Paddy Ashdown: The West must act now, or face the risk of a wider war in the Balkans

As Slobodan Milosevic approaches his trial in The Hague, and as fresh fighting breaks out in Macedonia, I am reminded that, in the Balkans, it is the interconnection of things which matters more than the things themselves.

Failure to recognise this has been one of the chief causes of our failures in the Balkans. We gave recognition to Croatia – and blew up Bosnia. At Dayton we brought peace to Bosnia – but omitted to include Kosovo. We fought the Kosovo war to protect Albanians and end the threat of greater Serbia – but failed to address the threat posed by the concept of greater Albania.

And so we end up with Macedonia and a crisis which looks more and more likely to slide from sporadic outbursts of conflict into civil war with the capacity to drag in a wider set of players, from Greece through to Bulgaria and Romania on one side and Albania and, God help us, Turkey on the other.

Macedonia is a new state, hewn uncomfortably out of ex-Yugoslavia, in which there is a large Albanian minority population made up of two distinct elements; the older, settled Albanians with whom the Macedonian Slav majority get on perfectly well and a later influx who fled from Kosovo in the early days of Milosevic, and who are hated and distrusted in equal measure by the Macedonian Slavs.

It is these newer arrivals who formed the backbone of the Kosovo Liberation Army (which was actually founded in the western Macedonian city of Tetovo) and who returned to Kosovo to fight Milosevic in the rebellion of 1998, lighting the fuse which led to war and Nato's intervention. Flushed with success, they returned home to take up the cause of Albanians in their own country, where successive Slav governments have denied Albanians the rights they ought to have enjoyed in a country aspiring to join the EU.

This has, in many ways, been a slow-motion tragedy, whose predictability has not seemed to make it any easier to solve. It has not been for want of trying. The new government of President Boris Trajkovski is the first to have been made up of Slavs and Albanians (chiefly from the original Albanian population). They made brave, if insufficiently urgent, attempts to address Albanian grievances, encouraged by the West. The present crisis broke when a handful of (mostly ex-Kosovar) rebels emerged in the mountains north of Skopje and another in the hills above Tetovo in March. Since when, Europe and Nato have been actively involved. Unlike Bosnia and Kosovo, this is not a Balkan crisis which has taken us by surprise. Its coming has been widely predicted since even before the Kosovo war. This time we have tried to get involved early to resolve the problem, rather than leaving it too late and paying the price.

Nato has been much criticised for the recent deal brokered by its Secretary General, Javier Solana, in Aracinovo – not least by Macedonian Slavs who saw the West yet again intervening to protect Albanian terrorists from just retribution by the Macedonian army. In fact, as I tried to persuade the Macedonian government in March, the Macedonian army does not have the military capacity to remove the rebel forces and, in the absence of a political solution, has been losing ground to them.

Those who find it easy to criticise the Solana deal ought to ponder the thought that, if it had not happened the slide to full scale civil war, with even wider consequences for the region, would have been unstoppable. I am not at all sure that, even with this breathing space, this outcome can be avoided – but I am quite clear that, for the first time in the Balkans, the West tried to act early to widen options and avoid conflict, rather than allowing inaction to close them and leave us only with intervention after one had started. The question now is how do we act to widen this fragile opportunity?

The first answer is: act quickly. Already the contagion of that virulent Balkan disease – ethnic cleansing – is beginning to spread. Some 50 to 60 Albanian intellectuals have mysteriously disappeared. There is a steady stream widening into a flood of Albanian refugees taking refuge in Kosovo. Weapons are circulating freely amongst extremists of both sides, and a dangerous mix of rumour, fear and aggression is taking hold in the Albanian and Slav quarters of Skopje and the ethnically mixed cities on the plains of western Macedonia.

It requires a single spark to set this thing alight again in a conflagration which it will be impossible to stop and almost impossible to contain.

I fear the solution now will require the West to act as more than passive mediators. We have tried that and it hasn't worked. The only solution in Macedonia is political, in which the Albanians' grievances are addressed, in return for rebel disarmament.

But I am not sure that there is any political force in Macedonia capable of delivering that now. Arben Xhaferri, the democratic leader of Macedonian Albanians, though much respected, is very sick. The Macedonian government is tired, weakened by splits and in uncertain control of the army. The army is furious and frustrated. It is insufficiently strong to remove the rebels as it boasted it would, and as an increasingly angry Slav population is demanding. Perhaps worse, the Macedonian forces, coming as they do from the same old Yugoslav army as Milosevic's forces in Kosovo, have not yet learnt the lesson that the Serbs learnt in their defeat, that you do not beat terrorists by using tanks and artillery to pulverise villages.

If the West is to extract peace out of this witches brew, it will only be by taking the initiative ourselves. I fear what we are looking at is a third major Nato deployment in the Balkans which will be large, long-term and expensive. If we are lucky, this time we might just be able to do it before war happens, instead of having to fight a war to make it happen.

No doubt even now, as in Bosnia and Kosovo, Western capitals are recoiling at the cost and danger. But now, as then, the cost of doing it will be far less than the cost of a civil war, with a potential to widen into a regional conflict involving two Nato nations, Greece and Turkey, on opposite sides.

A final point. We will not solve Macedonia, only in Macedonia. What we should have had after Kosovo and what we need even more urgently now, is a wider regional settlement – a Dayton for the southern Balkans and an end to the practise of solving its problems through conflict and piecemeal resolution. I hope that the British government will lead the way towards the West playing a more proactive role. As I said, it is the interconnection of things that matters in the Balkans.