rte.ie - Nationalists in Macedonia are "playing with fire" in refusing to relinquish power, said the former envoy who helped avert civil war in the Balkan country.
Pieter Feith also said the European Union should consider halting Macedonia's accession process in order to break a dangerous deadlock, said the former envoy who helped avert civil war in the Balkan country.
A long-running political crisis in the former Yugoslav republic turned violent on Thursday when supporters of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party, some in balaclavas, stormed parliament after a new majority in the assembly elected an ethnic Albanian as speaker, a first step towards replacing the nationalist-led government.
The events, in which one ethnic Albanian MP was badly beaten and several other deputies left bloodied, raised fears that the political crisis was spiralling out of control and may plunge the country back into ethnic conflict 16 years after Western diplomacy averted full-blown civil war.
The nationalists of former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski are blocking the formation of a new government led by the opposition Social Democrats, accusing them of doing a deal with the country's ethnic Albanian minority that risked tearing the country apart by allowing wider official use of the Albanian language.
Mr Feith, who as NATO's Balkans troubleshooter at the turn of the century helped negotiate a peace deal to end months of clashes between Macedonian security forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas in 2001, warned of further escalation.
The nationalists, he said, "are playing with fire. The next step I could imagine, but God forbid, if arms are going to be handed out and circulated as they were in 2001, you are quickly on the abyss of civil war,"
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