Europe faces another dilemma in the Balkans

PARIS - The West has won a tactical battle in its Macedonian campaign, but remains unsure about its overall strategy, fearing the former Yugoslav statelet could yet prove to be a quagmire.

After intense debate, lawmakers in Skopje, the Macedonian capital, overwhelmingly agreed to change the country's constitution, a move that opens the next phase of Nato's operations.

Essential Harvest, launched on August 27, is a one-month operation to collect weapons from Macedonia's ethnic Albanian rebels.

It is designed to unfold in three stages. A third of the insurgents' arsenal, which Nato estimates to total 3300 weapons, will be collected in each phase, linked to progressive parliamentary approval of constitutional concessions for the Albanian minority.

But it is still unclear what will happen less than three weeks from now, when Essential Harvest is scheduled to wind up and the 120-member legislature casts a final vote on the reform package.

The choice is a tough one for European policymakers, who see Macedonia - poor, ethnically divided, politically fragile - as just a hair's breadth from the sort of terrifying strife that stained Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.

An election is due in January, and a return to the violence of the past seven months would only boost the fortunes of extremists.

In such circumstances, the West simply cannot leave a "vacuum", said a European Union diplomat, indicating there was growing support in top circles for a mission after Essential Harvest. But who should do it and what should they do?

Nato's official position is that it has no plans to extend Essential Harvest, nor start a new one. Operation Essential Harvest is "a specific mission during a fixed period and that has not changed," said Nato spokesman Yves Brodeur.

The operation, designed to be limited in scope and in time, has been driven by Britain and France. Their eagerness - unreflected in other Nato countries - indicates they want Essential Harvest to convince Washington that Europe can successfully run its own operations under the Nato flag.

In any case, an attempt to extend the mission may run into a United States veto.

The US has been reticent of the Macedonian problem from the outset, seeing in it a far lesser danger than Kosovo, and sensing that Essential Harvest would not achieve much and could drag Nato into yet another unwelcome role as Balkan policeman. As for an EU force - an idea sketched last week by European envoy Francois Leotard - that idea "seems very premature," a Brussels official said brusquely.

One reason is that the EU force, designed to be a crisis-management wing, is not scheduled to be fully operational before the end of the year. But another is how far Germany, Western Europe's third biggest military power, would - with its historic guilt in the Balkans - want to get involved.

The third option is to broaden the international base of the force, putting it into the hands of the United Nations or a coalition of countries willing to send troops to Macedonia to protect peace observers and assure stability.

Any mission can only go ahead if the Macedonian authorities officially request it, something that has been clouded by suspicions that Nato has leaned towards the Albanian rebels. And there also has to be a peace for the mission to support. Resentment between the two communities remains red-hot.

And it is laughably simple to acquire new weapons to replace those that Nato has harvested with such a flourish to the world.

Feature: Yugoslavia

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia

Serbian Ministry of Information

Serbian Radio - Free B92

Otpor: Serbian Student Resistance Movement

Macedonian Defence Ministry

Albanians in Macedonia Crisis Centre

Kosovo information page