1“Mijalkov publicly said that he had made a mistake out of negligence, and by doing that showed a virtue, which is uncharacteristic of SDSM, they constantly make mistakes and try to cover them up with lies, manipulations.” This is what Nikola Gruevski said in October 2015 in an interview for Kanal 5, when as prime minister he defended his cousin who was caught carrying a gun at the Belgrade Airport while switching flights to Zagreb.
Sasho Mijalkov, at that point, wasn’t even the head of the Agency for Security and Counterintelligence. He had resigned after the tragic operation by the police in the Kumanovo neighborhood Divo Naselje, in May the same year, when 8 police officers died. Five years ago, the security at the Skopje Airport wouldn’t even dare to ask this ordinary citizen to walk through a weapon detector before boarding a commercial flight, but now he can’t get the song “You can’t get away from Shutka, Nikola” out of his head. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the illegal massive wiretapping that took place at the state institution where he was director. He’s already serving his sentence in custody in Shutka.
In a way, I still can’t believe that the wiretapping case which caused huge political shockwaves and changes has finally finished. As if I’m in a posttraumatic shock. I still can’t relax and optimistically hope for a new beginning.
Imagine if you were a newcomer and watched from the sidelines as the police, the court and the prosecution act like headless chickens trying to resolve the crisis when Mijalkov disappeared few days before the verdict. I don’t know what’s funnier. Their behavior then, or their explanations after the fugitive appeared at the Prosecutor’s Office to take the decision for his house arrest. So much fuss about a single isolation. Plus, the guy had the same virtue as in 2015. He apologized to the public again, but this time he also apologized to the Government, the prime minister, the MPs, the judicial bodies for the inconvenience they went through while he had temperature over 40. Who’d feel like picking up the phone or watching the news on TV if they had a fever and were afraid of getting covid-19 for the second time?
I’d like to believe that “there will be justice – and even more so”, as Zaev says. For heaven’s sake, we’ve waited for that justice since the first day he started publishing the information bombs. I’d also like to believe that they’ve learned their lesson with the case of Gruevski’s escape, as Zaev also said. And that although the system underperformed with Mijalkov’s escape, as the Minister of Interior Affairs, Oliver Spasovski accounted for, when the prime minster got angry and put his foot down, the system started working again.
2 Thank goodness the whole thing was resolved despite the “minor inconvenience.” The Minister of Justice Bojan Marichikj said he was “extremely pleased and proud that the event had a positive epilogue.” Although before that he was “strongly affected by the latest events the past couple of days which shook the public and for a moment undermined the trust in institutions.” For a moment!? Does Marichikj really believe in what he’s saying? Or does he think we’re stupid. Because we don’t know anything, so they told us. But because of the way they told us what was happening, it would have been better if we had just stayed ignorant. Well, that moment of distrust in the institutions has lasted just thirty years.
Politicians’ brains work in mysterious ways. They’ll think of something, they’ll say it and because they keep on repeating it, they think that we accept it as the only truth. The fall of every Government starts the moment they start thinking that the people are stupid.
3 Sasho Mijalkov had the first-hand experience of Kanal 5 and Sitel being the first to broadcast him being taken to Shutka, the TV channels where we heard that he was the editor-in-chief of their news program and where the then government of VMRO-DPMNE poured millions of our money. Is it cosmic justice? Or does the stone really come point-blank?
4 Ok, so why does Bujar Osmani go to Bulgaria a month before the elections? Who is he play-acting cooperation to? After each of his visits to Sofia, his colleague Ekaterina Zakharieva appears on TV with insults. Once she saw him off, she appeared on TV bright and early, saying that our politicians didn’t know how the EU works and that it’s not the same as it was in Yugoslavia.
Actually, I had decided to ignore Zakharieva’s nonsense because she obviously has a personal frustration with us. It’s not normal to mention Yugoslavia, Tito and Serbia every time she talks about Macedonia. She’s neither an uneducated, not a stupid woman. But there you go, the right moment to shake off any potential frustrations presented itself to her. And at the same time to act that it’s for the sake of the EU and the stability of the region.
Thirty years have passed from the breakup of Yugoslavia. Children are growing up, youngsters don’t speak Serbian, the teenage stories about “Yugoslavs and the Bulgarians who were doing it for three red ones” don’t mean anything to them, nor do they find them interesting, the fighters against the Bulgarian fascist occupier have died, their heirs are minding their own business, some of them got Bulgarian passports for a better life somewhere out there in Germany and Sweden, they founded companies on both sides of the border, people go skiing in Borovets, go drinking in Bansko, go bathing in Sandanski… And then what? Everything was great and was going to be even better, until Zakharieva and a few politicians like her took out their personal frustrations as an ace in their sleeve for the upcoming elections. Few people in Bulgaria following Karakachanov’s mindset pissed on everything that people from both sides of the border had built even without a treaty for neighbourly relations.
5 Indeed, as Zakharieva says, the EU is not the same as Yugoslavia. Our neighbors from EU promised vaccines, but didn’t deliver them. And our neighbors from the former Yugoslavia promised and delivered them.
6 The second batch of vaccines that Serbia gifted us was personally picked by Venko Filipche at the Tabanovce border crossing. Literally. He caried the box from the trunk of the Serbian car to our van together with his colleague Zlatibor Lonchar.
I see doctor Filipche and I can’t but wonder for the thousandth time – what an accomplished neurosurgeon is able to do once he becomes a politician. I can’t wrap my head around doctors who become politicians. Because in my eyes, being a surgeon is much more significant than being a politician.
Be that as it may; since they take photos at border crossings, since they move packages from one car to another as if Serbs don’t have a green card and can’t drive all the way to Skopje, since they check if the doors of the freezers seal well, does he really have to load and unload packages just for that damned political PR? Just tell the ones advising you: Sorry, but I won’t lift this box. Think of something else for the voters.
Besides, Venko is free to inform us about the progress of the procedure for signing contracts, to move ten more boxes by hand, to check if anyone has donated beer in the freezers, but that doesn’t change the fact that we still don’t have a date for the start of the mass vaccination.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
