SKOPJE (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Macedonian families Friday will bury 10 soldiers killed in an ambush by ethnic Albanian fighters against a desolate backdrop for a new peace plan after bombing raids by Macedonian jets.The 10 will be laid to rest in their home town, Prilep, in the south. They were killed Wednesday on the highway between Skopje and the northwestern town of Tetovo in the bloodiest clash of the six-month conflict.
Fighting has ravaged the Tetovo area since the killings, battering diplomatic efforts to avert a new Balkan war.
A diplomat and witnesses said Sukhoi Su-25 jets dropped bombs on Albanian-held areas northeast of Tetovo Thursday night after fighters assaults on a city police station and barracks.
A defense ministry source denied the jets had dropped bombs, saying they were merely flying over the area. Tetovo streets were quiet around midnight after 12 people, including a six-year-old girl, were injured.
``This is a serious escalation of the fighting,'' the diplomat said of what he described as two sorties by Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft over northwestern Macedonia -- one of the first uses of planes in the six-month conflict.
Hours after the deaths of the 10 soldiers, leaders of the main Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political parties initialed a Western-brokered peace deal and expressed hopes of a signing ceremony Monday.
Western powers say they are counting on the Albanian fighters agreeing to yield weapons voluntarily to a force of 3,500 NATO soldiers to be deployed once the peace agreement is signed and an amnesty and lasting cease-fire are in place.
'DOESN'T LOOK GOOD'
Diplomats said that the next day or so will be pivotal to chances for salvaging the peace accord.
``It doesn't look good,'' one said.
Macedonians' expected outpouring of emotion at the funerals of the 10 killed in Prilep could inflame ethnic tensions anew. A Prilep mosque was razed to the ground by a mob hours after the killings of the soldiers. (Read photo caption below)Some Macedonian hard-liners regard the peace plan as capitulation at gunpoint to demands for more rights for ethnic Albanians, who make up about 30 percent of the population. Albanianl hard-liners also believe their best chance lies in more fighting.
The peace plan would grant more rights to ethnic Albanians including wider use of the Albanian language, more jobs in the police force, reforms to education and to the constitution.
Fighting has made an absurdity of an already ragged cease-fire supposedly in effect since July 5 between the Slav-dominated government forces and the Albanian National Liberation Army.
In an ominous sign, Albanian media in neighboring Kosovo received a fax from a hitherto unknown group calling itself the Albanian National Army (ANA).
It said a special unit of the ANA-NLA carried out the attack on the soldiers to avenge the killings of five fighters shot dead in a police raid in Skopje Tuesday.
And it urged all Albanian fighters to keep fighting. It was unclear whether the message was a hoax or revealed a new radical splinter group.
A crowd of about 200 nationalist Macedonians demonstrated outside parliament in Skopje Thursday night, a day after about 1,000 people attacked shops owned by ethnic Albanians in protest at the killings of the soldiers.
The state news agency MIA said 46 people were arrested in Wednesday's unrest.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Bare chested Romany youths protest in Prilep, 160 km south-west from capital Skopje, August 9, 2001. A mosque and many Muslim stores were destroyed after news that Albanian extremists killed 10 Macedonian soldiers on the road between Skopje and Tetovo on Wednesday. All of the soldiers were from Prilep, and three of them were Romany. REUTERS/Ognen Teofilovski MACEDONIA OUT
- Aug 09 9:46 AM ET