1 The Minister of Internal Affairs, Oliver Spasovski, was the one who was the happiest with the news that an American team has come to Macedonia to launch a more aggressive investigation into corruption among past and present officials and their connections with judges and prosecutors. This corruption is unbearable. That’s why Oliver’s mind is now at ease. He won’t have to fight corruption now that the Americans are here.
Truth be told, he offered help to the US investigators and said: The Ministry of Internal Affairs is at their disposal in every way possible to support these activities”. As if the Macedonian Ministry of Internal Affairs is from another country, so it will now help Americans tackle corruption in its own country.
The Minister of Internal Affairs also said that “each one of us should be concerned about what is practically happening to us in our country”. You don’t say! We’re all already concerned about what’s happening in our country, we don’t need the Minister of Internal Affairs to tell us that. It turns out people in Washington were also concerned.
He even says: “As soon as possible, each one of us must do our best to put an end to crime and corruption in the country from every aspect possible”. Oliver Spasovski has held high state offices for seven years, since November 2015, when he was the first technocratic Minister of Internal Affairs. What’s the thing each one of us could do “to put an end to crime and corruption in the country” that a Minister of Internal Affairs couldn’t do? He even adds that it’s necessary to “create a system that will respond efficiently and quickly”. Sure, no problem. Let the system be designed. Who’ll design it? Will it be designed by itself? All right, let Americans design it for us. We’ll be at their disposal and stay concerned. Each one of us, including the government.
2 While Oliver is concerned that there is corruption, Bujar Osmani is trying to present the fact that an American team came to discover corruption as a phenomenal success. He’s selling the government’s failure as a diplomatic triumph. One might think the Americans weren’t up for it, but Bujar begged them, please come and save us from corruption. He depicts the government’s failure to deal with corruption as our common failure. He was afraid we’d be left without EU monitoring, so he invited the Americans – please save us from this corrupt people. Officials’ life is made difficult because our people corrupts them.
Osmani announced that his party DUI will propose a law on vetting candidates for high state offices. If that law needs to be passed – let it be passed. We already have laws on the fight against corruption and crime. So what if the law on vetting gets passed? It’s a piece of cake, pass a law and it will be enforced by itself. Who’ll enforce the vetting? Will the system enforce it? The system that needs to be designed “as soon as possible”, as the Minister of Internal Affairs says, the same system “we should all be concerned about”. Will the First Deputy Prime Minister enforce the vetting? Will the parties enforce the vetting? These parties, which are corrupt to the core, since the basis of their party activism is clientelism and the fight to get their hands on a job position that would give them access to public money? Or will the USA enforce the vetting as well?
3 Americans will help citizens fight corruption, the same citizens who’ve been silently suffering the humiliation inflicted by incompetent and corrupt authorities from the local to the highest state level. And now those incompetent and corrupt authorities are blaming citizens as the cause of corruption. As if citizens go to officials and judges and twist their hand so they’d take bribes. The citizens’ pressure to corrupt the government is too great.
It’s not about the mentality. It’s about how the system works. The anti-corruption system is rotten. But it’s not the citizens who spoiled it. It’s sabotaged by those who are supposed to make the system work and maintain it. The easiest thing to do is to say that citizens are corrupt because such is our mentality. The same way it’s easy to pardon the main culprits – the local and the central government, tender commissions, management and supervisory boards, directors of public enterprises and institutions, judges from the lowest to the highest court, prosecutors, the police, inspection agencies and a number of other officials which are part of the system that needs to be designed “as soon as possible”.
Let’s say you as a citizen want to report corruption. Where would you report it? Where would the report end up? With this kind of judiciary, it’s more likely that they’ll accuse you of being guilty for reporting it than of punishing the one who’s corrupt.
4 Prime Minister Dimitar Kovachevski was in Vienna and with the mayor of the Austrian capital discussed about “the importance of functional urban environments, developed city road infrastructure and transport systems”.
The phrase “functional urban environment” has a nice ring to it. Especially when it comes to a prime minster of a country whose government sells state-owned land, amnesties illegal constructions, adopts corrupt urban plans and doesn’t punish the pollution of the air, the water and the soil…
Our prime minister, while in Vienna, is admiring “something that works flawlessly in the Austrian capital”. While here, the thing that works flawlessly is the criminal connection local and central authorities have established with construction companies, which are presented as investors.
5 The same way the government is convincing us that the American sanctions team is a great success, VMRO-DPMNE is convincing us that the mayor of Skopje, Danela Arsovska, isn’t a candidate of VMRO.
They’re trying their hardest to convince us that Danela is with SDSM. They’ve even invented the phrase “Tachela coalition”.
They sure know how to tell a joke. And the funniest joke is that they’re asking their candidate to resign – immediately! That’s how things stand – VMRO is asking VMRO to resign immediately.
Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski
