1 After Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski announced that the Government is seriously considering introducing an additional tax on unmarried people, I can’t help but wonder: what will VMRO sympathisers do now? Will they suddenly start getting married en masse? Will they pull a few strings to avoid paying the tax? Or will they simply evade it altogether?
Then again, maybe it doesn’t apply to them. They’re married to the party.
2 Why worry so much? They can’t take your soul. That’s more or less how I interpreted the statement of European Commissioner for Enlargement, Marta Kos, who trying to console us in Skopje, said that our identity also lies in our “pogacha, tavche-gravche, or stuffed peppers.”
Personally, I don’t think the Commissioner meant to offend us because she said what we’ve been parroting for years. That “identity can never be a question of political decisions.” And of course, we’re well aware that “EU membership is the best way to protect the identity, culture and language of Macedonians.” If only she had stopped there and hadn’t continued to poetically mention various dishes as symbols of our identity. Because when you mention peppers alongside Bulgaria’s nationalist rhetoric and the EU’s support of that rhetoric it sounds terrible. It’s a smokescreen for the harsh fact that the EU has backed a member state that denies the identity of an entire people, people who want to see their country as a future member of the Union.
Yes. No one can take your soul. Bulgaria didn’t manage to take our soul even as a fascist occupier during the Second World War, and it certainly won’t succeed now as a model state in the European Union, especially according to the model of how human rights are respected. Fortunately, in our families there’s still someone alive from that time who remembers, and out of sheer spite for Bulgaria they refuse to die, just so they can keep reminding us what it was like under Bulgarian rule. Our soul wasn’t taken, not under Serbian rule, not even under the Ottoman Turks.
So, the problem we face as Macedonians isn’t that we’ll lose our identity because they’ll steal our tavche-gravche. The problem is that the identity is included in documents as a criterion for EU membership. The problem is that an EU member state is denying our nation and our language through countless resolutions and declarations passed in its Parliament. And it’s a problem that the EU is standing behind it. Put plainly: unless you register as Bulgarians, there’s no EU for you. And they’re not budging on that.
3 Honestly, Marta Kos didn’t offend me, but she did disappoint me a little. She’s Slovenian, she’s in her mature years, and for a good part of her life, she was our fellow citizen, we lived in the same country, Yugoslavia, from Vardar to Triglav, we grew up together, we went to the same camps “by our sea,” we studied in the same schools. I would expect her to be personally hurt by what Bulgaria is putting us through. Slovenian partisans fought against fascism side by side with our partisans.
Besides, Slovenian Marta Kos isn’t someone like the Finn Olli Rehn, who, while he was the European Commissioner for Enlargement from 2004 to 2010, told us anecdotes in Skopje about Sibelius and how he couldn’t predict to his wife when he would come home. Nor is she the Brit Denis MacShane, who, when the UK was still in the EU, visited Skopje in 2004 as Minister for Europe, took of his watch, moved its hands back and declared: “You either turn the clock forward or start turning it back.”
Croatian politicians, who were also once our fellow citizens, at least show more empathy. They say, what the Bulgarians are doing to you is really bad, it’s also unfair what we are doing to you as part of the EU, but think about it, weigh the pros and cons, reach an agreement, we’re far better off since we became a member of the EU.
Never mind. We know that Marta Kos now represents the European Union, not Slovenia. We also know that she’s been living with European values for over 30 years, ever since the late 1980s with “Slovenija, moja dežela” and “Evropa zdaj[1].” However, when Marta was fighting to achieve her European ideal in Slovenia, no one told her: You are not Slovenian and do not speak Slovenian.
So, next time she visits us as a European Commissioner, instead of comforting us with her knowledge of Macedonian cuisine, let her explain which European value includes denying the identity of an entire people in a country that’s a candidate for EU membership.
4 Truth be told, Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski could have asked the same question: Which European value includes denying the identity of the Macedonian people? And the next time he recites revolutionary poetry, alongside Goce and Jane, he can also mention the heroes of the anti-fascist struggle too. That hits a nerve with the Bulgarians even more.
It turns out that his robust diplomacy and the creative ideas of President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova haven’t exactly succeeded in unblocking the EU negotiations. The whole deal with the European Parliament report, which obligates no one to anything, makes it feel as if we’re looking for trouble. Languages aren’t mentioned in the reports on other EU candidate countries, but in our case, we insist not only on Macedonian language, but on “century-old, historical Macedonian language.” And the moment you add a qualifier in front of the language, you open a debate about something that’s not up for debate. So now the Bulgaria fires back with “modern, contemporary Macedonian language.”
As if we don’t know that Bulgaria is our enemy and as if we don’t know that the EU is unfair. Aiming to prove to us what we already know, Mickoski seems determined to create new blockades on our path to the EU.
The Macedonian language is the Macedonian language. Why are you nitpicking where there’s no need to? Little hooks for great patriots who proudly humiliate themselves to get Bulgarian passports, all while dazzled by the greatness of Aleksandar Vucic. That’s such a combination that I got dizzy just writing it. If you let ChatGPT analyse it, it will waste a lot of energy. And all for nothing.
All of this is part of the setup for the upcoming local elections. And, most likely, early parliamentary elections immediately after. We’ve seen that perpetual election cycle before.
We’ve already seen VMRO-DPMNE do it. However, we haven’t seen anything good come out of it.
5 And then, what do we do when we win? Has anyone actually read the Report on Macedonia’s progress toward EU membership, the one the European Parliament is about to vote on? Aside from the bit about the Macedonian language, have you seen all the comments?
We don’t need to read it. We’re living the report. We live in a country that’s experiencing an investment baby boom, where children as young as 5 are building 12-storey illegal buildings, and have them legalised so the ruling coalition doesn’t collapse. We have a Prosecutor’s Office that, just days before the verdict against Kumanovo mayor Maksim Dimitrievski, withdrew the indictment. Coincidentally, the mayor also happens to be the leader of ZNAM, a party in the ruling coalition, and, coincidentally again, Dimitrievski has just announced his candidacy for mayor once again. We live in an EU candidate country where several citizens of Struga repaired a bridge themselves, because every municipal and state institution pretends it’s not under its jurisdiction to repair it. And the residents of the village of Musinci, in Pelagonija, pulled a dead snake out of the drinking water tank on their own, because there, as everywhere else in the country, no institution considers it part of their jurisdiction.
They can’t take out identity. We’ll eat our peppers, we’ll choke on corruption and rubbish, and we’ll wait to die in some tragedy like the one in Kochani. That is, unless someone runs us over on a footpath in the middle of a park first and takes our soul that way.
6 I’m not bothered by Marta Kos, nor by the EU, and as for the Bulgarians, I’ve long since gone numb. What annoys me the most is that our political elites have no sense of national interest. Aren’t we talking about our identity, about our nation being under attack, about our language? Aren’t we facing hostility from a neighbouring country? So why is that, even under attack, we can’t find the strength to unite?
Stop blaming each other over who’s the bigger traitor, and bragging about who’s the bigger patriot. Pause for a moment. Forget the battles back home.
We’ve spent our entire lives trying to meet someone’s catastrophic fantasies. We’re wasting energy on nonsense. All that’s left now is a tax on being single — and the best is yet to come.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
[1] Translator’s note: “Evropa zdaj” (“Europe now”) was a pro-European political slogan from the late 1980s, while “Slovenija, moja dežela” (“Slovenia, my land”) began as a tourism motto but grew into a powerful symbol of national pride and identity before independence.
