1 Where are children supposed to see that it’s wrong to beat other children? Where are they supposed to see that it’s a punishable act?

If the video of a girl beating a 12-year-old peer in Skopje’s Aerodrom municipality hadn’t surfaced on social media, while other children stood by recording it, and if the mother of the 14-year-old boy who was stabbed in the municipality of Chento hadn’t appeared on television, no one would have even known what had happened, and the institutions would never have taken action. We’ll now spend a couple of days debating how we’ve sunk so low that violence among children has become part of our everyday life, and then we’ll forget all about it until the next similar case comes along.

Children aren’t to blame. Children simply watch what adults do. If parents don’t bring up their children properly, where’s the state to teach the parents a lesson? It’s not rocket science. You report a case to the police, the police respond, the prosecutor’s office brings charges, social services monitor, the courts hand down punishment, and they do so impartially, not according to the principle of “our child, someone else’s child”, and – that’s it. That’s how a country is supposed to function, with institutions that aren’t captured by incompetent, lazy employees and managers who happen to be there only because the ruling party rewarded them.

Children are a reflection of the spirit of the times. And these are times of party-appointed people with purchased diplomas, of a system in which loyalty to the party and its leader is valued more than knowledge, when thugs are rewarded and those subjected to violence end up being punished. Distrust of institutions isn’t something abstract. Distrust stems from institutions that are incompetent and don’t do the job we pay them to do.

A tangible consequence of the system that we’ve lived under for 35 years is children who abuse children and no one is held accountable.

2 How, for example, do you explain to children that we’ve built a system in which it’s considered normal for the Mayor of Skopje, Orce Gjorgjievski, to boast about having freed a pavement at Bit Pazar that had been illegally occupied, pose for photos with the owner of the kiosk that had occupied public space for years, and write “with a kind word and a hospitable approach, there is no such thing as an impossible solution.”

A kind word, a hospitable approach, you say!?

For four months, the city authorities have been negotiating with the owner of a kiosk to clear a pedestrian crossing that he had occupied for years, putting traffic safety at risk. You’d think they had just concluded a major peacekeeping operation. As though the Bit Pazar crossing were the Strait of Hormuz, so it took the government four months of negotiations with the encroacher to reclaim the usurped public space.

A kind word, a hospitable approach, you say!? We know how a state deals with bullies. You send in bulldozers, you send in the police, if the police isn’t enough, you send in the army and you finish the job. Or, that approach isn’t hospitable enough?

And then we wonder why our children grow up to be bullies. For more than ten years, the entire state, including the municipal services and the City of Skopje, has been unable to shut down a few bars in the centre of the capital for blasting music in a residential area and creating traffic chaos. The City and the Municipality of Centar keep pointing the finger at each other, this inspection, that inspection, my jurisdiction, your jurisdiction, it’s one company, no, it’s three, every bar has a different cash register… Itar Pejo[1] is making a mockery of the state, while the state eats and drinks for free.

The same happened in Kochani, where the Pulse nightclub operated for twelve years on the same principles of bullying, corruption and impunity. And so, “with a kind word and a hospitable approach” toward its resourceful boss, 63 of our children were burned to death. Yet even that tragic shock in Kochani, from which society still hasn’t recovered, failed to shake the country. Just as the country isn’t shaken by the fact that UNESCO is about to place Ohrid, the only UNESCO World Heritage Site we have, on the List of World Heritage in Danger, precisely because of a million such “kind words and hospitable approaches” towards local tricksters who’ve built entire hotels illegally, encroaching on the lake. Our national parks have been stripped bare by illegal logging. Our mountains have been destroyed by high-rise buildings with septic tanks. The capital drowns in sewage after a slightly heavier summer rain because of the greed of both the authorities and the developers who replaced two-storey houses with residential blocks and shopping centres, although the infrastructure is exactly the same as it was 35 years ago. Restaurants’ outdoor seating areas are encroaching on the fountains of “Skopje 2014”, for which we paid hundreds of millions of euros, so that the monuments now serve merely as decoration for private summer terraces.

The bullies are in charge. The bullies threaten the citizens. The bullies bribe the authorities. Both will claw your eyes out if you so much as ask how much they pay the municipality to use public space. As if the injury weren’t enough, they add insult to it. They’ll sue the state if it dares to reclaim the public space they’ve been occupying illegally, because it’s cut into their profits.

So the flea market “Ali Tobacco” is just another “intermezzo” in our everyday life. That’s why it comes as no surprise when the violence that we’ve endured for years and which institutions have allowed and tolerated can eventually be seen on Instagram as children committing violence against other children.

3 In the same week, Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski said that “a large part of the contributors to the second pension pillar will not be pleased with what they find in their accounts”, while the Governor of the National Bank, Trajko Slaveski, reposted on social media a statement he had made two years earlier, that “when in 2030, that is 2032, regular pensions of insured persons from the second pension pillar will start being paid, we will see that perhaps 70 to 80 per cent of contributors will transfer to the first pension pillar because they will not even qualify for the minimum pension”.

How can you so casually say that future pensioners won’t be pleased? How is it that 70 to 80 per cent of future pensioners won’t even qualify for the minimum pension?

This is rather like the governor telling you – you’re saving for nothing, when the time comes to draw your pensions, there won’t be any money there. And the prime minister says: Well, you won’t be pleased when you retire, because there won’t be any money in your account.

How dare you steal the money we entrusted to you for our old age?

If the prime minister and governor of the central bank of some more normal country were to announce that when you retire you won’t have enough money to live on, it would trigger mass protests like those we saw in France. The government would fall.

And here? Here, the prime minister is busy reshuffling the government, something along the lines of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” with VLEN, after weeks of bargaining between the parties. All the fuss for weeks for nothing.

4 But then again, who’d raise their voice over the scandal surrounding the second pension pillar, over the fact that the state fund is behind on transferring money to the individual accounts of the insured persons? The MPs? The opposition? Well, they’re busy fighting each other.

Not even VMRO-DPMNE uses language as harsh in its routine morning press releases against the opposition as the SDSM leadership did against its own party members who gathered to debate something without the knowledge of their leader, Venko Filipche.

And they aren’t only fighting with their fellow party members. They’ve done and continue to do everything they can to silence citizens. It turns out that the greatest enemy of both the government and the opposition is independent citizens’ initiatives. And it’s precisely that fear of the independent civic voice that unites SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE.

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski

[1] Translator’s note: Itar Pejo is a legendary trickster from Macedonian folklore, renowned for outwitting figures of authority through wit and cunning.