Macedonia Albanians Express Pre-Election Discontent

An incident at the weekend when Ali Ahmeti, the head of the junior ruling Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, narrowly escaped an attack by an angry mob in the town of Kumanovo could be the beginning of an outburst of discontent among voters, observers suggested.

"It is clear that there is great dissatisfaction smouldering among the people and they express it at times in a very tense way," political analyst and former MP Ismet Ramadani told BIRN.

"Similar things [like the Kumanovo incident] may happen in some other place," Ramadani warned.

On Sunday in Kumanovo, protesters blocked Ahmeti's path and threw stones at his motorcade, breaking a car window. Ahmeti, who was heading for a local party meeting, had to be rescued by the police.

In a press statement on Monday, the DUI said that Sunday's incident was politically motivated by their opponents in the ethnic Albanian political bloc.

"We express regret for the shameful misuse of people's pain by some new political groups who want to get affirmation through desperate moves," the DUI said.

The people who attacked Ahmeti were mainly former sympathisers of his DUI party who were relatives and supporters of Xhemail Rexhepi, aka Commander Shqiponja, who was killed in July last year. They insisted that Ahmeti was persona non grata in Kumanovo.

People close to the party at that time saw the murder  of Rexhepi, who was a candidate for the head of the party's local branch, as a sign of a deep rift within the DUI's local branches, not only in Kumanovo.

Bajram Limani, at the time acting head of the DUI in Kumanovo, surrendered after saying that he and his supporters acted in self-defence and had been attacked by Rexhepi's group in his office.

For some observers, the...