News about Macedonia in English
Trading freedom. A Balkans List of Bad Practices
This article originally appeared on 11 October in BalkanInsight, www.BalkanInsight.com
The last few weeks bombarded us with bad news from the Balkans. It seems that the dream of so many people to have a good life in freedom and prosperity has moved a few steps further into the realm of the unreachable. But hold on – is it really the dream of many? Prosperity – sure.
There even was a political party in Macedonia with the cryptic name that none of their members could ever explain to me: “Party for Democratic Prosperity”. I say was, because the insignificant leftovers that form it today are hardly worth mentioning… But that is another story. Bottom-line is – everybody wants to live in prosperity.
But freedom? Of course one of the biggest misunderstandings about it comes from a German – Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote in 1920 that “freedom is always the freedom of dissenters”. Nice and wrong.
Let me give a few recent examples from the region, in which freedom is traded for another, greater good (usually profit), or in which it is utterly disregarded, usually for the same greater good. Maybe it is time to think about taking it back.
• In an utterly sultanesque event, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan paid a visit to Macedonia, where he was greeted as a great friend and by some as a savior. I saw a woman on TV news saying that Erdogan is “the man, the first and maybe the last one”. Whatever that may mean, it certainly sounds like a slightly religious touch sticking to the man, aureole included. It was a bit ridiculous, but harmless.
What followed was anything but harmless and a major faux pas, which either went unnoticed or was willingly accepted by the Macedonian hosts. Erdogan’s visit to Tetovo ended in a mass event in the Arabati Baba Tekke.
It is the location that has been taken by force from its rightful owners, the Bektashi dervish order. And when I say force, I mean armed force. The Bektashi temple was destroyed, desecrated and turned into a mosque. All this was done by a group around the Tetovo mufti, in the name of Sunni Islam. And in the name of more considerable profit from using the Tekke location.
This is of course no incidental event. By organising the visit in the Tekke, Tetovo’s Sunni muslim community managed to send out a clear signal of intolerance and of disregard towards deviant religious views. In Recep Tahir Erdogan they found the perfect ambassador.
Needless to say that the Bektashi stand for the opposite of all that: tolerance, open-mindedness and gender equality. But that never counted.
What is even more discouraging is the fact that not a single journalist brought the issue up. Not a single critical voice at the visit of the man who has created the atmosphere which led to the killing of their colleague Hrant Dink, just to pick one prominent example. Obviously, it is good enough if he ridicules Greece. That will do to satisfy national needs. The rest is insignificant details. Freedom? Irrelevant.
• Speaking of surrendering. By banning the gay pride parade in Belgrade, the Serbian authorities have delivered the perfect material for a case study in applied populism. What they probably miscalculated are the repercussions this decision will have on their country.
First, it would be outrageous if this didn’t seriously impact on Serbia’s bid for EU candidate status. But even more important is the internal damage. The government has brought the police into a position of zero credibility.
The institution whose primary duty it is to protect citizens from any harm done to them and to their fundamental rights and to guarantee the free exercise of those fundamental rights, has become the laughing stock of a fascist mob.
A mob that should be the object of police work; that should be crushed with all means available to a democratic state, because it stands with its very existence against all principles of democracy. This is where freedom should end. Instead, this scum is about to become mainstream.
But no, Serbia’s ever uninspired political class decided differently. The freedom of a small group was sacrificed on the altar of alleged safety. But whose safety are they talking about?
That of the policemen, who chose a career, which implies the lack thereof? Or is it the safety of the fascist mob, which can be mobilized whenever needed? Or is it the safety of the righteous citizens, who feel threatened by the existence of homosexuality? Or could it maybe be the safety of an utterly bankrupt political elite that has no answers to Serbia’s problems?
Be it as it may, it was a sombre day for freedom in Serbia. And interior minister Ivica Dacic’s attempt to portray himself as the defender of Serbian national interest against the gay lobby in Brussels has an after-taste. Flavour: totalitarian. Category: cheep.
• The Bulgarian obsession with Roma being blamed for everything short of bad weather (although I’m not sure about that, either) is not new. Clashes are not new. Close ties between politicians, policemen, the church and the raging mob are not new there as they are the case in Serbia and a few other countries.
The recent Roma hunt in Bulgaria may have surprised in its dimension. But in the end, it is just an escalation of what is happening every day in Bulgarian society. And what is the reaction to that? Also not really new. Lip service. And nothing will change in the short run.
Not with the populist turn that the Bulgarian political scene has taken already a good few years ago. What remains disappointing is the lack of tools within the EU to sanction such behaviour. Sleep tight, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. And freedoms. Or not.
• Next stop Kosovo. Or rather Germany. Or both. The suicide of witness X in the case of Fatmir Limaj. Also there, the signal is clear. You are free to live your dream of prosperity, as long as you don’t get in the way of those who have the larger share of the cake.
Don’t ask how they got it, head down, nothing will happen to you. Obviously the famous Albanian pride and strive for freedom ends at the entrance to the court building. Beyond, it is omertá and clan allegiance. Or suicide. Haradinaj, Limaj. How many more until people realise who is hijacking their freedom, their future and eventually their prosperity?
• Last stop census. The only real reason to have an all out census every ten years in the 21st century? My guess is because it has always been the case. Rationally, this good old Roman practice had better be shelved and put to rust next to the SPQR insignia of the empire.
In small countries especially, it might prove much more efficient to opt for a combination of alternative techniques, making use of registered data and sampling it with results of smaller or targeted surveys, e.g. on municipal levels or on a specific set of topics (agriculture, use of energy, etc). There are dozens of models available and already implemented. Take Israel or Norway as examples.
Instead, institutional inertia and lack of knowledge are unavoidably producing conflicts. In the Balkans, the census exercises have degenerated into ethnic muscle-flexing and boycotts by a variety of ethnic groups put the result of the efforts in question.
The politicisation of ethnic data won’t be avoided if this practice is held up. Unhelpful actions like imams calling for boycott or NGOs calling for the Diaspora to return to the motherland and be counted will continue to be part of the census folklore.
The impact on people’s freedom of choice is undeniable, as ethnic and religious groups – or rather self-styled saviours of identity will continue to exercise pressure on individuals to declare themselves, the division into “us” and “them” will continue, and personal identities will continue to be pressed into national matrices.
As for prosperity – a census which is not based upon real data is useless. A census is a snapshot and a planning tool and not a political instrument. A large number of politicians and an even larger number or their constituents fail to acknowledge that. This will continue to lead to flawed resource planning and to small, localised crises whether it is about energy supplies or the quality of roads. Time to think about alternatives.
Vision? Be tenacious…
Time to Grow
This article originally appeared on 8 September in BalkanInsight, www.BalkanInsight.com
At 20, you are not a child anymore. But nobody expects you to be mature, either. You are grown up, but you lack the patina of experience.
You are creative, but not realistic. You are loud and impulsive, but what you say and do is often radical, not always thought through. You enter relationships just as easily as you leave them.
The system of coordinates that should drive you for the rest of your life is there in the rough, but it needs a lot of fine-tuning still.
And for that, whether you recognise the necessity or not, you still need some mentoring, combined with quite some amount of information and education. In the meantime, most others overlook your caprices with a smile.
And some will invest energy and time in you, because they recognise some potential in you. It is however up to you to develop that potential.
Nice metaphor, isn’t it? It is so tempting to compare a young country or rather its society to a twenty year old girl. Fatherland – mother tongue and the whole oedipal story in between.
It opens the space for poetic language, for tender thoughts, for fatherly advice, for a whole range of sexual connotations borne of feathers of stuck-up late national romantics. Except – it doesn’t work. Really, it doesn’t. All it produces is bad poetry, bad literature and pathetic journalism. And there is more than enough of that around.
This type of late romantic symbolism is so tightly connected to ethnic nationalism that it cannot interest me. And even more so in the Macedonian context, which is the one I am writing about here. It is omnipresent these days leading to the 20th anniversary of Macedonia’s independence and this is all I shall say about it. Not worth it.
But why doesn’t the metaphor work? Quite simply: a society is not one compact body run by one brain (and a soul, some would insist), but a complex network of different clusters, held together by a number of ideas.
This truth is as simple as it is often ignored. Let me give you a recent example. I was watching a news program, a run-down of events between 1991 and 2011. When talking about the crisis government of 2001, the reporter mentioned Ljubcho Georgievski and Branko Crvenkovski as coalition partners, simply ignoring their Albanian partners Xhaferi and Ymeri. I am sure it was not ill intended. It is however symptomatic that the “other” reality is simply eclipsed. What does that tell us about the state of affairs?
To make a society work, one needs a vision and a narration. The premises in 1991 were already not very encouraging, and today, one conflict and a lot of commotion later, this situation still persists. If a deputy prime-minister can say publicly that he acknowledges the independence of his country, but that there is nothing for him to celebrate, and the day after he is still deputy prime minister, then something is really wrong.
The various visions don’t match the narration. Or rather – there is no narration to integrate the variety of visions.
Macedonian society is faced with a lot of problems today, which could very theoretically have been avoided if other people had entered politics than the ones that hijacked the country for their personal interests and continue to do so. But that remains theory.
Let us see what can be done from now on. Apart from the mountains of social and economic issues, there is a conceptual one to be addressed.
The first two decades of independence have not provided answers to a few crucial questions. What is the glue that has the power to hold Macedonia’s society together?
Academia is intolerably slow and shy in providing these answers. The Academy of Sciences and Arts is alzheimering away, producing merely the glue that keeps its members attached to their seats. And when it finally comes around to actually doing something, it produces scandals of the likes of an attempted Macedonian encyclopaedia.
And politics – well, look around in Skopje and to a lesser degree in a few other towns. Politics provides a very strong narration, which materialises itself in bronze, marble and a lot of plastic. Strong it is, but it is also divisive and backwards oriented.
Inventing a past is a nice exercise when it comes to creating jobs in the construction business. It gives a whole plethora (or rather phalanx) of self-styled pseudo-artists an otherwise unlikely opportunity to express themselves and to be admired by the masses, who alas know no better. Fine.
It gives political actors a boost in ratings and perception. Legit. It puts a lasting aesthetic stamp on the faces on towns and cities. Alright, others have done that too. It keeps battalions of apologists in media and science busy with producing increasing amounts of absurdities. At least it sells. And it sells well. And eventually people start buying in, believing these absurdities.
The tighter the mental, physical and psychological space around the narration mainstream, the more this mainstream penetrates people’s minds.
But the problem is that the narration is hollow, because it is re-telling the past. It tries to occupy territory on the mental map of the region. Ok, others have done that too. But they have done it a long time ago.
The spaces on mental maps are taken. Squatting them does not do much to legitimising the narration, but it does a lot to polarising and alienating potential allies and friends, as well as to reinforcing unfriendly positions. Wouldn’t it be more useful and logical to look ahead, starting from today’s setting and problems? The narrative bubble will eventually burst anyway. The question is how much damage would have been done by then.
It is far more challenging to find the glue that can keep Macedonia’s disparate and partial societies together, thus turning the memetic soup into a cohesive mass. For that there is need for a crystallisation agent.
Who can play that role in the absence of a viable economy, and in the face of failure of academic and political elites? There is no easy answer.
The complex one is probably civil society. A civil society that resists political temptations and keeps up the struggle for a truly open society in Macedonia; a civil society driven not by the logic of donor funding and project cycles, but by activism and voluntarism in recognition of the necessities in creating this open society; a civil society that sees itself not as an extended arm of political forces but as a powerful, independent chorus of a large variety of voices singing not in unison but in multiple polyphonic layers. Loudly.
Impossible to overhear and thus listened at.
It is time to create a narration that enforces this vision. Twenty years after it suddenly found itself independent, it is high time for the Macedonian society to grow into that role, to emancipate itself from servitude and clientelism, from group treatment and group exclusion and embrace the values that put the most powerful of factors into the centre of European societies: the responsible, self- conscientious citizen.
Vision? Grow up…
This article originally appeared on 23 February in BalkanInsight, www.BalkanInsight.com
So they finally get their will. The two arch-rivals of Macedonian politics, Prime Minister Gruevski and opposition leader Crvenkovski can finally enter the ring against each other. For the first time. Although the haggling about the date and the procedures is ongoing, Macedonia is set to face snap elections this spring. The press conferences announcing victory and attacking the rival are on. Don King is prepping his hairdo.
“Branko, let’s go for elections, it’s time”, Gruevski called yesterday. As if it were about the two of them; about rivalry between two teenagers for dominance in the neighbourhood gang. Or to gain the heart of the hood beauty. Showing off their virility, their readiness to fight it out, at all cost. Quite cool for the neighbourhood bullies. If all this were about the hood.
Only, it’s not. It is about a country, albeit with “the population of a borough of London”, as a former British Ambassador put it some years ago. It is about the future of this nation, which still hasn’t finished defining itself. It is about finalising the process of integration into NATO and the EU. About finally filling the mantras with substance. It is about ensuring that the inhabitants of Macedonia, who will again be misused as voting pawns in the chess game of electoral arithmetic, have a future ahead of them, which is less bleak than the past and more promising than the present.
It is clear that the key to achieving that lies in a number of hard decisions. The toughest one is compromise on the name row. This will have to be achieved by consensus among mature politicians, based on a sound analysis of the options and as a result of a real negotiation process.
What is to come then is a decade or more of really hard, committed work, to get Macedonia out of its current state of social, economic and intellectual dilapidation and build a real society, based on integration rather than exclusivism, on debate and negotiation rather than paternalism, on intellectual dispute rather than political pressure.
The only problem is that in order to do that, a different type of politics and a very different type of politicians will be needed. Such politicians would understand that it is not a democratic achievement to have a parliament filled with party soldiers, who represent nobody but their bosses. They would also understand that the arena for political dispute is parliament and not the boxing ring of almost yearly elections. They would understand that the dispute is not about exercising control, about seeding fear into peoples’ heads, but about concepts and ideas.
They would understand that exercising power is not about destroying your opponent, but about having the better arguments. They would understand that controlling the media and public opinion make you lose credibility.
But of course it is not about that. The type of politician we are dealing with here was characterised by Istvan Bibo in 1946 as a ‘fake realist’. It is the type of politician that makes use of democratic instruments to distort and corrupt them. The result is personalisation of power.
And it was not Slavoj Zizek, but his much more interesting former wife, Renata Salecl, who once wrote that in such a political discourse, the honesty of the speaker is irrelevant. Whether they are invoking the present or the past, whether they speak of wellbeing or glory, whether they build monuments or networks is irrelevant. Whenever they say the people, they mean themselves. Whenever they say “we”, they mean “I”.
And what does all that mean? Another year lost for development, for progress, for reform. Another huge amount of money pumped into campaigns, into empty promises, into painting reality in hallucinatory bright colours on billboards, to contrast with the grey around them. The country will hibernate until well after the elections, when the last post is distributed, the last debt in the network of patronage and clientelism has been paid off. And it will wake up to another year gone.
A year in which a lot of work could and should have been done. If only anyone were serious about it. But as things stand now, policy making has lost against the political battle; content is sacrificed for the sake of power play. And in breach of all rules of fair play, the referee has been beaten up. The treatment of the outgoing EU special representative Fouere by the leading group of VMRO-DPMNE is beyond any acceptable standards of diplomacy and of decency.
As for the elections, they will be fierce. If the rhetoric of these days is just the beginning, we are in for a hot spring. And all this in the context of an international community turning away from Macedonia, in large part because of this political caste. Will they be monitored? I most certainly hope so.
I think it was Crosby, Stills and Nash, accompanied by Neil Young, who sang at Woodstock a little piece called “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”. I beg to differ. So I shall board one of the brand-new Ukrainian buses, drive to the Matka canyon and hide in the bear-cave, hibernating it out. Cheers!
Vision! Hibernate…
Lennon and The End of a Childhood
This article originally appeared on 8 December in BalkanInsight, www.BalkanInsight.com
I first heard it on Radio Free Europe. John Lennon had just been shot in New York. New York – an abstract concept to me, a concept of freedom, of all I wanted then. To breathe freely, to move freely, to do whatever I wanted to do. Normal wishes for a fourteen-year-old. Except I was trapped. Locked up in a country and held hostage by a system. I am talking about Romania under the regime of an illiterate former shoemaker apprentice, whose name my father refuses to pronounce until today.
It was a time of global and personal tensions. My family had decided to turn its back to paradise and search for a new beginning in the empire of evil, in the land of oppression of the working class, in West-Germany, the country that was ready to pay Ceausescu in order to let us go – something we found out much later, though.
My parents had taken up the fight with the authorities a few years before, and we had just entered the end-game. What had preceded were a few years of harassment, of humiliations, of being treated like traitors. But they stood firm against all that, invoking their freedom of movement and of thought, both guaranteed by the Romanian constitution. And we the children grew to stand firm with them. And I learned to distinguish. Between home and outside, between private thoughts and politically desired ones, between real friends and possible informers (little did I know about the thin line there), between me and them. And I learned to despise. What else could one feel towards a system and its cronies, which treated people the way they did?
The period leading to December 1980 was one of faint hope. Solidarnosc in Poland had begun to unveil again the ugly face of Communism. I had witnessed the suppression and annihilation of three hopeless attempts at a democratic movement in Romania – the Goma-movement, the Jiu-Valley miners’ strike and the attempt to create an independent trade union. All events ended tragically. So, all hope was in the Poles. But in early December, Soviet tanks were massed in large numbers on the border to Poland. Brezhnev thought he could take advantage of the USA being in a state of transition from Jimmy Carter’s presidency to Ronald Reagan’s. With the previous experience of 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Czechoslovakia, nobody expected a positive outcome. We felt we could bury our hopes for another decade, at least. And yes, I am saying “we”, because that is how it was. At fourteen, I was confronted with all this and had to be interested. Besides – urban life had been killed by the total insanity of the regime. There were no public entertainment opportunities for a teenager. What remained was the bleak world of politics and the escapism provided by books and decadent Western music – via Radio Free Europe and Radio Luxemburg on short wave radio. Static included.
Around the beginning of December I started living in a bubble. The end-game I mentioned earlier had started. My parents had lost their jobs. In principle a good thing, because it indicated that the ball had started rolling. The down-side was that it could still take years until they let us go. We simply did not know. Then, shortly after, I was solemnly excluded from the young communists’ organization, which I had been forced to join only a few months earlier. It was a great moment. I had to step in front of the entire collective of my school and hand in my party booklet and uniform. And they sure didn’t appreciate the bright smile on my face… A few weeks later, I was excluded from school. As a traitor, I had no right to enjoy the fruit of socialist education. Then I already knew. It was going to be a short transition until we were allowed to leave.
Still, all this built up month by month, and the tension was hard to bear. Not to talk about existential teenage problems: what about the girlfriend? Would it last across borders and the iron curtain? And then, amidst all that, my older cousin, my initiator into all things good – music, girls and all that - deflected from the mistreatment by sadistic officers he was faced with in the presidential guard and sought asylum in our house. It was a period of extreme tension, in which networks did what networks do and saved him from being court-marshalled. He survived. But it was during the forty-eight hours that he hid in our house that the news about Lennon broke. We both shared a deep love for music, and Lennon’s music was up there. Double Fantasy had just been released and (Just Like) Starting Over was everywhere on the radios. The news first paralysed me. Then the dam broke and I felt all this grief I had accumulated over years was channelled into this rage. It was an outcry to the world, announcing the new me. The child in me died that day. And with it two abilities: to forget and to forgive.
Today, after thirty years, this day is still very much alive inside me. A few months ago, I had the opportunity of a new beginning. The first state security files about my parents are emerging. I shall read them. And I shall not forget. And certainly not forgive. Because God is a concept, by which we measure our pain. Nothing more.
Vision! Be vigilant…
