Leaders of Macedonia's political parties will formally sign a peace deal next Monday aimed at averting civil war, a European Union envoy said today.
News of the peace deal came only hours after 10 Macedonian soldiers were killed in an ambush by ethnic Albanian guerrillas, the bloodiest single incident since the rebels began an insurgency in the former Yugoslav republic in February.
A Macedonian political source said all the main party leaders from the Macedonian majority and the ethnic Albanian minority had already initialed the deal. No official confirmation was immediately available.
"The political process will continue until next Monday, August 13, the date when the text of the political accord will be signed in Skopje," EU peace envoy Francois Leotard told reporters after talks in the lakeside resort of Ohrid.
He side-stepped questions about whether the accord had already been initialed.
But a source from the smaller of the two parties representing the Macedonian majority, the Socialist SDSM, said all the leaders from Macedonian and ethnic Albanian parties involved in the talks had initialed the document.