SKOPJE (Islamweb & Agencies) - Leaders across Macedonia's ethnic divide restarted peace talks on Tuesday with help from Western envoys but progress appeared likely to be difficult after an Albanian Resistance ambush killed a Macedonian soldier. (Read photo caption below).
U.S. envoy James Pardew and his European Union counterpart Francois Leotard joined the cross-party session in parliament after holding two days of separate crisis talks with politicians to kick-start efforts to avert a civil war with dialogue.
But neither gave any indication of how the deadlocked process might be salvaged to deliver substantial enough results to persuade Albanian fighters to hand over their weapons.
The fighters, whose revolt for equal rights for minority Albanians has brought Macedonia to the brink in less than five months, are planning to advance not retreat and Tuesday's ambush can only raise the pressure on the talks.
An Albanian commander codenamed Sokoli confirmed there had been an attack near the Kosovo border, where the fighters surfaced in February. The Slav-dominated army said the Albanians ambushed a patrol near the hamlet of Tanusevci, killing one soldier and injuring another.
Defense Minister Vlado Buckovski said peace talks had to move quickly and said the military situation was worsening after the Albanian fighters vowed to extend the territory they control.
On the table is a fresh draft of Macedonia's constitution, rewritten by a French expert in a bid to address the sensitive question of how to define the official status of Albanians.
But diplomats expect this to be one of the last issues to be finalized and neither side has commented on the new proposal.
Albanian fighters and politicians demand international mediation and are sure to welcome U.S. involvement. But their Macedonian counterparts are resisting a formalized foreign role.
The only intervention both sides agree on is for NATO to help disarm the rebels if they agree to give up. But without major progress in the talks, this remains a distant prospect.
Some 100,000 civilians have fled their homes since February, more than 70,000 of them to join Albanian kin in Kosovo.
PHOTO CAPTION:
A Mi-24 attack helicopter passes by the Mustapha-Pasha Mosque in the city of Skopje July 3, 2001, after coming back from a mission over the villages near the town of Tetovo. Leaders across Macedonia's ethnic divide restarted peace talks with help from Western envoys but progress appeared likely to be difficult after an Albanian Resistance ambush killed a Macedonian soldier. (Dimitar Dilkoff/Reuters)