1 I really wonder what sort of agreement was reached by the residents of Slupchane and EVN so that the electricity distribution teams can enter the village, fix the defect and install electricity meters. The company announced that all political parties and the local authorities gave guarantees once more, but I’m very curious about what the guarantors promised to the locals. And, since ministers mediated, the Government should make the agreement public.
What sort of deal did the residents of Slupchane reach, considering the fact that their idea was that if they had to pay for electricity, their bills shouldn’t be higher than 3,000 denars? Has their debt for the stolen electricity been forgiven? Has their request for the mosque not to pay for electricity been accepted? As if using electricity is God’s will.
Where did they learn to fight like this? It’s as if they’ve read the comics about Asterix and Obelix, the rebellious Gaulish village that fought against the Roman Empire when Caesar decided to adjust their electricity meters. Or perhaps their relatives living in Belgium, Switzerland and Germany told them stories about how residents there negotiate with political parties about how much they want to pay for electricity. And about how they mercilessly destroy the infrastructure of the electricity distribution company if the electricity bills bring unrest into their lives. The reason why they’re untouchable is because they drink the magic potion of the local party sheriff. Political patronage in Macedonia today gives much more power than the magic potion of Panoramix in the time of the Roman Empire. In Switzerland, when the relatives of the residents of Slupchane cause a defect that leaves eight villages and a border crossing without electricity, ministers and party officials immediately visit the village and debate together about human rights.
And just like that, in modern Macedonia, a NATO member state, in the 21st century, we have a situation where the Minister of Economy, Kreshnik Bekteshi, gives the most official statement that everyone who uses electricity should also pay for how much they’ve spent. I can’t believe it…What’s next? A mobile educational caravan in villages and towns on how to pay electricity bills?
The way they’re handling the negotiations, they may soon ask for the ethnicity to be written on the electricity bills. That way, EVN will know who they’re dealing with, and everything will be in line with the ethnic equity tool, in line with the census, to decide how much each ethnicity will pay.
2 The EU sent us a team that’s supposed to investigate the developments in the Judicial Council. There’s really no need to investigate. The last incident should be sufficient evidence.
Supreme Judge Nakje Georgiev applied to become a member of the Judicial Council. There were petitions against him in the Judicial Council, but they hadn’t been addressed for months. As the day for Georgiev’s election approached, the members of the Judicial Council unshelved those petitions and dismissed them. They elected him as a new member of the Judicial Council with six votes, one of which was his own. And on the very day when he was supposed to take the oath, a session of the Council was scheduled where he was supposed to vote for his son to become a judge. And then, the members of the Judicial Council realised that the father mustn’t vote for the election of the son. More specifically, if the father is a member of the Judicial Council, his son can’t be a judge. Because that’s what the law says.
And that’s when the battle to redeem the Judicial Council began. It’s one thing that the supreme judge hadn’t read the law, that the other members of the Council, whose job is to elect judges, hadn’t seen the law for the election of judges, but it’s another that someone got the bright idea to postpone the act of taking the oath for the new members, giving the father the chance to vote for his son. So, there are indeed genius minds in the Judicial Council.
So, the new member of the Judicial Council resigned for personal and moral reasons. Because he was caught in the act before he took the oath. If he hadn’t been caught, they would’ve settled for the “everyone deserves a second chance, even the son of a member of the Judicial Council can be a judge”.
Still, I don’t want to swear on my soul, perhaps the Judicial Council did know the law for electing judges, but felt like using the law “If it gets past them, it will be passed”. After all, they’re not elected to enforce the law. They are elected to carry out orders given from “the higher-ups”.
3 The euphoria of the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Skopje earthquake died out, along with the digital projections, the plaques for diplomats, the commemorative concerts, the events with politicians giving grand speeches and going from zero to waterworks in seconds about “my lovely Skopje” and “the beautiful city”. On 26 July, 1963, at 5:17 a.m., Skopje was struck by a disaster that lasted for twenty seconds. Today, Skopje is living the disaster that’s been going on for 30 years. Disasters are looming in the future as well, after they build all those unsightly building and shopping malls, while the streets and the entire communal infrastructure date back to Tito’s time, when all the citizens of Yugoslavia contributed a solidarity allowance per year for several years to support Skopje. We’ll end up dying in shopping malls and trapped in our apartments, because neither the ambulance nor the Fire Brigade will be able to come to save us.
The centre of the capital, the face of every country, now looks as if we’ve just come out of a war. Skopje is suffocating in its own stench of rubbish and dust piling up for decades, as a completely dysfunctional metropolis, a city raped by urban planning, with substandard living conditions from birth to death, without organised public transportation, with broken benches, illegal landfills set on fire, overgrown canals, stray dogs, jam-packed kindergartens, plastic bottles in Vardar, filthy monuments, dried-up fountains…
But what’s even more terrible is that Skopje is suffocating in corruption.
Construction companies, or the so-called “investors” make a wish – and the local authorities make it happen. No one is doing what they should be doing, unless it’s done by joint stealing. Still, the local authorities wouldn’t be able to deliver if that wasn’t approved by experts, urban planners, architects, construction companies… The Dean of the Faculty of Civil Engineering, Goran Markovski, gave a fitting definition for this sector – engineers prostituting themselves. The ones who are supposed to build Skopje, destroy it.
Their lack of conscience doesn’t surprise me anymore. Their lack of shame, even less so. That’s a long-forgotten category. However, I really wonder – how do those people live in practice? What does everyday life look like for them in the city they are destroying? No matter how expensive the car they drive is, even if it has tinted windows, they still drive on the potholes we drive on, they still get stuck in traffic, they still pass by the rubbish we see, they still step in mud when they park… Even if their children study in the most expensive schools, they still breathe the same air once they get out. They don’t walk around with oxygen tanks. Even if they go on expensive holidays, if they buy a mountain villa, if they rent apartments by the sea, they still have to come back here. They can’t evacuate their whole family. A kid, a mother, a grandmother, a neighbour, a childhood friend will stay here to live in the miserable mess they’ve made, thinking only about themselves. Is it really a personal benefit considering the fact that even if they are treated in the most expensive private hospital when they open a window to let some air in they still breathe the air from the burning landfill, the same air that people in state hospitals breathe.
The 60th anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake in Skopje is a good opportunity to ask questions about the everyday life of the politicians we elect, the so-called construction investors and the experts who draw and approve their plans and buildings to make sure “everything is in line with the law, boss”. How do they spend the money they’ve made through bribery and corruption to improve the quality of their lives in this city?
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
