1 It’s time to let a bit of sunshine and fresh air into our dull Scandinavian everyday lives. Let’s tune in live, let’s watch another episode of “The Danela and Visar Show.” Let’s see how the Mayor of Skopje, Danela Arsovska, and the Mayor of Chair, Visar Ganiu, go head-to-head with their latest wisecracks.
The Mayor of Skopje has rolled up her sleeves a few months ahead of the local elections and is now touring Chair, filming every illegally constructed building she can find. Meanwhile, the Mayor of Chair has been collecting rubbish from his municipality and dumping it outside Danela’s office in the dead of the night. He first unloads the rubbish in Chair, and then reloads it onto a truck, only to unload it yet again and scatter it in front of City Hall, right in the centre of Skopje. He organised a clean-up action with civic activists. Danela responded like a hardcore rocker: wearing a Nirvana t-shirt, she started chasing him through the park, shouting “Where are you, Vicky? Where are you hiding?”
Isn’t that a wonderful experience? If there were no video recordings of the performance, we’d never have believed just how marvellous our country truly is. You’re left speechless when you hear the refined vocabulary they use in debate, and enchanted by the political culture of debate. Without this show starring our two elected officials, who received their mandate in direct elections, we’d have no idea what Scandinavian-style good governance and accountability to citizens are supposed to look like.
Visar Ganiu says: “Don’t point the finger only at Chair, such legalisations of illegal buildings exist in every municipality.” And most of those municipalities happen to be governed by VMRO-DPMNE, Ganiu’s coalition partner. So who’s learning from whom?
Simply put, this show is just an attempt to divert the public’s attention. So we’d forget that Danela Arsovska, as a candidate VMRO-DPMNE backed, has ruined the capital to almost irreparable proportions. So we’d turn a blind eye to the fact that Visar Ganiu, from Vredi, is legalising illegal buildings with forged documents, just like his predecessor, the current Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Environment, Izet Mexhiti, did when he was in DUI.
If all this is forgotten by the local elections in October, then it’s certain that poking fun will the downfall of this people. Because that’s all it seems to care about. Nothing more.
2 Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski says that as long as he’s prime minister, he’ll stand his ground, and Bulgarians won’t be included in the Constitutions until a Macedonian joins Bulgaria’s Committee for Minorities. Fourteen rulings by the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg couldn’t change a thing in the Committee on Minorities in Bulgaria, but Mickoski will sort it out.
Mickoski’s statements are mostly for domestic show. But at their core, they’re an admission of powerlessness. Because the narrative that we’re victims of the EU’s unprincipled policy no longer holds. As if we didn’t already know that. We’ve been victims since the days of Kiro Gligorov and Nikola Kljusev. It took us over 25 years to resolve the dispute with Greece. If it takes us that long to resolve the one with Bulgaria, followed by the one with Albania, we won’t be joining the EU in our lifetimes.
That’s why it would only be fair if Mickoski told us and the EU representatives: I can’t resolve this issue, it’s unsolvable, and EU integration will stall during my mandate. We’ll work on the European agenda without the EU.
3 The problem is that even our most influential strategic partners, the USA and the UK, want to see Macedonia in the EU. And to even begin the accession talks, we need to include Bulgarians in our Constitution.
Right now, Mickoski has the perfect opportunity, both in the EU and back home, to put an end to that issue. Right after the local elections, when he says he’s expecting a major victory. Let him change the Constitution so we can finally break the deadlock, start those damn negotiations, and then if they block us again, we’ll figure things out, we’ll keep fighting.
There’s no one to stand against it, except Levica. As for the rest of the opposition? SDSM and DUI are the sorry lot who saddled us with the French proposal, they were the first to push for including Bulgarians in the Constitution. Do you really expect his voters from VMRO-DPMNE to rebel? Let’s not forget, this is the same party that convinced them the polluted water in Lake Dojran was safe to drink, so surely they can convince them that opening the EU accession talks is good for the country. And if people start to feel the slightest improvement, something tangible, before the next parliamentary elections, Mickoski’s government will present every newly opened chapter in the negotiations as a historic success. He’ll be bulletproof.
Personally, I don’t believe that Bulgarians deserve a place in the Preamble as part of the peoples who fought for Macedonian statehood. On the contrary, Bulgaria, as a state, has always worked against Macedonian statehood. Nor would I ever identify as Bulgarian just to obtain a Bulgarian passport and travel more easily through the EU, as more than 120,000 of my fellow citizens have done.
But I’m not the prime minister.
The prime minister should see the bigger picture. He should act in the country’s best interest, and not be guided by personal feelings. He should be a visionary.
For instance, when Mickoski announces that, in the process of unblocking our European integration, he’ll be asking Bulgaria “where 200,000 Macedonians disappear in western Bulgaria between 1956 and 1965,” perhaps he should first ask himself where 200,000 Macedonians from the Republic of Macedonia have disappeared since independence. And where do hundreds of children disappear at the start of each semester in Macedonian schools, as their parents move abroad? He should ask himself whose passports they’re travelling with. And how over 120,000 Macedonians obtained Bulgarian passports in order to leave the country and work in the EU, including ministers from his own government, MPs, directors of public enterprises, mayors, municipal councillors, and civil servants. Perhaps he should ask them why they obtained Bulgarian passports.
What exactly are we waiting for? For the 120,000 with those passports to return home, but this time as Bulgarians, and join the 3,504 people who’ve declared themselves as Bulgarians, and even seek employment in the state administration under the principle of fair representation?
Like it or not, those 3,504 people who identified as Bulgarians in the last census are now holding back our future and the future of our children.
4 The prosecution has dropped the charges against the director of the National Security Agency, Bojan Hristovski, over a forged English language certificate issued by a studio in Bulgaria. During the investigation, prosecutors discovered that the owner of the studio that issued the Bulgarian diploma had moved, but also found another diploma, one that was valid. So, we should be proud that the director of the secret police is so good that he has not just one, but two English diplomas. So, let’s put an end to this issue forever and ever, amen.
After such a thorough investigation, I think that State Prosecutor Ljupcho Kocevski doesn’t deserve to be replaced, despite Prime Minister Mickoski’s insistence.
As for the members of the Judicial Council, the ones Mickoski threatened to rally the public against, they don’t deserve to be replaced either, not after the wives of the Prime Minister and the President of the Constitutional Court were promoted to appellate judges.
5 I don’t see anything controversial in the fact that a fashion studio from Bitola won a 2 million euros tender from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to sew uniforms for the police special forces.
How come you immediately suspect corruption just because a fashion studio with only two employees is to sew police uniforms for 2 million euros, and it doesn’t occur to you that our police officers will soon look like runway models? We should be proud that this Government is delivering historic achievements on a daily basis, we’ll have the most attractive special forces in the Western Balkans, and beyond, all the way to Italy, like never before in Macedonian history.
Ugh, there’s always something to complain about, isn’t there?
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
