Macedonian troops and ethnic Albanian guerrillas waged a gunbattle in the north-west city of Tetovo yesterday in a second day of fighting that has raised fears of a new Balkan war. Russia joined the European Union in saying it was alarmed by the violence and the US bluntly condemned the guerrillas and offered strong backing to Macedonia's government.
NATO said it was taking the situation seriously, but that the fighting in the former Yugoslav republic was quite limited.
Reporters in Tetovo said well-armed Macedonian police opened fire with mortars and heavy machineguns mounted on armoured personnel carriers in the suburbs of Tetovo in the direction of a nearby mountain. Gunmen returned fire.
Fighting near Tetovo, the main city of the ethnic Albanian community who make up a third of Macedonia's population, began on Wednesday, marking a spread of violence in northern areas since last month.
Macedonian authorities blamed Wednesday's fighting on 200 "terrorists" from ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo who crossed high mountains on the border and occupied several villages.
One civilian died on Wednesday and two were wounded, while 15 Macedonian policemen, three of them ethnic Albanians, were hurt, officials said. There was no word on the rebels' losses.
The violence has increased fears that inter-ethnic Macedonia, the only state to win its independence from Yugoslavia without war, could succumb to the chaos that has afflicted the rest of the Balkans for the last decade.
Around two thirds of the country's two million people are ethnic Macedonians, one third are ethnic Albanians.
Mr Daja Ali, a representative of the National Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian force claiming responsibility for the fighting, said that Macedonian forces shelled his group's position in north Macedonia in the morning.
The Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Igor Ivanov, was quoted by domestic news agencies condemning both the guerrillas in Macedonia and a similar group of ethnic Albanian rebels in the Presevo Valley area of neighbouring Serbia.
"In both cases, unfortunately, there have been infiltrations from extremist groups who want to break up the process of normalising the situation in the Balkans and drag the region into a new conflict with new victims," Mr Ivanov said.
NATO brokered a ceasefire in the Presevo Valley this week and the situation has been calm there since then. As part of the deal, Yugoslav army tanks drove back to barracks on Wednesday.
Western governments have acknowledged there are some problems with minority rights in Macedonia but have praised the current government, which includes the main ethnic Albanian political party, for taking steps to tackle them.
In Brussels, a NATO official speaking before the latest gun-battles broke out in Tetovo area said the situation in Macedonia should not be exaggerated.
"These are small groups. It appears to NATO that the [Macedonian] government has the situation in hand," the official said. "They are small and largely isolated. This is limited violence and these are not large numbers of people."
President Boris Trajkovski of Macedonia, also speaking shortly before the new fighting erupted, said his government was determined to crush the guerrillas. "The fight against them will not stop and we will not give up . . . We will isolate them politically and militarily."