Tetovo, Macedonia — Setting farmhouses and cars afire, Macedonia's ragtag army captured a string of guerrilla strongholds on the wooded heights above this city Sunday in defiance of international appeals for restraint in the Balkan region's latest ethnic conflict.
Hours into the first major infantry assault of its eight-year history, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said the army took "key positions" from ethnic-Albanian rebels, who returned fire before retreating from mountain villages they occupied for nearly two weeks.
But he did not declare the offensive over, and it was far from certain that the Slav-dominated government could achieve its aim of expelling the insurgents from this southernmost of Yugoslavia's former republics.
European and U.N. officials had tried to discourage Sunday's assault. They feared large-scale civilian suffering that would only inflame the uprising started six weeks ago by the National Liberation Army, which advocates equal rights for Macedonia's disaffected Albanian minority.
The government, however, yielded to pressure from Slavs to try to crush the rebels, whom it calls separatists and terrorists.
The army sealed off some villages under attack, making casualties and damage hard to assess. Kosovo Television, in the neighboring Serbian province of Kosovo, said 20 Albanians, including 11 children, were wounded in the fighting and evacuated there.
A hospital in Tetovo said it treated a Macedonian policeman and four civilians for gunshot wounds. They were caught in cross-fire between panicked troops in the city and rebel snipers on a ridge above the municipal stadium. Two soldiers were wounded by rebel fire, the government said.
The offensive, cheered on the streets by Macedonian Slavs as if it were a spectator sport, deepened this fragile country's ethnic divide. The Party of Democratic Prosperity, one of two Albanian parties represented in Macedonia's multiethnic Parliament, suspended its participation in the lawmaking body to protest what it called the army's aggression.
The army's long-range tank assault from Tetovo, which lasted 90 minutes, appeared to set fire to more than a dozen subsistence farms scattered along mountain ridges north and west of the city.
That set the stage for the infantry advance. About 200 soldiers with a motley array of uniforms rumbled through Tetovo and into the mountains in Greek armored personnel carriers. The convoy was led by two Soviet-era T-55 tanks and six 155-millimeter cannons mounted on Bulgarian trucks.
Guerrillas fought back before abandoning Gajre, damaging an armored personnel carrier as the government column broke through their roadblock, Macedonia's MIA news agency reported.
Army officials said troops also occupied the villages of Lisec, Lavce, Selce, Drenok and Teke. They captured Tetovo Kale, an ancient Turkish fortress that fell into rebel hands earlier this month.
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