WE’RE ALL JUST ONLOOKERS

by | 18 March, 2022

When the Government says that the public administration should spend less money, it’s even more apparent how much money goes down the drain.

1 Gjorgje, come back. We’re all just onlookers. That’s the message of the Court of Appeals after they gave Zdravko Saveski and Vladimir Kunoski a suspended sentence of six months and half a million denars in damages for breaking the window of the President’s office on 13 April, 2016, a moment which served as the harbinger of the Colourful Revolution. The graffiti “You damn onlooker!” stood on the wall of the office in the centre of Skopje as a testament to the civil protest against the crimes of the government, which we all heard in the wiretapped conversations.

The protests escalated after President Gjorgje Ivanov pardoned 56 officials from Gruevski’s government, their aides and witnesses for whom the Special Prosecutor’s Office initiated criminal proceedings. The protest against the pardons lasted for two months, Ivanov revoked the pardons, some of the officials who had previously been pardoned got convicted and are now serving prison sentences, Nikola Gruevski’s closest associates admitted guilt and apologized to the citizens for the unpleasant things they heard in the information bombs… None of this would’ve happened if it hadn’t been for those protests and the Colourful Revolution. If it hadn’t been for those protests, the crimes wouldn’t have been discovered. And Gruevski wouldn’t have fled to Budapest.

And now in an “It’s all according to the law, boss” fashion, the Court of Appeals will pretend to be part of a legal state in the case of Saveski and Kunoski, one month before the statute of limitations on the case expires. The case with the most expensive windowpane and the chairs in Ivanov’s office. As for the validity of the verdicts for the heavyweights on the list of pardoned officials, we’ll have to wait for them to expire because they’ll be a hundred retrials for them.

2 The Government has passed a decree to cut expenditure in all institutions that are funded from the state budget. They announced they’ve adopted “rationalization measures”. Let’s try to explain what that means.

For example, what do they mean by – “The Government has obliged all budgets users to reduce the costs of promotional materials, sponsorships and advertising, as well as the use of company vehicles by 50%”. In plain English, that means that they have to reduce wasting state money by half. And the question remains: Why wouldn’t the austerity measures in terms of the promotional materials and company cars stay even after the crisis ends?

Or, what does it mean when the Government announces that “all budget users are obliged to reduce the number of business trips and to significantly reduce the number of delegations when traveling abroad”?

That means that people should go on business trips only when needed. And when they have work to do. And what do they mean by reducing the number of delegations going abroad? That only the one who needs to get something done should go.

That’s how it’s done in private companies. Only the people who have work to do go on a business trip. And they pay taxes, so state institutions would have enough income to cut down on wasting money. Aside from the fact that private companies pay taxes for made-up institutions, made-up offices and made-up job positions. There’s no need for them to even exist, let alone spend money on business trips.

The thing that’s the most interesting is the Government’s recommendation to regulators, municipalities and local enterprises “to refrain from less-essential expenditures”.

So they should spend less money on the essential, and refrain from the “less-essential expenditures”. The bit with “less-essential expenditures” simply means “unnecessary spending”. Or, in even simpler terms, – throwing state money down the drain.

In fact, with this statement and without translation we come to the conclusion that: When the Government says that the public administration should spend less money, it becomes crystal clear how much money they waste.

3 The Council of Public Prosecutors re-elected five prosecutors in the Prosecutor’s Office for Prosecution of Organized Crime and Corruption. However, the President of the Council, Antonio Jolevski, couldn’t list a single case of corruption and organized crime led by four of the five prosecutors and explain why exactly those five are the best candidates to continue working in that Prosecutor’s Office for another 4 years. Nor did he explain why the other candidates weren’t elected. Commenting on the remarks why the Council of Prosecutors elected only the ones who hadn’t delivered results, he said that not everyone can cope in just one term. So he gave the re-elected prosecutors one more chance to prove themselves in the next 4 years. As for the ones who were rejected– he wished them the best of luck for the next open call.

We’ll see, maybe in the next open call the lucky one will be the prosecutor who cut a deal with Zoran Mileski – Kicheec for the six months of prison for the car accident that he caused at Strazha, where people died and were injured. He did that while he was in prison, but released for treatment. He didn’t have any luck with this open call.

4 Despite all the trouble we’ve had with the date for the start of the EU accession talks and the Bulgarian veto, we’ve started laughing at the brain-teasers of the Eurobureaucrats who come here, trying to comfort us. High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell said in Skopje: “I cannot promise you a date, but I can promise you will, and where there is a will, there is a way.”

Borrell has it tough. He has to come up with something clever, just as EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn did in December 2007, two years after Macedonia was granted candidate status. He too used to tell jokes about Jean Sibelius, who answered his wife’s question when he’d come home by saying that he wasn’t a fortune-teller, but a composer.

Since Borrell has decided to tell us proverbs, like “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”, we also have a good one that fits our saga with the EU – “Where there’s power, there’s no justice”. If proverbs are the only things Eurobureaucrats have to say, then they shouldn’t come here at all. They too will spend less money on business trips.

5 Russia invaded Ukraine. They committed a brutal military aggression on a sovereign country. It’s not a case of two countries at war here. It’s a case of one country attacking and another defending. The aggressor bombarded residential buildings, hospitals, theatres… There are already thousands of dead civilians. There are three million refugees in just three weeks.

And if in this case you can’t tell good from evil, all the debates, all the analyzing and all the moralizing are nothing else than a pub-talk. Nothing else than being a know-it-all outtalking everyone else at festive gatherings.

 

Translated by Nikola Gjelincheski