Macedonia rebels call ceasefire

Macedonian troops have been fighting the rebels since February

SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Ethnic Albanian rebels have volunteered to call a halt to their four-month insurgency in Macedonia.

The rebels said they would hold fire from midnight local time and urged the Macedonian government to agree to a bilateral cease-fire.

The rebel National Liberation Army said in a statement: "The NLA will refrain from fighting from 2400 of June 7th if it is not provoked by the military and police forces of the government of the Republic of Macedonia."

The surprise announcement came as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia's President Boris Trajkovski was preparing a plan to allow the rebels to put down their arms and withdraw from villages in the hills near the border with Kosovo.

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Trajkovski is due to announce the plan in a speech to parliament on Friday afternoon.

"It foresees the NLA being prepared to lay down their weapons, leave the area and enter Kosovo," one envoy said.

Kosovo, to the north, is a U.N.-governed province of Yugoslavia with an overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian population.

Macedonia has been pushed to the brink of crisis by rebel attacks two days ago that killed five of the country's soldiers.

That sparked a night of retaliatory violence against ethnic Albanian targets in the southern city of Bitola that raised fears the small Balkan state would collapse into civil war.

But the cease-fire and presidential plan offers fresh prospects of peace and will be welcomed by NATO and the European Union.

The EU's foreign policy chief Javier Solana was due in Skopje on Friday to persuade squabbling politicians of the need to agree reforms addressing the grievances of Macedonia's Albanian minority.

The NLA says it has been fighting to improve the rights of ethnic Albanians, up to a third of the population, but Macedonia labels them terrorists bent on destroying the state.

Trajkovski's plan is broadly modelled on measures NATO took to persuade ethnic Albanian rebels last month to quit an area of neighbouring southern Serbia where they waged a 16-month insurgency.

A NATO team was in Skopje this week to outline how the amnesty and arms plan worked in the nearby Presevo valley.

NATO sources gave a cautious welcome to the rebel cease-fire, which offers a possible way out of a crisis that roused "deep concern" from alliance defence ministers in Brussels.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson earlier offered alliance help. He said: "If the government in Skopje wishes NATO to have a role in decommissioning and disarming ... then we will be willing to respond to that and we await developments."

Trajkovski would gain wider powers if a state of war was declared

Earlier, Macedonian Slavs buried soldiers killed by rebels while ethnic Albanians cleared the debris from a night of attacks on their property in Bitola.

A 16-gun salute rang out in pouring rain as the white coffin of Blagojce Siljanov, 32, was lowered into the ground. His wife and five-year-old son were at the graveside.

Two more soldiers from Slav-dominated Bitola were among the five fatalities and were also laid to rest Thursday.