All Skopje has become accustomed to seeing a 45-year old man clad in a long white robe and flak jacket pushing his cart around the food shelves of the big Vero department store almost every Wednesday or Thursday of the week. Two hand grenades are stuck in the jacket’s front pockets and a Kalashnikov automatic rifle slung across his back. Most of Vero’s customers and staff know him to be one of 30 wanted top al Qaeda and Hizballah operatives hiding in the Crna Gora mountains north of the capital, near the Kosovo border. The Macedonian army and NATO forces policing the Kosovo Macedonia frontier have thrown out an extensive dragnet for their capture. Yet none of the hunters has ever waylaid the frequent shopper or followed him to his hideout.

Again, the reason is simple. Those 30 terrorists are under the protection of Ali Ahmeti, formerly a key commander of the National Liberation Army (NLA), who went into national Macedonian politics by running for election on September 15 at the head of the new Albanian Democratic Party. The European Union-brokered Ohrid peace accord, signed in 2001 to halt ethnic Albanian insurrectionist violence, provided for its ringleader to enjoy a power sharing arrangement in Macedonia. In return, he pledged to renounce civil strife and turn his back on organized crime and his Islamist terrorist associations. Ahmeti was also supposed to hand over the names of the 30 terror chiefs hiding in the hills.

The Albanian rebel chief, since gaining his seat in parliament, has not honored a single one of his promises. He did not disarm his militia and, while handing over 30 names, which still have to be checked, he claimed he never agreed to their detention. Moreover, since the signing of the Ohrid accord, the guerrilla leader turned politician has opened the door wide to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda and allied terrorist groups from the Middle East. Neither Macedonian police officers nor international peacekeepers dare venture into parts of Tetovo and most of the villages strung along Macedonia’s western frontier. The coalition of Islamist terrorists who rule that area pose a rising threat of extremist Muslim penetration to other parts of former Yugoslavia and their European neighbors, while turning Macedonia into their launching pad for terrorist attacks across Europe.

However, the European governments who brokered the accord are restraining NATO and Macedonian forces from going after the al Qaeda and Hizballah leaders, fearing the Macedonian government will fall and the country revert to civil bloodshed between Macedonian Slavs and militant Albanians.

In any case it might be too late for a limited operation. Local Skopjans report that the 30 wanted men have multiplied, joined in their Crna Gora mountain enclave by a small army of some thousand fighting men, who can be heard practicing in the use of automatic weapons, grenades and explosives.

Al Qaeda’s reach from Skopje to Karachi, southern Pakistan, was highlighted on December 5, when the Macedonian honorary consulate building was blown up. The bodies of three Pakistanis were found, all murdered before the explosion. Their deaths are regarded as revenge for the deaths of seven Pakistanis suspected of plotting terrorist attacks on Western embassies in Skopje on behalf of al Qaeda. Macedonian police hunted them down last April and killed them in a gun battle north of Skopje.