1 We celebrated the 150 years jubilee of Goce Delchev’s birth. He’s a historical figure born in the 19th century, who became an obstacle to Macedonia’s progress towards the EU because some joint Macedonian-Bulgarian commission in the 21st century can’t come to an agreement which country he belongs to more. Yes, yes… That’s how things stand. We’re not dreaming. We’re not fantasizing. Nor are we drugged. The truth is that an EU member state vetoes the start of negotiations of a neighbouring country, because it denies the personal feeling of ethnicity of someone born 150 years ago. And not only do they not recognize Goce Delchev as a Macedonian, who died almost 120 years ago, they don’t recognize even us the living as Macedonians.
More than a century ago, Goce Delchev dreamed of a world as a field for cultural competition. We too dream of a world in which his idea of progress will come to fruition, so that’s why we chose the path to the EU. Because we believe in the civilizational values the EU promotes as indisputable. However, what we’ve faced in that progressive and developed EU is their tolerance without objection for the behaviour of a member state that doesn’t understand the world as a field for cultural competition, but as a field for flexing muscles as a bully. Would you believe it, we’re struggling to get the EU to recognize the language we speak.
The world Goce Delchev dreamed of – simply doesn’t exist.
2 About ten parents in a school in Gostivar signed a petition that they don’t want their children to study with a girl with Down syndrome. So what did the school do? They moved the girl to a separate room to study alone, so she’d stay away from the other kids.
And now, we’ll start moralizing about how bad the parents are, how inhumane they are, how mean we all are, a people without any compassion, selfish, crude, uncivilized, uneducated…
It’s horrifying that there’s the sort of people who got together and wrote a petition to “protect” their children with “normal needs” from a girl their age with special needs. However, what’s even more horrifying is that that petition was accepted by the system. The problem isn’t the petition or the ones who wrote it. The petition would be useless if the system worked. Is there a Constitution? Are there laws? Is there a principal in that school, are there education inspectors, is there a teachers’ council, a pedagogue, a psychologist, a parent council, a mayor who appoints the principal… There’s a whole hierarchy and infrastructure of people in the institutions who were simply not doing their job. Those people allowed the parents’ petition to turn into law, and didn’t protect the child’s rights to education.
In the case of little Embla from Gostivar it turned out that the voices of the people who don’t accept the differently abled were so strong because the state failed. If there had been institutions or capable people in those institutions who were just supposed to do their job according to the law, those parents who don’t respect the differently abled would have been silent.
This case, once again, faced us with the reality that the institutions are not there for us. It doesn’t matter if you have special or regular needs. It doesn’t matter whether you need to fulfill your right to medical care or your right to education. Be it a medical check-up appointment by the state for a blood test for Covid-19 in case you have symptoms, or to right the wrongs done to you by the principal if you have a child with special needs. Institutions are not there when you need them. You’re on your own.
If you want your problem solved you have to appear on the news and make it public. And we can’t all appear on the news.
3 It’s tragic that with such initial enthusiasm for change and support to eliminate corruption, after six years, it’s VMRO-DPMNE’s turn to be vociferous about corruption, the party which didn’t even apologize for the epic robbery they committed during the 11 years of their rule.
However, what’s even more tragic is that SDSM keeps thinking of independent voters as enemies because they didn’t go to the polls to vote for them during the local elections. That’s who they blame for their defeat and keep being mad at them and rubbing it in – do you see who won just because you didn’t vote? They don’t accept that it could also be because of their bad and above all incompetent rule since they’ve managed to revitalize VMRO-DPMNE and now, having risen to moral heights, they have the opportunity to count every bite of food they eat in restaurants and to preach at them about corruption.
The leader, Hristijan Mickoski, even stated that “the time when have-nots entered politics and came out as millionaires is over”. What put an end to that time? The event on 13 November 2018 when their leader, along with the millions he had stolen, posted on Facebook “I’m in Budapest at the moment”? Or the day when Mickoski, working as his father’s assistant at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, became the owner of hydropower plants?
4 VMRO-DPMNE announced that Mickoski met with Russian Ambassador Sergei Bazdnikin and that he complained that Macedonia is “marking a political and economic stagnation in terms of our strategic goals for EU membership.”
I wonder what the Russian ambassador thought when the leader of the largest opposition party in a NATO member state complained that we can’t join the EU? Mickoski found the right guy to complain to. Bazdnikin must have comforted him in the spirit of the Russian classics. He probably said: “Why the hell would you want to join NATO in the first place?”
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
