Fury Over Decentralisation Forces Poll Delay

Monday, 21 February, 2005

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Ana Petruseva

Macedonia’s parliament voted this week to delay local elections for one month after it became clear deputies would not be able to complete a debate over a controversial new law on territorial organisation by the original August 7 deadline.

On August 3, parliament rescheduled local elections from October 17 to November 21in the hope that an extra month will give deputies sufficient time to pass the law on new municipal boundaries.

The delay is seen as a sign that the government has lost its grip on the decentralisation timetable and is faltering in the face of an unexpectedly massive popular revolt against the proposed changes.

A precondition for the upcoming elections, the decentralisation proposals - which form the last, crucial component of the Ohrid peace deal that ended months of ethnic conflict in 2001 - are now being held hostage in parliament, as the opposition mobilises its forces against suggested changes to local authority borders.

Although the opposition insists it supports the concept of devolution, it rejects the proposed new municipal boundaries, arguing they lead towards the ethnic partition of the country.

The government has defended the changes, maintaining that they will strengthen relations between the country’s two major communities.

The opposition’s main grievances centre on the merger of Albanian villages into Struga and Kicevo, making these small, mainly ethnic Macedonian towns part of much larger, mainly ethnic Albanian local authorities.

The opposition also disputes the proposed new boundary of the capital, Skopje, according to which two Albanian villages will be merged into the city to push the local Albanian population above 20 per cent, which is the threshold for an area obtaining bilingual status.

Over the past few months, the opposition has organised protests, roadblocks and dozens of local referendums against the new law. In Struga, which has no previous history of ethnic tensions, protests turned violent a few weeks ago.

The scale of the revolt has highlighted the degree of mistrust that bedevils relations between the two communities as well as showing that the wounds of the 2001 conflict have not been healed.

Most Macedonians still seem to fear that ethnic Albanians, or at least the radicals among them, harbour a hidden agenda of eventual partition – a sentiment that the mainly nationalist opposition has been quick to marshal under its banner.

“Popular discontent is understandable as it relates to memories of 2001 and a feeling that something unjust happened to Macedonia,” President Branko Crvenkovski said recently, adding that poverty and poor living standards had fueled such frustrations.

However, the president went on to say that he still believed in the Ohrid peace accord, of which decentralisation is a major component.

“I did not sign [the] Ohrid [agreement] because I was forced to, but because I believe Ohrid is a concept that will secure stability for the country and equality for all its people,” he said.

On the Albanian side, many see Macedonian resistance to the proposals as proof that they are not prepared to implement the peace deal in full and grant Albanians equality. They deny aiming at partition.

“If Albanians wanted to divide this country, they could have done so at any time,” said Zudi Xhelili a deputy of the opposition Democratic Party of Albanians.

“It is true we [Albanians] want live in one state, but we can have that in a united Europe,” he added. “If we do not get to join the EU, it will be your [ie, the Macedonians’] fault.”

However undiplomatic Xhelili’s choice of words, they hit on a significant point, which is that Europe wholly supports the government’s standpoint in this dispute.

The decentralisation package is a key condition for Macedonia’s application for membership of the European Union, which it submitted in March. EU and NATO officials have expressed support for the government proposals and have also appealed to the opposition not to block the process.

But, since the debate moved to parliament two weeks ago, the opposition parties have submitted over a hundred amendments to the proposals and opened a seemingly endless debate about them, forcing the government to postpone planned local elections.

The opposition claims that the decision to postpone the poll shows that the government is aware that its ratings are falling.

“By delaying the elections, the government is trying to buy time, hoping the revolt will fade and that public attention will focus on other things,” said Ganka Samoilovska Cvetanovska, vice-president of the nationalist, opposition VMRO-DPMNE party.

The ruling Social Democrats, SDSM, deny this, blaming the opposition for the delay in the poll and saying it was an inevitable consequence of the opposition’s lengthy discussions and numerous amendments.

“We are not afraid of elections,” said Boris Kondarko, an SDSM deputy. “The opposition has obstructed the debate over this law, which is essential for the decentralisation process.”

Many analysts concede that the ruling coalition ought to accept its own share of the responsibility for the muddle over the new territorial organisation plans.

They blame the secrecy that surrounded the 45-day talks on the plans, which left the public in the dark about what the coalition government parties were offering the Albanians.

By the time the deal was finally reached, everybody was anxious to see the government proposals, only to discover that the draft contained many of the same solutions that the Macedonian representatives had formerly declared unacceptable.

Needless to say, the opposition promptly labeled government representatives “traitors”. It all strengthened many Macedonians’ perception that the Albanians had obtained too many concessions.

Recent polls reveal the public remains strongly opposed to the government’s plans. A survey by the Institute for Sociological, Political and Legal Research, released on August 4, showed 72.9 per cent of respondents opposed the territorial proposals.

The ethnic breakdown of this poll indicated that opposition among Macedonians and Albanians was over 90 per cent and 30 per cent respectively. Seventy per cent of the latter supported the plans.

On the streets, protests and roadblocks are continuing in many municipalities. The first official victim of the crisis may be Struga’s annual international poetry festival, one of Macedonia’s most prestigious cultural events, dating back 43 years.

The local authorities there have already said the festival should not take place this summer, owing to tensions in the area and concerns about undesirable incidents if the event goes ahead. The government is pondering whether to move it to Skopje.

But the government faces worse problems than cancelled poetic readings. The opposition is in no mood to ease its pressure in parliament and although none of their numerous, submitted amendments has yet passed, they are slowing the debate with lengthy discussions, using every opportunity to delay a vote.

VMRO leader Nikola Gruevski has told the government the opposition will support all other 28 decentralisation laws if the law on territorial organisation is withdrawn and its problematic points resolved.

But despite the constant pressure, the government shows no sign of agreeing to amend the proposal.

As a result, the opposition is turning to its last constitutional weapon and trying to bring about a referendum on the law. To do this, they need to collect 150,000 signatures by an August 23 deadline. The initiators of the referendum say they have collected over 100,000 names, with more than two weeks to go.

But even if a referendum is held, it is unlikely to succeed in its aim of forcing a withdrawal of the contested law. This is because supporters of the ruling Macedonian and Albanians parties will probably boycott the poll, making it hard for the organisers to obtain the minimum of 400,000 votes needed for the poll to succeed.

What a referendum will do is add to Macedonia’s mounting ethnic tension and possibly provoke a counter-referendum on the Albanian side. Either way, the country risks seeing irreparable damage inflicted on relations between the Macedonia’s two biggest communities.

Ana Petruseva is IWPR’s project manager in Skopje.