Skopje, Macedonia - Nine people were wounded, several of them critically, in a gangland-style shootout in renewed violence in Macedonia, authorities in Skopje confirmed Friday. The drive-by attack from two cars, involving automatic weapons and shotguns, happened late Thursday in Radusa, a village in a tense section of Macedonia dominated by ethnic Albanians. The details remain sketchy and police said it was still investigating.
One of the wounded men was Besfor Haliti, son of three-time lawmaker Rafiz Haliti, a prominent member of the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI).
In a telephone interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, the elder Haliti said the attack was politically motivated. "There can be no other motives than political ones," he said.
Violence stirred by the rivalry between DUI and the other major Albanian party in Macedonia, the Democratic Party of Albanians, has left one dead and forced the partial repeat of June 1 snap parliamentary elections.
Though a European Union membership candidate since 2005, the country has since not progressed far owing to the country's lagging reforms and regular election violence.
Macedonia was on the verge of a Kosovo-style civil war in 2001, but a peace and reform deal - giving more rights to ethnic Albanians, who make up a quarter of the 2.1 million Macedonians, as well as a European outlook to the underdeveloped country - ended the conflict.
Rafiz Haliti was one of the Albanian insurgency leaders, before overall rebel commander Ali Ahmeti founded DUI, now the most likely partner in the upcoming government coalition of nationalist Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski.
Within the peace deal, brokered by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Ahmeti disarmed his rebels in return for an amnesty. All of north-western Macedonia however remains infested with weapons and prone to outbursts of violence.
Apart from politically-motivated violence, there is also a great deal of fighting for supremacy in the powerful ethnic Albanian underworld, which controls the smuggling of drugs and human beings across Macedonia's porous borders with Kosovo and Albania proper.
