
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 6, 1993                   TAG: 9307060006
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SKOPJE, MACEDONIA                                LENGTH: Medium

1ST U.S. GROUND TROOPS ARRIVE IN MACEDONIA

The first American GIs sent to keep peace in former Yugoslavia arrived Monday with orders to keep Bosnia's war from spreading into a land that has often been a flashpoint for Balkan bloodletting.

Two C-141s landed in Macedonia's capital with 20 soldiers from the U.S. Army's Berlin Brigade, wearing the powder-blue berets of the United Nations. The planes also carried vehicles and supplies.

Another 20 members of the advance team were to arrive today, followed by the main body of about 260 soldiers, possibly by the end of the week.

The soldiers comprise the first U.S. ground unit deployed to a former Yugoslav state by President Clinton, although individual Americans are working in various U.N. capacities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The American troops will join a force of 700 soldiers, most of them Scandinavians, under the command of Gen. Finn Saermark Thomsen of Denmark. The peacekeepers are deployed along Macedonia's 260-mile border with Serbia, the dominant state in what is left of Yugoslavia, to the north and Albania to the west.

Macedonia, with a population of about 2 million, is the only state to have seceded from the Yugoslav federation without violence. There is no immediate threat to its borders, but there are fears that ethnic fighting in former federation partners could spill into Macedonia and possibly draw in other Balkan nations.

As an impoverished, landlocked region with much larger neighbors - Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia - Macedonia was a crucible for the 1912-13 Balkan Wars, as well as a focal point of the struggle for control of southeastern Europe in World Wars I and II.

More than 60,000 of the Yugoslav army's soldiers and hundreds of tanks withdrew last year but remain within easy striking distance. Macedonia's army of 14,000 is equipped with only light infantry weapons.

As the Americans arrived in Skopje, fighting continued in Bosnia. It was concentrated in the north-central area, where outgunned Muslim-led government forces battled with newly allied Serbs and Croats, who want to partition Bosnia into three ethnic zones.

by CNB