For a quarter of a century, I have not stopped returning again and again to a reporter's photo. I do it every year around August 13, the date on which the Treaty was signed by the waters of Lake Ohrid, which ended the armed conflict between the forces of the rebel National Liberation Army (ANO) with commander Ali Ahmeti and the forces of the army and police of the government of Lyubcho Georgievski, leader of VMRO-DPMNE. The document returned peace to the state and preserved its territorial integrity.
This reminds me of "Trud" Kostadin Filipov.
The photo in question is familiar. I am tempted to talk about the people we see on it, despite my concerns that some of the things I have already said or written and could be repeating myself. So be it! The event is worth remembering, and not only now, when last week, on Thursday, August 13, it was twenty-five years since it happened. A quarter of a century is a period in which many things, if not everything, about the reasons and motives for signing the Treaty should be clear. But we would not be talking about today's Republic of North Macedonia, we would not be talking about its politicians and statesmen, if that were really the case.
Because this time too, in the “anniversary“ discussion about the crisis in the spring and summer of 2001, it became abundantly clear that there is no single and generally valid opinion about its nature. And the differences in opinions do not come along ethnic lines, as one might assume and as often happens when assessing even the smallest political event. There is such a virtual coordinate system near the Vardar, in which the yardstick is ethnic and means that if something is good for Macedonians, it is bad for Albanians. And vice versa. No matter how outdated and dangerous it is, it still exists and continues to distort the assessment of the events of a quarter of a century ago. Unfortunately.
The photograph in question, taken by a skilled photojournalist, shows quite familiar faces. Both local, from the Republic of Macedonia, and foreign, but popular enough not to pay attention to them. Some are standing, others, the most important, are sitting behind the table with pens in hand. By the way, the question of importance is conditional, since the well-known in our country Professor Vlado Buckovski, former Minister of War and Prime Minister of the Republic of Macedonia, will say today that the peace in the country in 2001 is primarily due to the international factor. If we personify this “international factor” we will see the British George Robertson as the then head of NATO, or the Spaniard Javier Solana from the EU, or the mediators in the settlement of the conflict - the American James Pardew and the Frenchman Francois Leotard.
All selected heroes of that time, some of them already deceased. Like James Pardew, who became famous in Skopje for throwing plates of food in the canteen at the Police School near the Idrizovo prison because of the Albanian cadets' complaints that they were not taking into account their religious feelings as Muslims and were serving them dishes with pork. And the school in question was supposed to show that equality between ethnic groups, and more precisely between Macedonians and Albanians, in their preparation for joint police work in implementation of the Ohrid Treaty was already underway and going well. In this way, Pardew, who later became the US ambassador to our country, had given a kind of signal that hesitations in the implementation of the Treaty by either party would not be tolerated. But it was too much, but it was dramatic and undiplomatic, very American. Here, twenty-five years later, this is remembered.
Five men are sitting around the table. In the middle is the President of the Republic of Macedonia, Boris Trajkovski, the man and politician who has one of the most important merits in convincing society of the need to end the conflict. Many patriotic Macedonians still cannot forgive him for this role, labeling him posthumously as a “traitor”.
Two and a half years after that August 13, on a foggy morning on February 24, 2004, the plane in which Trajkovski and members of his presidential team were traveling to an international forum in Bosnia and Herzegovina crashed into one of the hills near Mostar. Even today, from time to time, articles appear that the disaster was not an accidental accumulation of negative meteorological circumstances and that there was external premeditation for it. But what near Vardar has been cleared up and clarified to the end, including the death of Boris Trajkovski? The fact that one of his advisors on international politics and security refused to board the plane at the last moment is also being pushed into this fog of conspiracies.
Ah, so he knew something, and maybe he was part of a conspiracy? This advisor to Trajkovski won the presidential elections on May 5, 2019, years after his death, and entered his office in the residence under the Vodno hill above Skopje. His name was Stevo Pendarovski.
To the right of Trajkovski, with a gloomy expression on his face, sits Lyubcho Georgievski - also with a pen in his hand. To this day, the then leader of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE and prime minister cannot come to terms with the signing of the Treaty, although he was aware of its inevitability. And perhaps even then he was clearly aware that with the same inevitability his exit from power, and from politics in general, was imminent. As it happened. The following year, 2002, despite the fierce campaign that Ljubco conducted, his party and he personally lost catastrophically to the Social Democrats of Branko Crvenkovski.
To the account of his government within the four-year mandate, voters put not only the crisis in 2001 and its resolution, but also the consequences for the entire republic and society of the refugee crisis from Kosovo two years earlier. Slobodan Milosevic, the dictator from Belgrade, had taken revenge on the young prime minister in Skopje for public statements that he would reduce Serbian influence in the Republic of Macedonia, dumping thousands of Kosovars at the border and obliging the authorities in Skopje to take care of them. In the fall of 2003, at the VMRO-DPMNE congress in Ohrid, Georgievski left politics. He is now a businessman and analyst.
To the left of Trajkovski is the leader of SDSM Branko Crvenkovski. Whether he wanted it or not (and why wouldn't he?), he personally and his party are the big winners from the end of the conflict and the signing of the Treaty. Fate handed him power on a platter, no, on a silver platter. In the regular parliamentary elections on September 15, 2002, SDSM won convincingly and took over the government of the country. In my notes from that time, I noted that Crvenkovski and his team didn't even need to throw money at the campaign, because Georgievski and VMRO-DPMNE's loss was foretold.
There was also Bulgarian intervention - Ivan Krastev, invited to help SDSM in the elections, had given the idea, borrowed from the experience of the UDF in our country, when at the last rally before the vote, people should be positioned as they were along Tsarigradsko Shosse, then still called "Lenin" Boulevard. The impression was many times stronger. Then, in 2004, after Trajkovski's death, Crvenkovski won the presidency and opened the door to the SDSM leadership for Strumica mayor Zoran Zaev, who entered there with his own money.
To the right of Ljubcho Georgievki is Arben Xhaferi, leader of the Democratic Party of Albanians and Georgievski's coalition partner. Today, as then, many Macedonians regret not having had a politician like the Albanian Xhaferi. The crisis reduced the influence of his DPA, but his idea of "consensual democracy" was largely enshrined in the Ohrid Treaty. He was laughed at, mocked for this idea of institutionally sharing political power between the ethnic communities in the state so that no large community would fear that the other could politically crush it. The Treaty also included a protective mechanism for this - the Badenter rule, which now, a quarter of a century after that August 13, today's rulers want to "revise". Xhaferi paid the price - personal and party, for his desire to have everything agreed upon by consensus and peacefully. He is no longer among the living, and the DPA is clinically dead.
The fifth person on the far left is Imer Imeri, leader of the Party of Democratic Prosperity, which was born as a conformist and clientelistic formation, and as such has gone down in history. I had the feeling then, and I have it now, that he is on the table only for the sake of balance. Two on two, two on two. Imeri has also been deceased for a long time.
I'm putting the photo away. Until next year, around August 13.