Aid fears for Macedonia villagers

Thursday's fighting centred on the village of Matejce

SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Thousands of civilians remain trapped in Macedonia's northeastern mountains by the conflict between government troops and ethnic Albanian rebels.

About 8,000 mostly ethnic Albanian villagers have been caught in the battle zone since May 3.

The latest fighting lasted into Thursday night and focused on the village of Matejca, infiltrated by the rebels last week, army spokesman Blagoja Markovski and a rebel commander calling himself Shpati told Reuters news agency. Neither side reported casualties.

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) spokeswoman in Skopje, Annick Bouvier, said the ICRC did not have enough security guarantees from both sides to try to get into the Lipkovo area, about 20 km (13 miles) northeast of Skopje, where most of the civilians are hiding in basements and cellars.

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Food, water and medicines were reported to be in short supply and summer temperatures were adding to villagers' problems.

While the rebel National Liberation Army (NLA) wanted the civilians evacuated to neighbouring ethnic Albanian dominated Kosovo, village leaders objected to a government evacuation plan.

They said in a statement on Wednesday they feared men would be subjected to paraffin tests to see if they had used firearms and "would be declared terrorists whatever the result."

They called for the villages of Lipkovo and Otlja, "which are overcrowded and in dire need of medicines, food and water," to be declared safe havens under United Nations protection.

The government has accused the rebels of using civilians as human shields in their five-month-old campaign for greater rights for the Balkan state's ethnic Albanian minority.

NATO is giving the badly equipped and inexperienced Macedonian army help with intelligence but does not want to be directly involved in the conflict. NATO's peacekeeping KFOR force has increased patrols on the Kosovo side of the border.

On Thursday they detained nine suspected guerrillas crossing from Macedonia during the night and seized their weapons and vehicles.

"We are doing everything possible to stop the cancer of violence from crossing the borders and boundaries of Kosovo," Colonel B.R. Fitzgerald, chief of staff for the U.S. forces in Kosovo, said in a statement.

Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski has proposed a partial amnesty to persuade the rebels to lay down their arms.

However, ringleaders and those responsible for killing Macedonian soldiers or committing other atrocities would be excluded.

Trajkovski's security adviser, Nikola Dimitrov, said the plan was outlined in a letter to NATO Secretary-General George Robertson.

Ali Ahmeti, political leader of the NLA, said in a statement the amnesty proposal must be examined by "international courts."

The amnesty proposal was welcomed by ethnic Albanian parties in the ethnically mixed coalition government and by Western diplomats, who said it could help avert a wider Balkan conflict.