Ilirida

Ilirida or Illyrida is unofficial region in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia, with a considerable number of Albanian population.

History

On March 24, 1990, in the village of Šipkovica near Tetovo, several ethnic Albanian political activists declared the political autonomy in the form of an autonomous state called Ilirida. In 1992 Albanian activists in Struga
proclaimed also the founding of the Republic of Ilirida with the intention of autonomy or federalization inside the Republic of Macedonia. The declaration had only symbolic meaning and the idea of an autonomous state of Ilirida is not officially accepted by the ethnic Albanian politicians in the Republic of Macedonia.

On August 13 2001 the leaders of the most relevant Macedonian parties signed the Ohrid Agreement, which ended the clashes between the regular Macedonian forces and the Albanian rebels from the National Liberation Army, which was, according to the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) of the United States (US), not an army but rather a loosely-organized terrorist group which calls for the unification of ethnic Albanian areas of the Western Balkans.. With the Ohrid Agreement, the Macedonian government pledged to improve the rights of the Albanian population, that makes up 25.3 percent of the population. Those rights include improvements of the status of the Albanian language, increasing the participation of ethnic Albanians in government institutions, police and army and a new model of decentralization. The leaders of the National Liberation Army agreed to give up any separatist demands, to fully recognise all Macedonian institutions and disarm and hand over their weapons to a NATO force.

Borders

There are different views among Macedonian Albanians about borders and size of the proposed state. Some of them claim that Ilirida should include municipalities with Albanian majority, others claim that it also should include municipalities with Macedonian majority and large Albanian minority (this also include Skopje, the capital), while most extreme views claim that Ilirida should include 2/3 of the Republic of Macedonia.

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