Picturing War: Macedonian Boys Fetch Ammo in the Thick of Fighting

Seasoned Macedonian photographer and European Press Agency contributor Georgi Licovski is a well-known name in his country and abroad.

But he admits that during the early days of the 2001 armed conflict in North Macedonia, his experience accounted for little as he too was caught up in the prevailing chaos and adrenalin rushes that could have cost him his life.

One of the pictures that has stayed with him from those days, and that he says encapsulates best the early confusion of the war, is of two teenage boys, who were rushing to carry ammunition boxes to a nearby machine gun outpost, exposing themselves to grave danger.

It was taken in mid-March 2001, on the second day of the war in this ethnically-mixed but Albanian-dominated north-western town, when Albanian insurgents stationed in the nearby hills started shooting at the security forces who were defending the town below.

"I was there on day one [March 14], when after a rally in the city centre, the shooting from nearby hills started," Licovski recalled.

But the second day he managed to reach Kultuk on the outskirts of Tetovo, a place teeming with army and police forces repelling fire from the rebels up in the hills. It was there when he first found himself in the thick of battle.

"The street was filled with empty bullet casings. Everyone was full of adrenalin. Everything was new for everybody," he said. "I was not even aware how dangerous it was."

Hidden behind a house and a parked armed personnel carrier, he first spotted a group of local residents apparently helping the security forces by filling up an emptied heavy machine gun's ammunition cartridges.

Further up the street there was a machine gun post that had been firing on the insurgents in the hills...