Missing the Boat In Macedonia.

• Author: Rozen, Laura
• Position: Balkan conflict - Brief Article

AS I WRITE, THE FORMER Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a country I reported from for several months in 1999, is on the verge of civil war. After months of escalating clashes between Macedonian security forces and armed Albanian guerillas demanding greater rights for the country's Albanian minority, a shaky, ceasefire holds while the country's leaders debate a last-ditch peace plan. If the peace talks collapse, Macedonia could go the way of Bosnia and Kosovo, with mass killings, ethnic cleansing, and NATO troops deployed eventually to police the border between ethnic groups for years to come. Even worse, refugees and other fallout from the war could destabilize neighboring countries, including Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Greece.

If ever there was a conflict that Washington should have seen coming, this would seem to be it. Macedonia is not some mysterious, impenetrable land, like North Korea, where good intelligence is hard to come by. Thousands of GIs and scores of U.S. intelligence agents have been on the ground in that Balkan nation since 1993, when the West first became seriously concerned that Yugoslav fighting would spill over into Macedonia. The U.S. embassy in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, is chock-full of experienced Balkan hands. Hundreds of journalists like me made Skopje our base for covering the 1999 war in Kosovo. Every conceivable non-governmental organization, from Doctors Without Borders to UNICEF, has staff people working in Macedonia.

And yet virtually none of us--not the journalists, the diplomats, humanitarians, or spooks--saw this war coming. True, the future is always unknowable. But in this case, a crystal ball wasn't needed. The warning signs were there for all to see. We just failed to interpret them correctly.

Indeed, a year and a half before the fighting broke out, Macedonian newspapers were running front-page stories 'about armed Albanians training in the Sar Mountains near Macedonia's northwestern border with Kosovo. The guerillas even gunned down four Macedonian police officers 13 months before the recent fighting broke out, and issued official communiques calling themselves the "Albanian National Army." Few in the West noticed, and those who did discounted the significance. By December of last year, U.S. government officials were becoming concerned about reports of increased arms flowing from Kosovo into Macedonia. But no one seems to have put two and two together.

No one, that is, except John...