Amid growing fears of the Kosovo crisis triggering a third Balkan war, Macedonia said yesterday it was time regional officials met to ensure the conflict did not turn into a wider conflagration.
After emergency talks in Athens, the Macedonian Foreign Minister, Mr Aleksandar Dimitrov, suggested his Balkan counterparts meet as soon as possible to discuss ways of containing the crisis. "We have no time to waste," Mr Dimitrov said after asking Athens to provide help for an estimated 15,000 Kosovan Albanian refugees who have poured into poverty-stricken Macedonia.
"We must try to stop something worse coming out of the Kosovo crisis," he added after meeting the Greek Foreign Minister, Mr George Papandreou.
Fears of the unrest spreading to Albania and Macedonia, the strife-torn province's two frontline states, have increased as the exodus of refugees has grown. Yesterday Greece, which last week called on its NATO allies to end the air strikes, publicly condemned Serbia, its long-standing regional friend, for conducting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
Greek sources said they feared Belgrade was now bent on partitioning the province, keeping the parts that are rich in minerals and historically significant to the Serbs, and leaving the rest to the Kosovan Albanians.
"Our information is that there are Serb forces conducting cleansing, resulting in large movements of population," said Mr Papandreou. "We have condemned any ethnic cleansing operation."
Earlier, the Greek Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, said: "These actions must stop immediately."
Greece, the only NATO and European Union state in the Balkan peninsula, is now worried that hundreds of thousands of refugees are about to pour across its borders. Athens, announced it would be providing humanitarian aid to its neighbours in addition to the reception centres it has already set up along the Greek frontier.
Mr Papandreou said five Balkan states including eternal enemies Greece and Turkey had recently established a task-force to kick-start regional co-operation. "We want to prove that the Balkan states can work together, that all these scenarios of a wider Balkan war are greatly overblown," he said in an exclusive interview with The Irish Times. The minister said while he feared the crisis would destabilise Albania and Macedonia, he had been shocked to see CNN displaying maps that showed Greece and Turkey also "engulfed by flames".
"There's this prejudicial stance in the West that Balkan states are always going to war, that they always want a fight. It's true that there are bilateral problems and important issues need to be solved, but we also have the resolve to work together and not allow the conflict to spread," he said. "The third Balkan war is not going to happen." Athens, he said, was now working feverishly behind the scenes to get Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to sign the peace accord drawn up in Rambouillet last month.