As weapons-collecting mission ends,
small NATO force will stay in Macedonia
By Gregory Piatt,
Belgium bureau
BRUSSELS, Belgium — On the day its weapons-collecting mission in Macedonia
expired, NATO adopted a plan on Wednesday for a small force to protect international
observers monitoring a peace deal signed between the government and ethnic Albanian
rebels, the alliance’s secretary general said.
NATO approved the new force called Operation Amber Fox, but still needs to work out
some details, like the size of the of the force, Secretary-General Lord George Robertson
said.
Other NATO sources said the force could number between 350 to 1,000 troops depending on
the size of the observer force — including troops from Germany, France, Italy and
Poland. No U.S. troops are expected to be part of the new force.
Led by Germany, the follow-on force will replace the 4,500 troops collecting weapons
from the rebel National Liberation Army in a monthlong mission known as Operation
Essential Harvest. Several hundred U.S. troops based in Skopje, Macedonia, and serving in
the KFOR peacekeeping mission supported the weapons collecting mission with logistics,
intelligence and medical assistance.
"NATO stands by to help," Robertson told reporters at its one-day defense
ministers meeting at alliance headquarters in Brussels. "Today is Day 30 of a highly
successful harvest of an armed guerrilla movement. We completed the mission, and it was on
time."
Operation Essential Harvest, the British-led NATO weapons collecting force, surpassed
its target of gathering 3,300 arms voluntarily surrendered by the rebels as part of a
peace agreement for Macedonia, Robertson said.
"The weapons are still being collected today but we can confirm that 3,381 ...
have been collected and the final figure should be higher still," Robertson said on
Tuesday in Macedonia. "The skeptics have been proven wrong. Arms have been handed in
and the disarmament process has gone ahead."
Even before the end of the weapons collecting mission, ethnic Albanian rebels handed
over to NATO troops more than 3,300 firearms — from pistols to a T-55 tank — in
exchange for promised political reform.
NATO approved the follow-on force after Macedonian’s President Boris Trajkovski
requested it in a letter to NATO last week. That request was welcomed by the rebels as a
way to help maintain security in the still-tense country.
A NATO official said on the condition of anonymity that NATO needed to work out a
status of forces agreement and other details before Amber Fox troops deployed. But the
security vacuum in Macedonia won’t be immediate because the weapons collecting force
will redeploy in waves beginning later this week, the official said.
"We still have a few days to work things out," the official said.
Many Macedonians feel the peace agreement brokered by the European Union, NATO and the
United States capitulates to the rebels, and politicians don’t want to look
unpatriotic to voters before elections early next year. They also believe the rebels have
hidden a considerable amount of weaponry they could use to stage another uprising.
Many ethnic Albanians hope the follow-on force will help police an ethnic line where
Albanians stay in one part of the country and Macedonians in another part. But NATO
doesn’t want to take on another open-ended mission in the Balkans, NATO officials
said.
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