http://www.b92.net/eng/news/globe-article.php?yyyy=2007&mm=07&dd=11&nav_category=123&nav_id=42372
Macedonian Albanians “ready to fight for Kosovo”
11 July 2007 | 17:02 | Source: BIRN
*SKOPJE -- Macedonia’s main Albanian opposition party official says
thousands could fight for the independence of Kosovo.
* “We have at least five thousand volunteers in Macedonia that are
willing to fight for Kosovo if necessary,” Fazli Veliu, a member of the
Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, presidency and head of the war
veterans association of the National Liberation Army, NLA, the force
that launched an insurgency in Macedonian 2001, told Balkan Insight.
In a statement published in daily Dnevnik, Veliu gave similar comments
but talked of ten thousand former fighters.
A senior source in the DUI presidency criticized Veliu’s remarks as “not
serious”, adding that they were “unnecessarily raising tensions”.
“After a serious warning in February, Veliu is again playing with his
status in the party,” the source said.
“The DUI cannot pay a price for the adventurous statements of people who
did not really even have a serious role in the NLA but were just tagging
along,” the same official said.
In February, the Democratic Union for Integration distanced itself from
Veliu after he led a group of Macedonian Albanians to attend a protest
in Priština called by Kosovo’s radical nationalist movement,
Vetevendosje.
Veliu said the fighters from Macedonia would help the struggle against
all those who are stopping Kosovo’s independence, “first of all Serbia
and then all its allies”.
He said that if Kosovo’s final status was not resolved soon, “I can say
with full responsibility that we are going to fight. This will not be a
classic war with one AK47, this will be a wide war that will include all
Albanians,” he went on.
However, a representative from Kosovo’s war veterans association said
aid from Macedonia was totally unnecessary.
“We don’t need these 5,000 men from Macedonia, we have enough men of our
own,” was his argument, according to BIRN.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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http://www.antic.org/
