Severna Makedonija

Xexoxical Endarchy wrote:jebena vanparlamentarna antarsija i NAR za koji prvi put cujem u zivotu. neverovatno po kojoj margini se mora cackati za taj neki normalan stav.

Kondo wrote:pa ne moze to tako da se promeni, grcki mindset se formira od 1945 godine i titovog djona u vidu makedonske republike.

Апелација ја потврди двегодишната затворска казна за Груевски


Апелациониот суд Скопје ја потврди двегодишната затворска казна за поранешниот премиер Никола Груевски, обвинет дека незаконски влијаел врз потчинетите да набават луксузен мерцедес.

Казната на осудениот Ѓоко Поповски му е намалена од 6,5 на 4, 5 години.
-Жалбите на обвинетиот Н.Г. од С. изјавени лично и преку неговите бранители ги одби како неосновани, а првостепената пресуда ја потврди во целост.
Апелациониот суд Скопје, постапувајќи по кривичниот предмет КОКЖ-23/18, познат во јавноста под името „Тенк“ по одржана јавна седница, донесе пресуда со која жалбата на обвинетиот Ѓ.П. од С. делумно ја уважи на начин што ја преиначи во делот на одлуката за казната и го осуди на казна затвор во траење од 4 години и 6 месеци, а во останатиот дел првостепената одлука ја потврди – соопшти Апелациониот суд во Скопје.
Во 2011, МВР донело одлука за купување блиндирано возило најмногу до 243.000 евра, поради осиромашениот буџет на министерството, но под влијание на тогашниот премиер Никола Груевски со барања за луксуз, Гордана Јанкулоска како министер потпишала одлука за набавка на ново возило од речиси 600 илјади евра.
Против Јанкулоска за „Тенк“ се води одвоена постапка и пресудата за неа, под обвинение дека ја злоупотребила службената положба и го натерала Поповски да го намести тендерот за „мерцедесот“ што го посакал Груевски, ќе биде изречена на 8 октомври.

https://soundcloud.com/ecfr/macedonia-referendum-a-low-turnout-what-happens-next

Macedonian referendum: What happens next?

Mark Leonard speaks with Vessela Tcherneva and Robert Cooper about the contested result and how it might be solved.

There was nothing unexpected about the referendum. It was clear that the government in Skopje would struggle to reach the 50 percent threshold to make the plebiscite. Also certain was that the yes vote would be in a strong lead.

The only surprise has to do with the failure of the Albanian parties included in Zoran Zaev’s cabinet, primarily the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) led by Ali Ahmeti, to rally their coethnics in a number of regions across the country. There are various hypotheses why that was the case: from competition amongst the Albanian community, otherwise staunchly pro-Western minded, and desire to punish Ahmeti for the lack of interest in the name issue.


What next? The Prespa agreement is not dead, whatever its detractors say. Parliament has to vote on changing the constitution, as the referendum was non-binding. The opposition VMRO-DPMNE holds the key as 2/3 majority is needed. President Ivanov who hails from that party is firmly against name change and led the boycott campaign which won support from the nationalist grassroots.

Leader Hristijan Mickoski is sitting on the fence. He wants to appear both pro-EU and please diehard patriotic voters. That’s why he called on members to decide for themselves whether to vote in the referendum or join the boycott. Mickoski will be coming under strong EU pressure. Enlargement Commissioner Johannes Hahn already made it known that Brussels sees the outcome of the plebiscite, where 90 percent backed Prespa, as a mandate for change.

Mickoski will probably try to exact a price – for example freedom for ex-PM Nikola Gruevski who is appealing a jail sentence for corruption. But he will need to save face before VMRO supporters. It could be that he would allow some members of the caucus to vote with the government.
If no deal is struck in the coming weeks, Zaev will call early elections. Going for Plan C is however risky – for all parties. Ahmeti says there is no time to lose. We will know soon whether he is right or not.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/greece/2018-10-12/problem-north-macedonia

The Problem With “North Macedonia”
New Name, Same Old Delusions
By Ioannis Kotoulas

Dr. IOANNIS KOTOULAS is a Senior Researcher in Geopolitics at the University of Athens, Greece. His latest book is Historical Geopolitics of Contemporary Greece (Athens: Leimon, forthcoming in 2018).

This summer, Greece and Macedonia—known internationally by its UN designation, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM—made headlines with an unusual announcement: under a provisional deal known as the Prespa Agreement, FYROM would change its name to “the Republic of North Macedonia.” Proponents of the deal argued that adding the qualifier “North” would dispel Greek fears that the word “Macedonia” implied a territorial claim on Greece’s own homonymous region, thus settling a long-standing dispute. But the identity dispute between the two countries is far from over: after a recent referendum on the matter in FYROM failed owing to low voter turnout, the country’s leaders are struggling to scrape together enough votes to push the name change through parliament. Things do not look brighter in Greece, where parliament has yet to ratify the deal and 72 percent of the public disapproves of the agreement. It is unlikely that both governments will survive and see the agreement through.

In his recent Foreign Affairs article (“The Name's Macedonia, North Macedonia”), Victor Friedman argues that the Greek and Macedonian governments should press ahead with the deal, popular opposition notwithstanding: the agreement is the region’s best bet for stability, providing FYROM with recognition and legitimacy without infringing on Greece’s sense of territorial unity, and could pave the way for FYROM’s accession to the European Union and NATO. Most important, Friedman writes, the agreement “acknowledges that the same term—Macedonian—can have different meanings depending on time and place. It suggests, in essence, that there is more than one interpretation of history.” Our reading of history, however, should not be based on factual inaccuracies, and this is where Friedman’s argument falls short at several turns.

Let’s start with the issue of language. Friedman rightly points out that Modern Macedonian is wholly unrelated to Ancient Macedonian and that any suggestion to the contrary is a “linguistic folly.” Yet Friedman’s account could have done greater justice to the well-established links between Ancient Macedonian and Ancient Greek. After all, Ancient Macedonian was a Greek dialect that bore a close resemblance to the dialects of Thessaly and of northwestern Greece. The Greek identity of ancient Macedonians is undeniable in historiography. Friedman skirts this fact, merely writing that “the relationship between Ancient Macedonian and Ancient Greek is uncertain.”

Friedman also claims that Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia all had their eyes set on “the geographic area called Macedonia” during the gradual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. Yet the notion of a “geographic Macedonia” beyond the borders of modern-day Greece was a novelty at the time, introduced by cartographers in the late nineteenth century. Under Ottoman rule from the fifteenth century to 1912, there never existed an administrative entity named Macedonia, and nearly all European maps published between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries place the northern boundaries of Macedonia south of Skopje, the modern capital of FYROM. Prior to the nineteenth century, in short, the geographic region of Macedonia largely overlapped with what is today the province of Macedonia within Greece.

According to Friedman, when Greece’s borders shifted northward after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, “most of the people in the annexed territory spoke Macedonian, not Greek.” This is simply not the case. A 1926 report by the League of Nations’ Refugee Settlement Commission listed the region’s population in 1913 as 42.6 percent Greek, 39.4 percent Muslim, 9.9 percent Bulgarian, and 8.1 percent “other.” According to a Greek statistical survey carried out in August 1915, the total number of Slavic speakers in the region barely exceeded 200,000 people. In other words, the region appears to have had a plurality of Greek speakers before and in the years immediately after its annexation to Greece.

The territory north of the Greek border was initially incorporated by Serbia and Bulgaria. At the end of World War I in 1918, much of it became part of the newly created state of Yugoslavia. Although explicitly conceived as a multinational state, Yugoslavia initially made no official reference to either “Macedonians” as a separate ethnic group or “Macedonia” as a distinct geographic division. Instead, the region around Skopje was named Vardar Province, after a local river. Across the border in Bulgaria, the term “Macedonians” did not designate a distinct ethnic group either; it instead denoted Bulgarians living in the southwestern Bulgarian province of Pirin Macedonia.

It was only after World War II, when Yugoslavia was reconstituted as a communist state under Josip Broz Tito, that the Yugoslav authorities began promoting the view that the Slavic-speaking population around Skopje formed a distinct ethnic group, calling them Macedonians. The state’s goal was to weaken the region’s historically close ties to Bulgaria. The idea of a distinct Macedonian ethnicity outside Greece’s modern-day borders is thus largely the brainchild of Yugoslavia’s communist regime, conceived for entirely strategic reasons.              

This new Macedonian identity outlasted its creators. In 1991, as Yugoslavia was buckling under the weight of increasing ethnic tensions, the Vardar region declared its independence as “the Republic of Macedonia.” The new state retreated to an imaginary precommunist past, in which a united Macedonian nation was broken up by neighboring states, including Greece. In the decade that followed, Macedonian leaders often resorted to hostile anti-Greek propaganda. For instance, they issued maps suggesting that a “unified” Macedonia would require the secession of northern Greek provinces. To this day, the country’s constitution contains references to “persons belonging to the Macedonian people in neighboring countries.”

The notion of a single Macedonian identity also excludes the significant minority of non-Slavic Albanian speakers within FYROM, which grew from 13 percent in 1961 to 25.2 percent in 2002. Some estimates now put it at above 30 percent, but state authorities have not conducted another population census since 2002, possibly so as not to acknowledge the reality of a growing Albanian-speaking population. It is not implausible that FYROM will evolve into a confederate entity split along Slavic/Albanian lines in the coming decades.

Against this background of division, the country would do well to reinvent itself as a multiethnic state with a neutral name, such as “South European Republic” or “Vardar Republic,” that could accommodate all of its ethnic groups, including Slavic and Albanian speakers, Roma, Vlachs, and Turks. The label “Macedonian,” which is claimed by the country’s Slavic-speaking element, cannot act as this unifying glue. Sadly, the Prespa Agreement in some ways reinforces the notion of a dominant Macedonian identity within FYROM: according to the deal, the nationality of the citizens of North Macedonia will be “Macedonian/citizen of the Republic of North Macedonia”—a paradox in itself, as the nationality does not correspond to the proposed name of the state.

Victor Friedman’s case for the Prespa Agreement is partly a pragmatic one: the deal will allow FYROM’s accession to NATO, which Friedman claims will increase regional stability. Yet the idea that NATO membership will magically erase FYROM’s problems with neighbors such as Albania and Bulgaria seems far-fetched. Greece and Turkey joined NATO back in 1952, but this has done little to eradicate tensions between the two. If anything, FYROM’s entry into NATO would simply saddle the alliance with more interstate tensions.

Nor would FYROM offer any tangible benefits for the alliance. NATO has already secured its eastern flank against Russia with the inclusion of Romania and Bulgaria. Greece and Turkey form its southern flank. Adding FYROM—a landlocked state roughly the size of New Jersey—would not exactly shift the balance of power.

What, then, is a more sensible path forward? A realistic strategy for FYROM, a state dependent on the Greek port of Thessaloniki for energy and goods imports, would be to improve its strained relations with Greece, which despite its recent woes continues to be the richest and most powerful state of the greater European Balkan region, a member of both NATO and the EU. The future of FYROM lies in a special relationship with Greece and the European Union, perhaps modeled on the EU’s close economic ties with Turkey. Any long-term progress, however, depends on the ability of FYROM’s ruling elites to free their country and its multiethnic population from the state-imposed identities of the Cold War period.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/greece/2018-10-01/names-macedonia-north-macedonia?cid=int-rec&pgtype=art

The Name’s Macedonia. North Macedonia.
Can the Country Overcome Its Identity Crisis?
October 1, 2018
By Victor A. Friedman

VICTOR A. FRIEDMAN is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, University of Chicago and Research Professor at La Trobe University. He has written extensively on the linguistics and history of Macedonian.

What’s in a name? Enough to hold a referendum on it. Thus, some 1.8 million voters in the Republic of Macedonia were asked on Sunday, September 30, to cast a vote on their country’s name. The question on the ballot: “Are you in favor of European Union and NATO membership by accepting the agreement between the Republic of Macedonia and the Republic of Greece?” The accord in question is known as the Prespa Agreement, provisionally signed by the Greek and Macedonian prime ministers earlier this year. In it, Macedonia agrees to change its name to “the Republic of North Macedonia.” The change holds the potential to end a decades-long deadlock between the two countries over Macedonia’s name, language, and national identity—and also over competing interpretations of history. For Macedonia in particular, the stakes are high: resolving the dispute would allow it to join NATO and, further down the line, smooth the way for its accession to the European Union.

But with more than 97 percent of the votes counted, it looks as if the referendum did little to settle the matter. Roughly 94 percent of the votes were cast in favor of the Prespa Agreement (and thus in support of the name-change), but turnout stood at a dismal 37 percent. As such, the referendum is only consultative, not binding, and the wrangling over the country’s future continues.

Since Macedonia seceded peacefully from Yugoslavia in late 1991, a majority of UN members have recognized it under its constitutional name, the Republic of Macedonia, a name largely unchanged since 1944. However, Greece objected to the name, arguing that it implied a territorial claim on its own northern province of Macedonia. The two countries reached an agreement to allow Macedonia to join international organizations using its official UN designation, “The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.” Yet when Macedonia sought to join NATO under that name in 2008, Greece blocked its accession anyway. The International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled that Greece’s position breached international law, but Athens did not budge.

In Macedonia, the NATO accession debacle set off a sharp turn to the right, fueling the rise of VMRO-DPMNE, a right-wing nationalist party. VMRO-DPMNE misruled the country until 2015, when opposition politicians revealed the government’s wiretapping of 20,000 people, including its own officials. Over the course of several months, Zoran Zaev, then head of the opposition party SDSM, published excerpts from the tapes in a total of 38 press conferences, entitled “The Truth about Macedonia” but popularly known as the Bombi (Bombs). The recordings are on the Web, and they make the Watergate tapes look like polite conversation: they document a breathtaking level of corruption including election fraud, bribery, violations of property law and city planning, misuse of public funds, vengeful destruction of property, judicial corruption, the cover-up of an extra-judicial killing, and conspiracy to commit rape. The Bombi revelations led to dozens of individual court cases, but the trials have dragged on or stalled.

The Bombi also plunged the country into a political crisis. Popular outrage pushed the VMRO-DPMNE out of government and brought in the SDSM, whose willingness to engage in talks with Greece led to the Prespa Agreement. The VMRO-DPMNE, now the main opposition party, is intent on hobbling its rival and even called for a boycott of the name-change referendum. The poor turnout may reflect the fact that many Macedonians continue to depend on the VMRO-DPMNE’s patronage networks for their jobs, allowing the party to intimidate them into staying away from the polls. Because the referendum was nonbinding, the real decisions will be made in parliament, where the SDSM’s ruling coalition commands only a slender majority and cannot push the change through on its own. In order to get the required two-thirds majority to enshrine the name change in the constitution, the government will need ten votes from opposition MPs. Some observers speculate that the SDSM will trade a pardon for one of the chief suspects embroiled in the Bombi scandal for the necessary opposition votes. Others have suggested early parliamentary elections in November as a way to break the stalemate.

To understand why the stakes are so high, a bit of linguistic history is in order here. The relationship between Ancient Macedonian and Ancient Greek is uncertain, owing to the paucity of textual evidence. What we refer to today as Modern Macedonian, however, is not a contemporary version of Ancient Macedonian, but an altogether separate South Slavic language whose ancestral speakers arrived in the Balkans from northeastern Europe approximately 1,500 years ago—about ten centuries after Ancient Macedonian had last been spoken in the region. (In a similar fashion, the French speak a Romance language with roots in Latin but call their language français, which is derived from Frank, a Germanic tribal name.)

By the late nineteenth century, Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria were attempting to expand north, south, and west, respectively, at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. All three claimed the geographic area called Macedonia, and in 1913, Greece succeeded in annexing the southern half of that region. Yet most of the people in the annexed territory spoke Macedonian, not Greek. To solidify its claim over what was now its province, Greece engaged in a systematic campaign to impose its own language at the expense of Macedonian and all other languages spoken there, including Aromanian and Albanian.

This history of aggression is part of what has driven Greek antagonism to assertions of Macedonian national and cultural identity in recent decades: Greek leaders have tended to view any claim to a distinct Macedonian nation with a distinct language as a threat to the territory they gained in 1913—a challenge to the national and territorial integrity of their country. They have therefore argued that the term “Macedonian” can refer only to the southern, Greek—controlled part of the region. Hardliners in the Republic of Macedonia have responded by mirroring this populist and exclusive narrative.

The Prespa Agreement offers a way out of this cycle of recriminations through genuine compromise. First, the Republic of Macedonia indeed only encompasses the northern part of the wider geographic region of Macedonia, as it has been defined for the past two centuries or so. Thus, the name change to “the Republic of North Macedonia” is geographically appropriate without in any way calling into question Greece’s modern-day borders.

Second, both sides agree that Macedonia’s official language is “the ‘Macedonian language,' as recognized by the Third UN Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, held in Athens in 1977.” The text produced by the conference in question mentions Macedonian a total of seven times, always as a language with its own Cyrillic alphabet. The Prespa Agreement thus reaffirms that Greece acknowledges Macedonian as a language in its own right.

Third, Article 7, Paragraph 4 of the Prespa Agreement reads: “[Macedonia] notes that its official language, the Macedonian language, is within the group of South Slavic languages. The Parties note that the official language and otherattributes of [Macedonia] are not related to the ancient Hellenic civilization, history,culture and heritage of the northern region of [Greece].” This formulation attempts to mollify Greece in its claim that the use of the name “Macedonian” for a modern-day people and language implies descent from the Hellenic culture and language associated with the Ancient Macedonians. In the past, some Macedonian nationalists have dealt with this by claiming that Modern Macedonian really was descended from Ancient Macedonian and was therefore not a Slavic language. This is like saying that French is descended from Frankish, not from Latin. The Prespa Agreement puts an end to this linguistic folly and sets the record straight about the historical roots of Modern Macedonian. At the same time, it acknowledges that the same term—Macedonian—can have different meanings depending on time and place. It suggests, in essence, that there is more than one interpretation of history.

Nationalist voices in Macedonia continue to denounce the name change as an unacceptable concession to Greece and an assault on Macedonian national identity. Yet I have written about the distinctiveness of the Macedonian language and identity for more than 40 years and have at times come under physical attack for my views. I would, in short, not endorse anything that denied Macedonia recognition.

Aside from granting the Macedonian state the legitimacy that most of its neighbors have long enjoyed, there is a strong pragmatic case for laying the dispute to rest: it paves the way for Macedonia’s accession to NATO and the EU. As Jess Baily, the U.S. ambassador to Macedonia, puts it, this step will transform Albania, Bulgaria and Greece from "neighbors" into "allies" bound by treaty. NATO membership in particular could also shield Macedonia from future threats to its territorial integrity in a region still rife with ethnic tensions along many borders. The fact that both the right-wing nationalist VMRO-DPMNE and Russia opposed the referendum suggests that it was in Macedonia’s best interest to approve it.

A few weeks ago, I was at the market in Struga, a lakeside town in southwestern Macedonia. A couple selling ceramics expressed doubts about whether EU membership would benefit them. After all, they pointed out, joining the EU had often caused prices to rise while salaries stagnated. I answered that being in the EU might not benefit them now but would open up immense opportunities for future generations, including their children. They saw the point—as do many Macedonians.

Zaev je poručio toj opozicionoj partiji da će, ako glasaju za ustavne promene u skladu sa Prespanskim sporazumom, dobiti amnestiju za njihove članove kojima se sudi za nerede u Sobranju 27. aprila prošle godine.

Gargantua wrote:Sjede vezir, sitnu knjigu piše 

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Почитуван г-дин Мичел,

Овој Договор е штетен за интересите на мојата нација и татковина и како таков е НЕПРИФАТЛИВ за ВМРО-ДПМНЕ и за огромното мнозинство на граѓани на Република Македонија, што впрочем и се покажа на последниот референдум каде што и покрај бруталното и насилничко полнење на кутиите од страна на луѓе блиски до Владата, сепак на крај не успеаа во намерата да обезбедат ни приближно услови за да референдумот биде прогласен за успешен.
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#Greece FM Kotzias resigns. He reportedly felt he didn't have enough support from PM Tsipras in his fight with DefMin Kammenos over the agreement with the FYR of #Macedonia.

— Yannis Koutsomitis (@YanniKouts) 17. октобар 2018.

Tsipras takes over Foreign Minister's post himself.

— Yannis Koutsomitis (@YanniKouts) 17. октобар 2018.

#Macedonia - Vladanka Avirovik, member from a minor party allied with VMRO, refuses to walk out of Parliament, will likely vote yes.
Her son is threatened with prison in an openly politically driven case. She has a Sophie's Choice: you vote yes or your son goes to prison

— Cvetin Chilimanov (@Cvetin) 17. октобар 2018.

The irony of Tsipras warning ministers to toe gov't line on the FYROM name deal while accepting the resignation of the one minister who is an ardent supporter in order to keep the one who wants it gone

— Daphne Papadopoulou (@daphnenews) 17. октобар 2018.