‘They Like to Arrest People Here’

Several thousand people protested against the police killing of a young man in Skopje | Photo: Martin Stojanovski

It was hour before midnight when I arrived in Skopje last week. Sleepy and somewhat confused, I exited the airport building in a few steps, before even realising I had gone anywhere. Compared to Skopje’s airport, even Zagreb's Pleso seems like a giant landing field.

My taxi driver is a talkative guy, and very soon we came to the subject of the elections, held just the week before my arrival. The winner was the ruling party, the conservative VMRO-DPMNE, and current prime minister, Nikola Gruevski. It was, however, a victory by the narrowest of margins.

The VMRO-DPMNE bagged 39 per cent of the vote and their main opponents, the left-wing SDSM, got 33 per cent.

“Gruevski won't be able to put together a government,” the driver told me. I noticed much hope in his voice. “He needs partners, and nobody wants to be their ally. The opposition is going to make a new government.”

He refused my request to photograph him. “They like to arrest people here, you know,” he said, with an apologetic shrug. I would hear this sentence often during my stay in Macedonia.

The next day, I headed out to Kumanovo, a small town just a half-hour drive from Skopje. It would be an unlikely winner in a beauty contest, it has to be said.

But I’m not here for the scenery; I’m here to meet a group of workers who have lost their jobs in the process of privatisation. During the process of selling off state-owned companies, many businesses went bankrupt, along with their unfortunate employees.

“We are waiting to get arrested. Some people came threatening us with arrests as soon as VMRO announced its victory. Most votes were not even counted yet,” claims Ljiljana Georgievska, leader of the group and head of two laid-off workers associations from bankrupt companies, UNIT and UNIJA.

She tells me she used to be VMRO member. These workers were demonstrating for months in front of the government building, sometimes throwing eggs.

“Now we have no money to go to Skopje,” an elderly man says sadly. I paid for my bus ticket - it cost the equivalent of €1.7 – and returned to the Macedonian capital, where the younger generation has also taken to the streets.

The youth are protesting against police brutality, following the fatal police beating of 22-year-old Martin Neskovski the day after the general election.

Later that day, the leader of the right-wing United for Macedonia party, Ljube Boškoski was arrested. Boškoski had made many allegations against Gruevski and the VMRO during the election campaign. He has been accused of racketeering and illegally financing of his campaign.

Six months ago, police arrested media tycoon Velija Ramkovski and 14 employees at his A1 TV channel – a popular television station which has broadcast items that criticise the government. He has been accused of fraud.

“I really wouldn't be surprised if the police come to my door to arrest me,” a journalist working for another media outlet tells me over coffee at one of the many terraces in the city centre.

Crane-filled streets

Skopje suffered a devastating earthquake in 1963. It left 80 per cent of the city in ruins. Now it is full of cranes, construction workers and other building machinery, but none of it is here to repair damaged streets, steps and sidewalks.

They are here because of things like the biggest monument of Alexander the Great in the world on Skopje's main square and the beach being constructed on river Vardar, just below the site of the newly unveiled statue of Alexander.

The statue of Alexander the Great will cause some consternation in neighbouring Greece

Perhaps Skopje is already the city with the most monuments in the world, and new ones are still coming. There are monuments to posh girls and man-fish. There are also lions, something that has upset the Bulgarians who claim they have been stolen from their historic tradition.

This dispute was forgotten, I’m told, when the Bulgarians realised that, unlike theirs, Skopje’s lions have no testicles, explains my fellowship colleague Slobodanka, with a grin.

It was not refined sensibilities that saw Macedonia’s lions without testicles. There is a saying here: “He who works makes mistakes.” And some one is most certainly working hard on raising so many monuments.

The newest one, Alexander the Great (or Alexander of Macedonia) is taller than all the surrounding buildings. It is so huge I thought I was hallucinating when I stumbled across toward the conqueror's gigantic head and his horse's rear on my first evening in Skopje.

It cost more than €9 million and it will bother many in his other homeland, Greece. The plan is to put his father, Philip II of Macedon, on the other side of the square. The government says that around €80 million will be spent on monuments and works in the city, while others suggest that the true amount spent will be double that.

After years of being denied their name by the Greeks and Bulgarians, Macedonians seem to be in the process of putting their country on the map, geographically and historically.

They have recently claimed the Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great as one of their own. He didn’t get just a monument, there is also a law school named after him.

This nationalistic spree seems so unbecoming for Macedonians, who strike me as the mellowest people of the Balkans, and mostly nostalgic for the time and state ‘before the wars’.

Around midnight of a very exhausting day, I reach to the closed door of my hotel. The receptionist went out and locked it accidentally. A group of us unfortunate guests smile at his attempts to fix the situation. We're taking it the Macedonian way, not counting the minutes or hours.

“You are a journalist?” asks a 20-year old friend of a waiter from the nearby bar. “Watch it, don't get arrested.”

Ruzica Matic is a Zagreb-based journalist who is participating in the 2011 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

She will be writing regular updates on her investigation into age discrimination in the workplace in Croatia and Macedonia following the collapse of communism, and in France and the UK.