"The National Liberation Army is more popular in Macedonia than the Kosovo Liberation Army was in Kosovo," says Arlinda. When we get to her family's three-story red clay cinder block home, in the village of Drenovac in the foothills of the Shar Mountains just northwest of Tetovo, the violence of the past month is visible in the partial destruction of houses on the hillside, some hit by shells, others shot up by bullets. Inside her home, in a cool, bottom-floor living room covered with Turkish rugs, Arlinda's little brother's desktop computer screen saver features, along with photos of American rapper Eminem, downloaded Internet photos of NLA rebels, their military berets decorated with the red double-eagle insignia of the Albanian flag, and of smoke burning in the hills after a recent battle. The photos of the burning villages on the computer screen eerily resemble the scene outside their own home.

Arlinda points out the house on the corner, which she says belongs to two men from the Kuraci family who were killed by Macedonian police at a checkpoint three weeks ago. The video of the incident, which was broadcast worldwide, clearly shows the younger man clumsily pulling a grenade out of his suit jacket pocket after Macedonian police manning the checkpoint ask him to step out of the car. A panicked Macedonian police barrage of shooting ensues, killing both father and son. But Arlinda and Arsim say the men were only carrying cellphones; Arsim insists the video showing the man with the grenade has been doctored.

The anecdote is one of a few that suggest how people are being manipulated and radicalized by propaganda. (Similarly, ethnic Macedonians are hearing plenty of propaganda, verging on the level of hate speech, on their televisions and in their newspapers.)

As we sit in Arlinda's family's living room drinking Turkish coffee, Arlinda reads aloud some headlines from the Albanian-language press that say there are only 150 Albanians in Macedonia's force of over 9,000 police officers. Western diplomats say this is a terrible underestimate, although they encourage Macedonia to recruit and train more ethnic Albanian policemen and military officers.

Arlinda points to a news headline reporting that the western city of Struga was blanketed with pamphlets last week urging Macedonians not to buy goods from ethnic Albanian shops. But even now, unlike their cousins in Kosovo who faced extreme oppression, physical abuse and even massacres by Serbian security forces, Macedonia's ethnic Albanians mostly complain that they face a mix of official and unofficial discrimination, which many outsiders have witnessed. Arsim says Macedonia's Albanians are in the position of Martin Luther King Jr. But the rebel group he and many of his neighbors increasingly support, although it's quiet for now, seems to borrow more from the violent methods of the Black Panthers and the IRA than King's civil rights movement.

One of Arsim's and Macedonian Albanians' major gripes with the state is that it refuses to recognize the Albanian-language university that was opened in Tetovo in 1994 to fill a need created after nearby Albanian-language Pristina University in Kosovo was seized by Slobodan Milosevic and Serb nationalists. Tetovo University has become one of the flashpoints of tension between the country's ethnic-Macedonian majority and ethnic-Albanian minority.

"We are not radical," Arsim, who studies Albanian linguistics at Tetovo, insists. He and Arlinda are both children of professors at the university. "We would just like the university to be officially recognized and financed by the state."

They point out that the Macedonian government funds Macedonian-language state universities in Skopje and Bitola.

Other Albanian demands include making Albanian one of the official languages of Macedonia, revising the preamble of Macedonia's constitution to declare ethnic Albanians a constituent people along with ethnic Macedonians, an internationally monitored census to determine exactly what percent of the population Albanians make up (officially it's 23 percent; most people say it's about a third of the population; some Albanians say it is as high as 45 percent) and, in this job-scarce country, increasing the number of ethnic Albanians employed in Macedonia's state sector, including the police forces.

Starting this week, Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski has invited all parties represented in the Macedonian parliament to participate in talks meant to address these issues. Powell said he has urged Trajkovski to keep the pedal to the floor in this integration process.

Despite their romantic ideas about the NLA and their real sense of frustration with aspects of life in Macedonia, there is something encouraging that underlies all that Arlinda and Arsim have to say, and that most ethnic Albanians here seem to share. They really do want to be Macedonians. With the exception of a few sidelined extremists, almost all of Macedonia's Albanians say they want more rights within the country.

"If we feel Macedonian," Arsim says, "then Macedonia must start to feel us."

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