The end of a love affair

For years Macedonia has been considered the most devoted ally of the West in the region. When the crisis began, however, the love affair turned sour.

AIM Skopje, Aug. 1, 2001

Macedonian villagers from the Tetovo region demonstrated in front of the Macedonian Parliament building on July 24, after they were forced out of their homes by fighting. It was the end of the day when Skopje was startled by the news that international representatives Francois Leotard and James Pardew urged the leaders of the four leading political parties, in talks on resolving the crisis, that Albanian be granted the status of the second official language in areas where ethnic Albanians account for more than 20 percent of the population.

The Macedonian public, frustrated by the political elite's inability to resolve the crisis in recent months, saw this as a major provocation. Later in the evening, the unfortunate villagers were joined by a group of unidentified young people who immediately took over: they marched through the city streets, torched a number of vehicles belonging to international organizations, wrecked a McDonalds restaurant and the offices of British Airways and broke windows on the German and British embassies. And that was not all! The riot was supposed to culminate in front of the U.S. embassy, where the demonstrators were going to give the West "a piece of their mind." In other words, a rerun of March 24, 1999, was to follow. Back then, Skopje was the city that most courageously stood up against NATO's attack on Yugoslavia. Pictures of the U.S. embassy, wrecked and burning, made headlines worldwide. But on July 24, 2001, the angry crowd stopped in front of an unconquerable bunker, which the U.S. embassy had become over the past two years. The following evening the demonstrators attempted to reach the residential district of Vodno, where President Trajkovski, Prime Minister Georgijevski and Western diplomats live. Police (who did practically nothing about the riots the day before) saw it was no longer a laughing matter, taking action to suppress this expansion of "spontaneous anger." The villagers from around Tetovo, in addition, were forced to distance themselves from the events, saying that "someone has taken advantage of our suffering."

The following day not a single Western country omitted to express, in one form or another, its displeasure with such an expression of anger. The matter, however, did not end there. In an allegedly unrelated statement, the U.S. State Department said that due to staff reductions at the embassy it would have to stop issuing visas to Macedonian citizens at its consular department in Skopje, advising potential applicants to travel to neighboring countries harboring U.S. diplomatic missions. Unofficial sources said the U.S. "colony" in Skopje, formerly numbering 500 people, had been reduced to a mere 40. Foreign media organizations reported that a platoon of marines would arrive to assist their fellow countrymen in Macedonia, and protect them if need be. British Airways cancelled flights to Skopje because the service "is not making money." The Western media, which as of recently have people in Macedonia, started looking for clues about the Macedonians' "anti-Western sentiment."

There are many explanations, but Western analysts are prone to accept one that says the West, or more precisely, the United States, has done several "strange things" since the onset of the crisis: little was done to seal the Macedonian border with Kosovo, which the Macedonian public believes caused the conflict and activities of the National Liberation Army to escalate. Furthermore, the role of the U.S. MPRI Consultants has not been clarified. MPRI Consultants allegedly offered its services to both the Macedonian army and the KLA-NLA. There is also the issue of the evacuation of NLA guerrillas from the village of Aracinovo and the fact that the Americans never bothered to address rumors that their instructors and sophisticated weaponry were present there, which prompted last month's demonstrations in front of the Parliament building. Leotard and Pardew's "language" proposal was only the last straw.

Some foreign analysts sought an answer in the 10-year history of the youngest state in the Balkans. Since its creation, Macedonia never concealed that it wanted to become a fully-fledged member of NATO and the European Union. Of course, other nearby countries also had similar plans, but Macedonia was always portrayed as a paradigm of co-existence and ethnic tolerance. Everybody was quick to praise this state of affairs. The political elites quickly, maybe even too quickly, realized how they would have to behave in order to win the West's support: never openly oppose something, endlessly express your readiness to build democracy, multi-cultural society, and pursue economic reforms. Thanks to such cooperativeness, Macedonian politicians got numerous privileges: the people at the top met with the most important international officials, there was enough financial assistance for adding many a luxury to government buildings, to purchase costly vehicles, and for all sorts of international conferences -- in short, they lived in a world that had nothing in common with the Macedonia of today.

Preoccupied with Euro-Atlantic integration, or more precisely, with their own international endorsement, local politicians failed to notice several devastating facts. Privatization, often reminiscent of the cruelest forms of early capitalism, was presented to workers as an indispensable part of economic reforms backed by international financial institutions. What were the tens of thousands of people who lost their jobs for the sake of "economic reforms" and a market economy supposed to think? The multi-party system was embodied in leaders lacking any clear vision of the kind of society they were actually planning to build and was perceived by the ordinary people as a cruel struggle for power, lauded and supported by numerous Western "instructors in democracy." While government officials were traveling around the globe, the common folk had to stand in line in front of foreign embassies for days, exposed to endless forms of humiliation. The government, regardless of who was in power, explained the building of trust between the ethnic groups and the expansion of collective and individual rights as a result of Western pressure, that is, not as of efforts to truly democratize society.

This is why the observant International Crisis Group is probably right in concluding in its most recent report that the past years were not properly used to explain to Macedonian politicians that radical changes, especially in ethnic relations, were indeed necessary.

What is happening in Macedonia is nothing new, say transition experts. Russia was the most drastic such example. Many "transitiologists" have pointed to the West's lack of caution and sensitivity to the fact that it could turn ordinary people against it. Or, to put it differently, the cold-war dreams of East European nations about the blessings of the West have ended in a cruel, post-socialist awakening. Macedonia's misfortune lies in the fact that it has been forced to face reality in the worst way imaginable: with a gun to its head.

Zeljko Bajic (AIM)