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Fighting Around Tetovo Toughens
TETOVO, Macedonia, March 23 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Government forces strafed hills around this Macedonian flashpoint town Friday after officials announced an "uncompromising" crackdown on ethnic Albanian rebels.
Tracer fire from heavy machineguns could be seen rising from the northwestern town overnight and a series of explosions rocked the rough, brush covered hills dotted with ethnic Albanian villages.
After a quiet morning around a dozen mortar shells fired by police units crashed into the rebel-held slopes around 1:10 pm (1210 GMT).
A spokesman for the Kosovo peacekeeping force KFOR said in Prizren that a civilian with head injuries caused by mortar fire had crossed into the U.N.-run province from Macedonian in a group of 20 refugees.
He played down an earlier statement by a German KFOR officer in Tetovo that up to 200 wounded civilians had crossed into Kosovo. Skopje also said it had no information of such casualties.
Tensions are running high in the region as Tetovo's Albanian community prepares to bury a father and son gunned down by Macedonian security forces in a failed grenade attack, according to BBC.
Ten days of fighting have displaced 22,000 people from the area around the large, mainly Albanian town, 14,200 seeking shelter elsewhere in Macedonia, said a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Most of the others have gone to Turkey, Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo.
"The vast majority of those who left their homes said they did so as a precautionary measure, usually citing concerns over the safety of their children, and are staying primarily with friends and relatives," said agency spokesman Ron Redmond.
The Macedonian government on Thursday signaled its determination to destroy the rebels with a renewed onslaught after a delegation of EU officials came to Skopje to express support.
Kosovo's three top ethnic Albanian political leaders Friday signed an EU-proposed declaration calling on Macedonian Albanian rebels "to lay down arms immediately," said Christina Gallach, spokeswoman for EU foreign policy high representative Javier Solana.
The statement also called on Macedonian security forces to show restraint and urged the authorities to resolve the grievances of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia, reports CNN.
"We, the leaders of the political parties in Kosovo, call on the extremist groups which have taken up arms on the territory of Macedonia to lay them down immediately and to return to their homes peacefully," the statement said, CNN adds.
Ibrahim Rugova, Hashim Thaci and Ramush Haradjinaj signed the two-sentence declaration a day after Solana went to Pristina as part of an EU delegation trying to halt the fighting in Macedonia, Gallach said.
The statement added: "We urge the Macedonian government to show restraint and to address and resolve the grievances through peaceful and democratic means."
Copies of the statement were seen at the EU summit in Stockholm, which was to be addressed later Friday by Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski.
Government spokesman Antonio Milososki said the struggle against the ethnic insurrection in the northwest would be "uncompromising" and that commanders in the field had been given authority to pursue the campaign.
The rebels had earlier defied a government ultimatum to give up their arms or leave the country by midnight Wednesday.
On Thursday, police Special Forces shot two ethnic Albanians at a checkpoint in Tetovo after what the interior ministry described as an attempted grenade attack on the position.
The apparent attack came as rebels appeared to be making good an earlier threat to spread fighting to other areas of Macedonia as police units came under fire in previously peaceful areas near the Kosovo frontier.
One police officer was seriously injured in a shooting blamed on the rebels in a separate attack west of the capital Skopje, where a day earlier two policemen had been shot, one fatally.
European Commissioner for External Affairs Chris Patten called on Macedonia to keep its nerve and predicted, "the armed extremists will lose." He also said that no negotiations should be opened with the rebels, CNN reports.
Interior ministry spokesman Stevo Pendarovski said another policeman was injured by a rebel mortar attack Thursday near the Kosovo border.
The scattered attacks mark a shift of rebel tactics away from their offensive on the edge of Tetovo, which has been deadlocked for nine days and appeared to be swinging in the government's favor after the army deployed tanks and cannons to back up special police units.
The National Liberation Army (NLA) says it is fighting to protect the rights of Macedonia's Albanian minority and has demanded the country be split into autonomous ethnic entities.
The government, in power for less than two years, insists it had already started working to improve Albanians' rights before the armed rebellion started. The coalition includes a key Albanian party.
In Washington, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the deployment of unmanned Predator reconnaissance aircraft to the Balkans to beef up aerial reconnaissance around Kosovo.
Much of the intelligence material gathered is being passed on to the Macedonian authorities.
NATO has agreed to boost its presence on Macedonia's border with Kosovo where the rebels are believed to receive their supplies, but says it will not send additional troops, BBC adds.
Trajkovski was due to participate in a EU summit in Stockholm that is expected to be dominated by the Balkans crisis.
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