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MACEDONIAN SECURITY FORCES MOVE AGAINST ANA STRONGHOLDS
Reuters
09 September 2003
Equipment seized from the ANA fighters
SKOPJE (Reuters) - Macedonia vowed on Monday to hunt down ethnic Albanian militants after security forces said they killed two gunmen in what looked like the biggest such crackdown since a 2001 insurgency.
"The ultimate goal is...that all criminal gangs and their leaders be brought to justice," Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski told reporters.
The Interior Ministry initially said several armed men died when police and soldiers clashed on Sunday with 20-25 suspected separatists in the remote village of Brest, on the frontline during the rebellion two years ago and near U.N.-run Kosovo.
But officials showing reporters seized items, including a heavy machine gun and a black rebel uniform, said two had been killed in several hours of fighting. They said the group had used mortars and grenades against government forces.
"One of our patrols came under fire," Defense Ministry spokesman Marjan Gurovski said. "Troops responded and killed two of the gunmen." Army and police said they suffered no losses.
A parliamentary deputy of a party that emerged from the guerrilla force which battled Macedonian troops two years ago and is now in Crvenkovski's government, criticized the action.
"We are against any kind of armed operations and use of force. Such actions are not in the spirit of the peace agreement," said Hisni Shaqiri of the Democratic Union for Integration, junior party in the Social Democrat-led coalition.
"Nobody wants 2001 to be repeated," the ex-guerrilla said.
A shadowy group known as the Albanian National Army (ANA), declared a terrorist organization by the United Nations in Kosovo, said late on Sunday that two of its "soldiers" had died in the fighting and implicitly threatened to hit back.
ANA accused the military on its Web site of using helicopters to blast two villages and said one civilian died.
Macedonian officials denied this and said no force had been used against the population in the operation around 30 km (20 miles) north of the capital Skopje, adding that police helped a group of 96 villagers leave after the fighting began.
The area is close to the U.N.-governed province of Kosovo, formally part of the new union of Serbia and Montenegro but populated mainly by pro-independence ethnic Albanians.
Macedonia, which peacefully broke away from Yugoslavia 12 years ago, has seen sporadic violence since a Western-brokered peace accord in 2001. The guerrillas agreed to lay down arms in return for better rights for the large Albanian minority.
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