Army tanks roll into besieged city

The Macedonian army sent four tanks rolling into the country’s second-largest city today, signalling the military is ready to engage ethnic Albanian rebels fighting for increased rights.

Nato, under increasing pressure to intervene, sent troops to the border with Kosovo to cut off rebel supply lines.

The tanks entered Tetovo accompanied by an armoured personnel carrier and two military trucks, one filled with government soldiers. They arrived on the scene as clashes decreased in intensity after a night of bombardments.

Macedonian police and army units were bringing in infantry reinforcements, including armoured vehicles, field artillery pieces and howitzers, the independent Yugoslav radio station B92 reported.

It said the rebels tried to raid the centre of Tetovo this morning but suffered heavy casualties and retreated back into the hills above the city.

Reflecting growing international concern that the stability of the entire region is at stake, Nato Secretary-General Lord Robertson said today that the international force in Kosovo was moving more troops up to the border with Macedonia to cut off the supply lines to insurgents who have attacked government forces there. He declined to say how many troops would be deployed.

‘‘We are determined to starve this limited group of extremists of the means’’ of carrying on the fighting, Robertson told reporters.

Several hundred ethnic Albanian civilians were fleeing Tetovo in buses and cars, said Thomas Loebbering, spokesman for German forces in the Kfor international peacekeeping force in neighbouring Kosovo.

‘‘This is not a very promising sign,’’ he said.

Germany moved four Leopard 2 battle tanks, four Marder armoured personnel carriers and four Fuchs transport tanks, together with 100 soldiers from Kosovo, to protect its remaining 150-200 soldiers in Tetovo.

‘‘We will only shoot back if we are under immediate attack,’’ Loebbering said.

Fighting was especially fierce overnight in the village of Drenoec on the outskirts of Tetovo, where the rebels fired on police, state-run media reported. Insurgents also targeted the Tetovo soccer stadium with mortars. The neighbourhoods of Teke, Mala Recica and Gajire were rocked by fighting.

A few city buses and some cars returned to the streets but most stores remained shut after an overnight curfew ended on Monday morning.

Last night, only a handful of people, and even fewer cars with darkened headlights, crept through the streets. But the curfew ordered by Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, along with restrictions on movements in the region, did nothing to stop the booming volley of fire between government forces and the insurgents.

‘‘Macedonia will win this battle without giving up a single foot of our territory. And after the victory, Macedonians and Albanians will continue to live together as they must,’’ Georgievski declared in a Sunday address to a nation he said ‘‘is rapidly arming itself’’.

Georgievski accused the United States and Germany of not doing enough to stop the rebels. ‘‘You cannot convince us that the chieftains of these gangs are unknown to your governments, nor can you persuade us that they cannot be stopped,’’ he said.

Zekir Bekteshi, spokesman for the opposition ethnic Albanian Party of Democratic Prosperity, said party activists were working in the field to try to ‘‘calm the situation’’ and stabilize the Tetovo region.

‘‘We are optimistic that this can still be resolved by political means and diplomacy,’’ Bekteshi said.

As the conflict moved into its sixth day, European leaders stepped up their criticism of the rebels’ tactics. EU foreign ministers were to meet Monday in Brussels to discuss the crisis, with the EU’s security affairs chief, Javier Solana, heading to the Macedonian capital of Skopje later in the day.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, arriving in Belgrade last night for a week of talks with Macedonian and Yugoslav leaders on ways to avert all-out war, warned that the stability of the entire Balkans was at stake.

‘‘We are deeply convinced that the international community now needs to unite efforts to establish stability and stop the terrorism,’’ he said.

Ethnic Albanians account for at least a quarter of Macedonia’s 2 million people, and although ethnic relations in Slav-dominated Macedonia have been relatively trouble free, substantial numbers of the minority feel they are being treated as second-class citizens.

The rebels insist their battle is not being instigated from Kosovo by the former Kosovo Liberation Army, but the latest uprising shares the aspirations of Kosovar Albanians for ethnic Albanian self-determination, if not outright independence.