Ljube Boskoski, 48, was the first person to officially announce his candidacy for the elections, which are to be held March 22.
“I expect to have the unlimited support of the people of Macedonia and call upon those who believe in me to believe in the future of Macedonia,” Boskoski said late Saturday, hours after the parliamentary speaker announced the date of presidential and local elections.
Boskoski was welcomed as a hero in his native Macedonia in July after the UN tribunal in The Hague, acquitted him on several charges for war crimes.
Hague prosecutors appealed against Boskoski’s acquittal in August. A decision on the appeal is pending.
Boskoski spent more than three years at the tribunal’s detention unit on trial over a 2001 police attack on an ethnic Albanian village that killed seven people. He was detained in Croatia in August 2004 and then sent to the UN tribunal in March 2005.
Boskoski and a senior police official, Johan Tarculovski, were charged with murder, wanton destruction and cruel treatment in Ljuboten, a farming village of around 2,000 people. Tarculovski was given a 12-year sentence.
The attack on Ljuboten is the only atrocity in Macedonia that led to an indictment by the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The tiny, landlocked country broke away peacefully from Yugoslavia in 1991, but was involved in a six-month conflict in 2001 between government forces and ethnic Albanians fighting for more rights.
The Macedonian president has little say in foreign and domestic policy, and the role is more that of a figurehead.
The March presidential elections will be the fourth since Macedonia gained independence from the former Yugoslavia in 1991 and officials say it will be crucial to the country’s hopes of joining the European Union.
The current Macedonian president, Branko Crvenkovski, hinted recently that he would not run for a second five-year term.
