1 The elections are approaching. The parties are commissioning polls about their popularity, they’re lifting their own spirits, they’re bidding on the number of voters and elected MPs, they’re making calculations about who will form the Government with whom… These data are the first items in the polls, they are the main topic of the party press conferences and announcements.
However, in all polls, the highest percentages are not the ones on the popularity of the parties and their leaders but the percentages that mark the respondents’ concerns about corruption, poverty and the fact their children are moving abroad. Issues like joining the EU and relations with our neighbours are somewhere at the bottom of the list, marking a lower percentage even than the trust in the judiciary.
People no longer care who’ll come to power, since they have a much bigger concern – the lack of prospects.
People want you to provide them with bread now. And you’re telling them that once we join the EU they’ll eat cookies.
2 Our politicians can’t accept reality. They’re too busy dealing with themselves. There’s no need to provide insulin, textbooks, report cards, passports, there’s no need for the directors of clinics to go to work, let them just pretend they are sick so they don’t get replaced, let infectious diseases spread… They don’t give a damn about the patients. Everyone else can suffer as long as our political party doesn’t.
The technical Government was established to prepare and conduct elections. Not for someone to be in power for five minutes. They’re going back and forth, is it going to be Alliance or not, is it going to be Taravari or Sela, is Minister of Health Mexhiti going to replace directors three months before the elections because they hadn’t renewed their English certificates, yet he gets replaced by the ones who don’t speak even Macedonian… It’s one thing they’re replacing ministers, they’re politicians, but replacing directors of hospitals is another. When it comes to those now accepting to become directors, I wonder what they think. The same way they appoint you based on your political and ethnic background, they’ll replace you based on your political and ethnic background.
A hundred days before the elections, during the elections, after the elections, the parties are concerned with their own interests. The pillaging must go on. Being a director is a grand thing. Even if it lasts just two days. It’s not about putting it on their resume. It’s about cashing in on the situation. It’s about stealing until the very last day, perhaps even after that. It’s about grabbing as much as possible, and then letting their lackeys have some of it so they’d return the favour by voting for them and making it possible for the stealing to continue. Since, the aim is not to make the country a better place to live, but to seize as much as you can by being in power.
They even dare scare you, claiming it’s irresponsible to vote for this party, it’s stupid to vote for that party… Oh, really? Or, what? What else are we in for if the party tells them if and when they can take sick leave.
3 Bullets are nothing new in the political culture of Albanian parties in Macedonia. In the past, within DUI, there were shootouts about who’d be the head of a municipal branch, so the bullet found in the yard of the leader of the Alliance for Albanians, Arben Taravari, isn’t an unprecedented phenomenon.
How great is the power the party gives you if you’re ready to kill? What sort of power does the office give you, regardless if you are an MP, a minister, a director, an employee at M-NAV?
It’s not about ideology. It’s about impunity. Impunity is strength, impunity is power. When you know the party lets you break the laws, regardless if it’s stealing, parking illegally, unauthorised constructions, smoking in the Assembly, breaking into the Control Tower, or a bullet in front of someone’s door – it’s all the same.
4 And now, these same guys, whose main political activity is to remain unpunished for stealing, are about to pass a law according to which they will punish themselves if the USA and the UK catch them stealing red-handed and put them on a blacklist. Although they had previously passed a law in their favour so that now, even if they are caught, the statute of limitations on their cases will expire faster and they won’t go to prison.
They’re putting in great effort to deceive Americans into believing they’ll treat their blacklists seriously. First, the Government under Dimitar Kovachevski drafted a law, but the Government under Talat Xhaferi withdrew it, now it’s back again, they’ve erased some articles, added new articles, apparently they harmonised it with European legislation. They’ve come up with a whole procedure about what to do if someone gets blacklisted in Washington.
Basically, now we’ll no longer have to wait for the USA to provide us with evidence about our bandits, but the Prosecutor’s Office will start collecting evidence immediately, after certain ministries provide them with evidence. So our country will now wait for the USA and the UK to blacklist someone from our guys and only then will it initiate institutional actions. It seems that all this time the Prosecutor’s Office has been prohibited from hunting bandits unless they’re on the American blacklist.
This law clashes with the one they fast-tracked, using the European flag, to protect corrupt politicians. By the time all our institutions complete the whole procedure, the statute of limitations will have expired for all those blacklisted by the USA.
So, we shouldn’t be too excited about the US blacklists. At home, whether the law applies to you or not, depends on whether you’re in power. Fortunately, the US blacklist doesn’t depend on who’s in power in Macedonia. Fortunately for the USA, that is, not for us.
5 I’m ashamed when I hear the news that, in the 21st century, our children are dying from whooping cough simply because they’re not vaccinated. To make it worse, the parents who refuse to vaccinate their children are sharing their personal experiences – the illness colloquially known as donkey cough is apparently treated with donkey milk.
Illiteracy has grown in direct proportion to the number of universities. Let’s set aside stupidity. Let’s set aside the distrust in institutions. Let’s set aside the irresponsible behaviour toward our immediate environment. But, how can one not believe in science, but believe in Satanists and donkey milk!?
In the past, teachers used to punish undisciplined students and those who didn’t want to study by giving them detention in what we called “donkey desks.”
Why should children suffer if their parents are the ones deserving of “donkey desk” detention?
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
