO is really trying to do here. He wanted names, physical descriptions and location of NLA commanders. He wanted to know their battle plans. He wanted my answers, no matter how unsatisfying they might be, and flatly refused my repeated requests to contact my embassy.
“There is no problem, you do not need an embassy,” he answered each time. If there was no problem, why wasn’t I allowed to leave, I asked. He would just smile and calmly resume his questioning. It was the most frightening 90 minutes of my life. When my inquisitor answered a phone call my mind raced over everything I had said, wondering if anything I had said or done in the course of my standard journalistic work could be twisted into a trumped-up criminal charge.
Most of all, I wondered how I was ever going to get out of this if nobody knew I was there. My only hope was that the translator would contact the embassy for me.
Then my interrogator ended his call. “That was your friend,” he said. “I told him we are already friends, too. That’s right, isn’t it?”
The “friend” as it turned out, was the Deputy Interior Minister Refet Elmazi. The translator had managed to reach him, and he in turn had called his minister. The minister himself-apparently shocked to hear of the incident-had issued the order for my release. “One of the problems,” the Elmazi later told me, “is that too often local officials do what they want to. As long as the ministry is unaware they have free rein. It is frightening.”
The police never gave any indication of my supposed infraction or crime. “It will be explained to you later,” they said repeatedly. But when they finally released me, I still had no firm answer. I guess I can work it out for myself, though.
