Macedonia ceasefire aids evacuation

SKOPJE, Macedonia -- A brief ceasefire in Macedonia has allowed aid workers to evacuate dozens of sick and elderly civilians trapped by weeks of combat between the army and ethnic Albanian rebels.

The International Committee of the Red Cross rescued 66 women, sick children and old men from the village of Lipkovo on Monday in the first such mercy mission it had been able to make in nine days.

"They were selected by the local authorities to leave because they were the most vulnerable," said ICRC field co-ordinator Olivier Chow. "Some were old and some were sick."

After overnight clashes following a weekend of bombardments, the army and insurgents agreed a four-hour pause in combat around the string of villages nestling under northern mountains which rebels have occupied for more than a month.

"We were given adequate security guarantees by both sides to allow us to do this," Chow said.

"We hope to repeat the exercise tomorrow."

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Near Lipkovo, the Macedonian army said it had avoided a novel attack overnight when ethnic Albanian guerrillas sent a bomb aboard a horse and cart toward their lines.

Frontline soldiers opened fire on the riderless carriage igniting a boiler full of explosives and shrapnel just 20-30 metres (yards) from their positions, said an army spokesman.

"The soldiers opened fire at the cart and it exploded. The horse is dead," he said.

Thousands more residents and displaced people are believed still to be sheltering in their homes.

The Interior Ministry and the mayor of Lipkovo, no longer in his village, say 13,000 to 15,000 people are trapped with food, water and medical supplies running low.

The ICRC says it believes several thousand are trapped. But Chow's team was not able to go right into Lipkovo to count them on its short dash across no-man's land.

The Macedonian army says concern for civilian casualties has kept it from an all-out assault on the villages held by the rebels, who argue they are fighting for fairer treatment of the ethnic Albanian minority, up to a third of the population.

Military deal to boost security

Meanwhile, Yugoslavia and Macedonia signed a military deal on Monday to boost security along their joint border and enable Skopje to buy arms from Belgrade.

The agreement comes five days after Yugoslav forces peacefully reoccupied the last chunk of a buffer zone around Kosovo, taking back control from ethnic Albanian guerrillas who used it as a base for a 16-month insurgency.

"We will work for increased security of our borders and exchange information in fighting terrorism and organized crime," Macedonian Defence Minister Vlado Buckovski told Reuters after signing the agreement with his Yugoslav counterpart.

"It is not a secret that in this crisis we need offensive and defensive weapons," he said. "We will seek to buy military equipment directly from the Yugoslav defence ministry without intermediaries," he said.

In another development, talks chaired over the weekend by President Boris Trajkovksi of the unity government to look at devolving local government broke up without any firm proposals.

Macedonian Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said late on Sunday the unwieldy inter-ethnic coalition should cut short its work and hold elections in September instead of January.

"I do not see a big future for this coalition," he told local television.

It is not clear when the parties will next meet.

The political leader of the rebel National Liberation Army, Ali Ahmeti, Monday repeated the guerrillas' baseline demand for changes in the constitution to guarantee the equality of Albanians and Slavs.

"All that we demand is for Macedonia to become our state too, not a state of only one ethnic group," he told the Kosovo daily Koha Ditore.