British officers will command the operation, which is portrayed as a 30-day mission to collect weapons from Albanian rebel forces. It will include troops from Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Turkey.

There are already 3,000 troops from NATO countries in Macedonia, and the 30-day limit is expected to be quickly set aside. In a feature opinion column, Wesley Clark, commander of NATO forces during the imperialist assault on Yugoslavia in 1999, said that if NATO "is serious about making democracy work in this fractious corner of Europe, then Western forces need to enter as soon as possible, engage as broadly as possible and stay as long as necessary to restore peace."

The NATO intervention follows eight months of clashes in which the Macedonian regime has attempted to crush an insurgency by Albanian rebels--part of a broader fight in the region by Albanians against the discrimination and oppressive conditions they face.

Albanians make up around one-third of Macedonia's 2 million citizens. They face an unemployment rate of 60 percent, compared with the national average of about 30 percent. Demands raised by the rebels have widespread backing among Albanians. They include the demands for equal status in the constitution, for Albanian to be made an official language, and for representation in government and police structures.

The rebels of the National Liberation Army (NLA) launched their military campaign last February and gradually seized large chunks of land to the north and west of Skopje. In intense battles with the guerrillas, the Macedonian government has used tanks and heavy artillery in Tetovo, the country's second largest city, which has the greatest concentration of Albanians. Government forces have also strafed and shelled smaller villages. Despite these assaults, the Albanian population has not been cowed into submission.

Washington has provided military and economic aid to the regime of Macedonian president Boris Trajkovski. When fighting began in February, U.S. troops were moved to the border zone between Macedonia and Kosova to cut off supplies to the NLA from Albanians in Kosova. Aerial photographs of NLA strongholds taken by pilotless reconnaissance planes of the U.S. military have been delivered to the Macedonian army.  
 
Concessions granted
With the Macedonian military unable to smash the Albanians' struggle for national rights, NATO officials sought to curtail the growing instability and brokered a "peace accord" that opened the door to the NATO intervention. On August 13 leaders of Albanian political parties and Macedonian government officials signed a deal to end the fighting.

Under the agreement, the rebels are supposed to turn in their weapons over a 30-day period, and the Macedonian government has said they will grant amnesty to the guerrillas. The nation's constitution is to be amended to make Albanian an official language in areas where they constitute more than 20 percent of the population. The government also agreed to recruit 1,000 Albanians to the national police force and to provide financial aid to an Albanian-language university.

Macedonia government officials were reluctant to sign the deal. However, "we don't have too many choices," said Gjorgi Trendafilov, a spokesperson of the party of Prime Minister Lupco Georgievski. According to the Washington Post, Western diplomats have offered to organize a "donor conference on aid" as a bribe for Macedonia officials to accept the agreement.

NATO's expanding role in Macedonia follows the massive bombing assaults against Yugoslavia that led to Washington establishing military occupation forces in the Balkans over the previous decade. Washington and other imperialist powers have taken advantage of the collapse of the Yugoslav regime in the early 1990s and the resulting infighting and wars between rival bureaucratic gangs--portrayed by the big business media as tribal or ethnic conflicts--as a pretext for their military intervention.

The federated Yugoslav workers state that the imperialists and rival Stalinist factions began to tear apart was a gigantic accomplishment of the Yugoslav revolution of 1942-46. Workers and peasants who were Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and from other nationalities forged unity to oust the Nazi occupation forces and their local collaborators, carry out a radical land reform, and expropriate the capitalist exploiters. This proletarian socialist revolution, among the most powerful of the century, is the ultimate target of the imperialist intervention.

In 1994-95 U.S. and NATO warplanes conducted air strikes against Bosnia and carved the republic up into zones of operations of British, French, German, Italian, and U.S. imperialist occupation forces. In 1999 Washington and other NATO forces launched an 11-week bombing campaign, claiming that their targets were Serb armed forces operating inside Serbia and Kosova. That onslaught devastated Yugoslavia's industrial and transport infrastructure, as well as working-class neighborhoods. Nearly 20,000 troops of the Atlantic alliance are currently deployed in Bosnia, and another 46,000 NATO military personnel occupy the Yugoslav province of Kosova.  
 
Interimperialist conflict
The new moves into Macedonia have brought to light some of the competing interests between the imperialist powers in Europe.

According to the Financial Times, British soldiers, who are "on the front line in the world's hot spots," could comprise about half the NATO intervention force. Prime Minister Anthony Blair is "seeking to set an example to the rest of Europe in an area where Britain is strong--versatile, rapidly deployable armed forces--to help make up for his inability to take Britain into monetary union," the paper noted.

Some of the 300 U.S. soldiers who will join the operation have already been deployed in Macedonia for months at Camp Able Sentry, a support base for Washington's occupation force in Kosova. The U.S. military base is near Macedonia's capital Skopje. U.S. general Joseph Ralston, NATO's top commander, traveled to Macedonia August 20 to assess the region and gave the green light for the deployment the next day.

New disputes have been engendered in the German government, which is seeking to provide 500 troops to the new deployment. At least 28 members of parliament belonging to German chancellor Gerhard Schröder's Social Democratic Party (SPD) and four legislators from the Green party declared their opposition to Berlin's involvement in the military operation. "We are against German participation because we believe it is not appropriate to deploy NATO in the region because NATO is not trusted in the region," asserted SPD representative Harald Friese.

As Schröder worked to assemble a majority for the deployment, two members of the opposition Christian Democrats introduced legislation to amend the constitution to in future allow the government to send troops abroad without prior parliamentary agreement.

Like their colleagues in Germany several other imperialist representatives are nervous about the Macedonia operation. "Although 3,500 is not so many, this is a political decision," said one NATO official. "It's the third deployment in the Balkans after Kosovo and Bosnia. In the backs of people's mind is the risk that things could go wrong."

"No one...is breaking out the champagne," said Australia's former foreign minister Gareth Evans about the NATO occupation. "This is Macedonia 2001, but it looks unnervingly like Bosnia 1992."

Meanwhile, Washington has taken further steps to get Belgrade to do its dirty work of policing the Kosova boundary area with Serbia. According to the Associated Press, Norwegian lieutenant-general Thorstein Skiaker, a NATO commander, signed an agreement with Yugoslav lieutenant-general Momcilo Momcilovic August 17 officially allowing the Yugoslav army back into the area. This "buffer zone" was created in southern Serbia to separate the province as part of the deal imposed on Belgrade after NATO's 1999 bombardment of the country.  
 
 
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