Leaders of Balkan and central European states paid their last respects to Macedonia's peacemaker president Boris Trajkovski on Friday ahead of his state funeral in the capital, Skopje.
Tens of thousands of people lined the streets as the solemn procession began a two-hour journey to the graveside, led by a cross bearing the president's name and an army honour guard around the bier.
The 47-year-old head of state, a lawyer and a devout Methodist, was credited with holding the fragile, ethnically divided republic together in 2001 at a time when hard-liners seemed bent on war.
His death in a plane crash in Bosnia last week is not seen as a blow to the stability of Macedonia. The so-called Ohrid accords granting greater rights to the ethnic Albanian minority have ensured it was one Balkan tinderbox, which did not blow.
Presidents and prime ministers from Poland to Bulgaria placed flowers at the foot of Trajkovski's flag-draped coffin, lying in state at the Macedonian parliament and guarded by six gloved troopers in breeches and maroon berets.
Nato Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and European Union president Romano Prodi represented the two organisations, which helped Trajkovski smother a general conflict as Macedonian troops clashed with ethnic Albanian guerrillas.
A sorrowful former Nato chief George Robertson, a personal friend of Trajkovski from those crisis days, also attended, along with delegations from some 50 countries.
Trajkovski and eight of his staff were killed in a plane crash near Mostar on February 26. The cause is under investigation but authorities have ruled out a criminal attack.
The funeral was the biggest ceremony organised by the country of two million since independence from Yugoslavia, whose largest state funeral was for leader Marshal Tito in 1980. A 10-gun salute sounded and helicopters hovered over the city.
Men of Trajkovski's personal security detail - a unit, which lost two members in the crash - walked alongside the coffin, followed by his widow and two children and members of the Macedonian cabinet.
He was due to be buried at Skopje's main Butel cemetery, in the Alley of the Honoured, alongside communist leaders of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.
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