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Why Punish Macedonia?
by Galina Schneider
These days, Serbia is slowly re-examining its ethnic cleansing
of the past decade. From recovering refrigerator trucks crammed
with murdered Kosovo civilians from its rivers to showing what
really happened at Srebrenica on television, a small transition
to reality is being made. After months of reluctance, the Serbian
people have turned over Mr. Milosevic, their prime atrocity director,
to the Hague. Over a billion dollars of aid is promised.
Unfortunately, Macedonia has no war criminals and no war crimes.
During the past decade when all of the other successor states in
Yugoslavia were expressing their superiority through short or long
term military means, Macedonia was constructing the only tolerant
state in the Balkans. Perhaps to get money and notice and support
these days, a state has to be at least a tad belligerent, a tad
racist and have a couple of war criminals to send to the Hague
in return for positive attention and an internal hands off attitude
by the international community. The Yugoslav army is still intact,
after all that's gone on, weapons and all, and in competitive form.
Macedonia has little material, and no real militarist culture.
Increasingly the lines are blurred between various international
institutions and international organizations and NGOs with the
UN, OSCE, NATO, EU, World Bank, World Trade Organization, etc.,
cooperating with each other, almost blending into one another and
suggesting cooperation with one another in their association documents.
This would ordinarily be fine if the coordination extended to
rational regional planning, a careful examination of fairness and
transparency and impartiality in policy and, most of all, not allowing
bilateral relations between states to dictate policy on the argumentative
side of any single member of one or another of these institutions.
It is not terribly amazing to note that the worst of the Greek
embargoes against Macedonia, which the EU Parliament did nothing
to either sanction or punish much less stop, occurred during a
period of time in which the rotating Presidency put Greece in the
Troika, in 1993 and 1994. Breaking a country economically and isolating
it was less important to the EU than keeping its rotation schedule
looking spiffy and workable.
Similarly, the excesses of Robert Frowick are enshrined and enshrined
again in policy to the point of denying Macedonia an even lesser
level of aid to fundamental democratic country structures and infrastructures
and to encouragement of economic partnerships than to countries
still wiping the fresh blood of ethnic cleansing off their military
agendas. Never having met a minority it didn't like and couldn't
believe, however, millions are pledged to separatist Tetovo University.
Mr. Frowick tried to make a deal outside the country with the
NLA terrorists and select members of Albanian political parties
without bothering to inform the Macedonian government. A couple
of other people are currently trying to cement the same deal after
a few "seasoned diplomats" tried to do the same deal.
It seems that "seasoned diplomat" Frowick is going to
be vindicated one way or another, even if the entire international
community has to threaten to cut off aid. That Frowick was heading
the OSCE's "Spillover Monitoring Mission to Skopje" which
had failed to prevent the very spillover it was mandated to prevent,
adds a certain leitmotif to the patronizing proceedings.
To not make the deal for separatism, to not pretend that all along
this was really a country of (as recently labelled in the press) "Majority
Slavs" (sounds Kosovo flavoured, a lot like "Minority
Serbs", doesn't it?) being nasty to its resident Albanians,
would be to suggest that the international community's initial
training of, encouragement of, continued training and funding from
its diasporas abroad of, lack of close observation of, lack of
policing of, lack of containment of, lack of disarming of, lack
of prosecution of, lack of prevention of spillover of these nurtured
murderers from Kosovo into Macedonia of, that all this was possibly
always, probably, hopefully, obviously, perhaps now thankfully
becoming an internal matter and not the fault of the UN, the OSCE,
the NATO, the EU. The international press solidifies this impression
by baptizing spillover terrorism as "internal" "rebellion" as
if the Macedonian people of all ethnicities had not worked hard
in the past decade to form and work within a polity and as if the
terrorists were active resident citizens. The longer the terrorism
goes on, however, the greater the number of political opportunists.
Soon, maybe day after tomorrow, it might be a rebellion.
Macedonia has been asked to change its form of government to fit
NATO and the UN not taking responsibility for its oversight in
Kosovo and for the US not controlling paramilitaries it created
as an expediency to save NATO body bags.
Meanwhile, there is a kind of blackout of media coverage. Only
an Elite is supposed to determine the future of a country under
siege by terrorists. There are mentions of negotiations on fundamental
changes to Macedonia's constitution, none of which have been printed
for the public to peruse in all their annexes. The changes amount
to providing a minority in a country with greater representation
than one person one vote and with greater rights than provided
in the constitutions of all of the Great Power states who provide
the "seasoned diplomats" attempting to bully Macedonia
into compliance.
It would have been difficult, three years ago, to conjure up some
further reason why Macedonia should be punished by the world community
instead of rewarded for commitment to non-violence in the past
decade. Apparently, that new way has been found. Macedonia is to
be sacrificed so that the UN, OSCE and NATO don't have to address
their incompetence in destabilizing the country from a spillover
from Kosovo. Having enabled ethnic tensions and separatist ideals,
the careers of "seasoned diplomats" will be more and
more in demand.
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