Macedonia Says ‘Serbian Spy’ Claims Hard To Probe

balkan insight

03 Nov 2010 / 16:40

Macedonia says it cannot investigate reports that ethnic Albanian officials spied for Serbia in the 1980s and 1990s until Belgrade forwards original copies of the relevant secret service files.
Sinisa Jakov Marusic

Skopje
Viktor Gaber, Macedonia’s representative to the group tasked with dividing the property of the former Yugoslavia, said that Macedonia cannot get original documents because no agreement has been reached over the ownership of the joint state archives, currently in Belgrade.

The six successor states to the former Yugoslavia signed an agreement in 2001 concerning their respective rights to the assets of the Yugoslav state, including the secret service files, but representatives have not yet met to discuss how the files would be shared, Gaber explained.

Several Serbian secret service files allegedly compromising Albanian politicians in Macedonia were recently leaked to Macedonian media, prompting the country’s lustration commission to request that the intelligence services check the authenticity of the files.

One of the files, codenamed “Ibar”, allegedly incriminates Ali Ahmeti, head of the Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, the junior partner in the Macedonian government of Nikola Gruevski.Ahmeti denied all claims, saying the file was an attempt to discredit him.

Ahmeti was a former guerilla leader in the short-lived ethnic conflict in Macedonia in 2001, which pitted ethnic Albanians against the security forces.

The conflict ended with the 2001 Ohrid agreement, which granted Albanians more rights in the country.

The Lustration Commission, tasked in late 2009 with determining which current office-holders were former spies, said on November 1 it needed the original files to launch a probe.

But Serbia insists on returning only copies of the files, Gaber said.

To avoid waiting for an agreement on the division of the archives, one option for Macedonia would be to officially request the files from Serbian state security.

But Ljubomir Frckoski, a former Macedonian interior minister, told Balkan Insight that this route was unlikely to prove fruitful.

“If you just ask [the Serbian secret services] for files, you might court ridicule,” Frckoski said. “You can’t expect a foreign secret service to just have over a secret file,” he added. “They can easily say they don’t have it.”

Until the logjam is broken, the file allegedly incriminating Ali Ahmeti cannot be probed.

Other Serbian secret service files, codenamed Mama, Archer and Uncle, allegedly incriminating other top DUI officials, have also been leaked to media.

balkan insight

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/macedonian-spy-case-authenticiyt-probed