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| Europe |
| New concerns over Albanian guerrillas |
| 2003-09-07 |
| The Swiss authorities have announced that they have banned the political chief of ethnic Albanian guerrilla group the Albanian National Army, Gafurr Adili, from living in Switzerland. Friday’s announcement coincided with a continuing stand-off between ethnic Albanian fighters and Macedonian security forces around two northern villages where police have been looking for a fugitive Albanian guerrilla commander. But what does the Albanian National Army, known by its Albanian initials as the AKSh, stand for and how much support does it enjoy? The shadowy AKSh emerged into the open at the time of the conflict between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and security forces in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia during 2001. In the course of that confrontation, the vast majority of ethnic Albanian guerrillas were fighting in the ranks of the National Liberation Army, or UCK, and their goal was to secure more extensive collective rights for Macedonia’s large ethnic Albanian community. With many of those objectives adopted in the Ohrid accords of August 2001, the UCK under its leader, Ali Ahmeti, transformed itself into a political party, the Democratic Union for Integration. It has since joined Macedonia’s coalition government. The former UCK’s partial integration into Macedonia’s political structures has opened the way for the AKSh to present itself as the new representative of ethnic Albanian interests, untainted by the benefits of sharing power. But the AKSh goes well beyond pursuing equal rights for ethnic Albanians. Instead, it stands for the creation of a greater Albania which would unite ethnic Albanian-inhabited regions of Macedonia, southern Serbia and Montenegro with Kosovo and the mother country, Albania, itself. Indeed, AKSh groups have been active not just in Macedonia but also in Kosovo and in the Presevo valley in southern Serbia which has a substantial ethnic Albanian population. This year, in particular, has seen an upsurge in violence in all these three regions. So much so, that in April the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, declared the AKSh a terrorist organisation. It is difficult to assess the strength of the AKSh because it is, by its nature, a highly secretive organisation. But it is unlikely to have more than a few hundred fighters spread over different countries and entities. As for public support for the AKSh among ethnic Albanians, that, too, is believed to be rather limited because of loyalty to the more mainstream organisations or political parties that have emerged from the various former guerrilla groups in Kosovo, Macedonia and southern Serbia. In any case, for the time being, most ethnic Albanians across the region seem to have adopted a "wait and see" attitude which is based on their expectations of how the various peace processes in the different entities work out. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |