SKOPJE, Macedonia — NATO prepared to start collecting guerrilla guns in Macedonia on Sunday well before its full 4,500-strong mission force is on the ground, evoking the urgency of implementing a peace plan menaced by mistrust.
The Macedonian government suspects the ethnic Albanian guerrillas will be able to hide weapons or replenish their arsenal with impunity via smuggling from Kosovo.
Guerrillas fear being left helpless against security forces itching for revenge after failing to contain the insurgency, let alone defeat it, and they want NATO troops to remain to police a "Green Line" — something NATO has ruled out.
Wary of "mission creep" into another Balkan quagmire, NATO has given itself a strict 30 days to disarm only rebels who dump guns voluntarily.
All may hinge on whether NATO can stockpile an arsenal impressive enough to persuade the nationalist-led parliament not to renege on peace accord commitments to enact reforms improving the rights of minority Albanians.
Parliament will convene Friday to consider the first batch of bills. NATO's "Operation Essential Harvest" wants to meet the first third of its arms haul target by then under a scheme twinning disarmament and legislation in three phases.
With the pivotal, agenda-setting parliamentary session looming, NATO commanders said collection depots would open Monday even though the full, 13-nation task force will not be in theater for another week.
A senior NATO officer said he was shown a list of firepower the National Liberation Army rebels say they will relinquish. "There were a lot of weapons (on the list), and if they are given in that is a seriously credible amount of weaponry," he told reporters.
The list included anti-tank rockets and mortars as well as Kalashnikov assault rifles, a common sight in hills held by the NLA in a crescent running from a few miles north of the capital Skopje to the city of Tetovo in the northwest.
"These are the sorts of thing that an organization (which does not want to disband) is going to be extremely reluctant to get rid of," said the NATO officer, who asked not to be named.
Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said that if NATO's estimate of guerrilla arms was around 3,000, as widely reported but yet to be made public, "Harvest" would be a ludicrous failure and war would resume after NATO troops went home. "To talk about only 3,000 pieces of weaponry after five or six months of crisis is ridiculous. I believe that the experts from NATO will correct that number," he said on Saturday. "Without serious disarmament, further fighting is guaranteed."
Macedonia's ethnic polarization looks ominously familiar to those who witnessed the downward spiral to war and dismemberment of fellow Yugoslav republic Bosnia. But NATO said Georgievski's comments would not upset its timetable.
"That has not been presented as the official response to NATO from the government," alliance spokesman Major Barry Johnson said. "We have every confidence this is moving forward and that weapons collection will begin on Monday as planned."
Arms smuggling culture a problem
The senior NATO officer conceded it would be impossible to collect all weapons at the disposal of the NLA, given porous borders with Kosovo and Albania and the inveterate smuggling in the mafia-ridden economies in the Balkans.
As if to underline that sober insight, NATO-led peacekeepers fought and captured five suspected ethnic Albanian insurgents and detained 48 more crossing the border from Macedonia on Friday.
Guerrilla units and government tanks and artillery have begun pulling back from direct firing range on the most volatile sections of the front to minimise the risk of incidents as "Harvest" proceeds.
NATO insisted on Saturday that its latest Balkan mandate, after more ambitious peace enforcement missions in Bosnia and Kosovo that now look indefinite, was credible despite government warnings that the operation had to restore stability, not just collect weapons.
President Boris Trajkovski, giving Macedonians his first detailed explanation of the terms of a peace deal signed two weeks ago, said arms collection was only important if it ensured that more than 125,000 displaced civilians could return home.
"To be honest, that will take time. But it's my top priority and of course we will ask the international community to help us with that," he told Macedonia's biggest-selling daily, Dnevnik.
NATO is widely demonised in the tiny republic for failing to subdue separatist former guerrillas in Kosovo who have supported the rebellion by Macedonia's minority Albanians.
Although NLA guerrillas were barred from the peace talks, they agreed to disband in return for the civil rights reforms that they declared were their objective.
But Trajkovski warned that failure to resettle refugees, which will be tough to achieve before the planned departure of the 4,500 NATO troops, would expose a latent separatist agenda.
"They're fighting to cleanse territory of Macedonians and the non-Albanian population.
"If the agreement and disarmament do not deliver peace and stability, I am certain that the international public will finally recognise the truth."