Macedonian News

Macedonian President Killed in Bosnia Plane Crash

Reuters (Feb 26, 2004, 05:45 AM ET)  By Kole Casule, (Reuters) SKOPJE - Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski was killed Thursday when his plane crashed into Bosnian mountains in thick fog, officials said.

His death was confirmed by Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who was holding talks in Dublin with Macedonia's prime minister.

The 47-year-old Trajkovski, whose tenure was marked by a crisis in 2001 with ethnic Albanian rebels that brought the former Yugoslav republic to the brink of civil war, had been on a short flight to the Bosnian city of Mostar for an economic conference.

Macedonian officials described the president's plane as an aging executive jet with nine people aboard. It disappeared from radar screens about 9 a.m. (0800 GMT).

No survivors were found in the wreckage near Stolac, Bosnian radio quoted local official Nedzad Vejzagic as saying. It is an area of treacherous winter skies for aviation amid mountains east and north of Croatia's Adriatic port of Dubrovnik.

The official Macedonian Information Center said the plane that went down had "several times" nearly cost officials their lives. A source in the capital Skopje said it was a twin-engine Beechcraft 200 Super King Air bought second-hand in the 1970s.

"The weather conditions were very bad with heavy fog and rain," said Zoran Glusac, a spokesman for the Bosnian Serb interior ministry.

Police were sent to the crash site on Hrgut mountain, between Stolac and the village of Ljubinje. The U.S.-led NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia, which has helicopters, said it was on standby in case help was requested.

PRIME MINISTER TO RETURN

Macedonian Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski was already in Dublin when news of the crash was announced, on a mission to formally deliver his country's application to join the European Union, of which Ireland holds the presidency at the moment.

Journalists traveling with him were told to pack up and be ready for an immediate flight back to Macedonia.

In April 1996, a member of U.S. President Bill Clinton's cabinet, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, was among 35 people killed when a U.S. Air Force passenger jet crashed into a mountain in the same area.

From his election in late 1999, Trajkovski's term was marked by tensions between Slavic-speaking Macedonians and the former Yugoslav republic's large ethnic Albanian minority.

Although his powers were limited and his role largely ceremonial, he presided over a NATO-brokered peace deal in 2001 that ended months of armed clashes and prevented a full blown civil war in the mountainous state bordering Kosovo.

Prime Minister Crvenkovski will retain the main powers.

Mark Laity, a NATO official seconded by the alliance as an adviser to Trajkovski in May 2001 and who worked in his cabinet until the Essential Harvest operation to disarm warring groups four months later, said he was devastated by the news:

"In 2001 no Macedonian was more important to stopping that country having a civil war. He was controversial and people often attacked him, but in the end he was a person who could always be relied on to do the right thing," Laity said.

An English-speaker and practicing Christian, he was viewed in the West as a young leader with an international outlook and an ability to build contacts abroad.

He specialized in commercial and employment law and once headed the legal department of a construction company.

In early 1999 he was appointed Macedonia's deputy foreign minister. During the Kosovo crisis that year he accused NATO of paying too little attention to the ethnic tensions brewing in Macedonia, and the influx of 300,000 ethnic Albanian refugees.

Trajkovski was married with a son and a daughter.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

Editor note: We would like to bring to attention the following exert from this article: "...Slavic-speaking Macedonians..". Macedonians do not speak "Slavic" but speak Macedonian. "Slavic" is not a language. Macedonian has always been the language that the Macedonians have spoken. For more information on Macedonia, visit the website Macedonia - Makedonija @ http://macedonia.ssport.net