Skopje: Macedonia`s embattled prime minister removed his interior minister and his intelligence chief quit on Tuesday, in an apparent bid to save the government from a damaging surveillance scandal.
The move also followed a weekend of bloodshed when police raided an ethnic Albanian suburb in the northern town of Kumanovo, triggering a day-long gunbattle in which 14 gunmen and eight police officers died.
The state news agency MIA reported that conservative leader Nikola Gruevski had proposed to parliament the election of new interior and transport ministers, offering no explanation why. A second report then said intelligence chief Saso Mijalkov, Gruevski`s cousin, had resigned.
Mijalkov, in a letter quoted by MIA, said he hoped his resignation would "help in overcoming the political crisis imposed by the opposition ... in the knowledge that the truth and arguments are on our side."
Mijalkov and Interior Minister Gordana Jankulovska have been at the centre of months of damaging opposition disclosures that the West says have raised serious questions about the state of democracy in the former Yugoslav republic.
Their removal comes just days before a planned mass rally led by opposition Social Democrat leader Zoran Zaev on May 17 to demand Gruevski`s resignation.
Zaev says he is in possession of a mountain of illegal wiretaps that he says Gruevski`s government recorded on an industrial scale.
The tapes, drip-fed to the media since January and often involving Jankulovska and Mijalkov, appear to expose government control over journalists, judges and the conduct of elections.
On Monday, Western envoys in Skopje met Gruevski and afterwards said his government`s failure to investigate the disclosures cast "serious doubt" on its commitment to European democratic principles and values.
