NATO troops tallied up more than 400 weapons dumped by guerrillas in Macedonia today and pronounced the first day of a controversial disarmament scheme a success despite brazen bursts of gunfire from the hills.
As British soldiers seated at trestle tables in a farm warehouse examined and registered assault rifles from weaponry arrayed on the floor, several short volleys of submachine gun fire were heard.
The shooting evoked the unmeasurable profusion of guns in the smugglers' paradise of northern Macedonia's borderlands and the risk that NATO's reliance on rebels to yield guns voluntarily may only scratch the surface of their fluid arsenal.
NATO's Operation Essential Harvest has targeted 3,300 guerrilla weapons for removal over 30 days as part of a peace plan granting minority Albanians better civil rights.
The Macedonian government is convinced the guerrillas are harbouring up to 20 times as many weapons and will easily hide the bulk from NATO to be unleashed again when NATO goes home and Skopje tries to reinstate state institutions in the north.
But after Macedonia's lumbering security forces failed to contain, let alone defeat, the National Liberation Army (NLA) guerrillas, it had little choice but to give NATO's prescription for saving the wobbly, 10-year-old Balkan republic a chance.
The agricultural warehouse in the village of Otlja was the first of 15 NATO weapons collection depots to open behind NLA lines across northern Macedonia.
NATO wants to reap 1,100 weapons at Otlja and two other collection points by Friday when parliament convenes to consider a corresponding first third of a package of reforms benefiting ethnic Albanians, who comprise a third of the population.