DUI Defectors to Form New Macedonian Albanian Party

In a sign of growing disarray in the Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, two leading figures, the MP and head of the party's general assembly, Zuluf Adili, and Gzim Ostreni, a former DUI secretary general, said they will form a new party called Unity.

Ostreni was one-time head of the general staff of the ethnic Albanian insurgents during the armed conflict of 2001.

"The new party will have a civic concept, which means that Macedonia should be a country belonging to all who live in it and not just to one or two ethnicities," Adili said.

He said he hoped the Unity party will attract some other current MPs in the DUI. The DUI has 20 of the 123 seats in parliament.

"All DUI members who do not have corruption scandals behind them are welcome," Adili added, noting that this does not include the current DUI leaders.

The announced formation of the new party is seen as culmination of a long-standing political rift within the ranks of the country's main Albanian party, which governs Macedonia in coalition with the VMRO DPMNE party of Nikola Gruevski.

Quarrels in the party have turned violent in the past. In October 2014, five people were wounded, one seriously, by a gunfight at the DUI branch in Saraj, near Skopje.

In December that year, a fight between DUI members in Struga, in southwest Macedonia, left several people in hospital.

Further signs of rifts emerged last year when three DUI parliamentarians refused to support a package of constitutional changes previously agreed between the ruling parties.

Divisions intensified in elections in the DUI local branches. In July, two party members were killed in separates shootouts that happened days apart in the towns of Kumanovo and Struga.