Macedonian artillery fell silent Friday as clashes between the army and ethnic Albanian rebels ground to a halt, but the fate of some 12,000 trapped civilians remained in the balance.
An AFP reporter near the flashpoint village of Matejce could see no sign of the fierce clashes of previous days, during which army tank crews and special police units exchanged fire with heavily armed guerrillas.
The Red Cross warned that the guerrillas had not guaranteed the safety of teams seeking to visit villagers holed up further north in the rebel stronghold of Lipkovo, where displaced civilians were living in "desperate" conditions.
Army spokesman Colonel Blagoja Markovski confirmed that after a night marked by sporadic clashes, Friday had begun quietly on the front line, located 25 kilometers (16 miles) north of Skopje.
"It is calm so far today. We will respond to any provocations from the terrorists," he said.
The colonel said there had been fighting during the night and that the army had thwarted a rebel attempt to bring supplies into the village on horseback, but could give no information about casualty figures.
"We cannot say that the village is totally under our control," he said.
Police units backed up by army tanks and artillery have been fighting daily battles with the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (NLA) in and around Matejce since the weekend, when the rebels infiltrated the village and seized control of a monastery and a mosque on a slope above the settlement.
A member of a police special intervention unit, who asked not to be named, told AFP that there had been fierce fighting in the village itself and that a number of guerrillas had been killed. His claims were impossible to verify.
On Thursday in the hills west of Matejce, one of a group of rebel-held villages, an army captain was killed when a lorry carrying supplies to troops on the Kosovo border hit a landmine.
Husamedin Halili, the mayor of Lipkovo, a village in the center of a rebel-controlled pocket of territory in hills north of Skopje, told AFP earlier this week that more than 12,000 civilians were sheltering in his village.
Fierce fighting in the surrounding area had forced many ethnic Albanian villagers to descend on Lipkovo, which has so far been spared the worst of the fighting.
Halili and civil defense officials in the town have called on international groups to bring aid to the civilians, who they say are running short of food, water and medicine.
But Annick Bouvier, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), said that thus far the guerrillas had not given assurances that humanitarian teams could gain access to the village.
"As always since the start of this crisis, we are ready and willing to send teams to assess the humanitarian needs of the civilian population, but so far the armed ethnic Albanian groups have not given security guarantees," she said.
The Macedonian government has repeatedly accused the rebels of exploiting the trapped civilians as human shields against a possible government offensive, but Halili told AFP that the villagers were afraid to come out because of reports of police brutality -- LJUBODRAG, Macedonia (AFP)
