Will There Be War?

Despite the increasingly noticeable nervousness and pressure coming from all sides, Macedonia's leaders - President Kiro Gligorov and Prime Minister Branko Crvenkovski - are still keeping to the strategy that instead of paving the way to international recognition by war, it is smarter to continually issue warnings that if this state of affairs lasts, war is inevitable. While one cannot still see the end of this political marathon involving Macedonia's recognition, it appears that both statesmen believe that, one day, time will give credit to them, and not to those who left Yugoslavia and achieved international recognition by war, occupying barracks and innumerable victims.

In a recent interview to the BBC, Mr. Gligorov, criticizing those who are reluctant to recognize Macedonia, observed for the umpteenth time that somebody apparently has an interest in leading this country firstly into social and political revolt, and then pushing it into war. "If that happens in Macedonia, history has taught us that this will cause another Balkan War - one must not doubt that. Not one of our neighbors will remain indifferent if a front opens in Macedonia. The Greeks seem to forget that war would already be on their border, were it not for Macedonia's current policy and remaining outside the conflicts. It has been shown now that an independent Macedonia as a separate state is a condition for stability in the Balkans".

Prime Minister Crvenkovski sent a similar message over AFP last week. He said that "the EC ought not to continue playing Russian roulette with Skoplje, because it is risking another Balkan War." That Mr. Gligorov and Mr. Crvenkovski are "not blowing into the cold" and that their fears are not the standing bogeyman for frightening the not so easily scared world public was confirmed in Skoplje last week by the co-chairmen of the Geneva Conference on Former Yugoslavia, Lord Owen and Mr. Cyrus Vance, who also described Macedonia as "a potential hotbed of war". Sometime earlier, Macedonia was mentioned by the former head of the State Department section for Yugoslavia, who has elaborated a new Balkan horror screenplay. He believes that right after the outbreak of war in Kosovo and Albania's involvement in this conflict (which he deems more than certain), Macedonia will take Albania's side in fear of Serbia and this will, naturally, automatically draw Greece in.

Which side will Macedonia take - is a question which has been troubling many in the Balkans in the past months. The former head of the State Department section for Yugoslavia is not the only who is betting on Albanian-Macedonian cooperation, even though it seems almost impossible. The leaders of the VMRO Party (Macedonia's Seselj) claim that the present Macedonian Government, in which five ministers are ethnic Albanians, is in fact a "communist-Albanian" government, and accuse Prime Minister Crvenkovski and President Gligorov of responding to the ethnic Albanian parties' blackmail policy with an unacceptable policy of concession. The Macedonian right-wing is reproaching the regime with increasing frequency for "selling this state to the Muslims", and includes as one of its sins taking in around 40 thousand Muslim refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Even though this still unrecognized state was threatened by a transport and industrial collapse recently (because of the Greek authorities' decision to retain in Salonika enormous quantities of crude which Macedonia had purchased on the world market), Macedonian nationalists were not overly enthusiastic on hearing the news that Turkey had (to spite Greece, and for its own reasons) immediately sent to Skoplje 22 thousand tons of crude, as a gift worth three million dollars. Somehow at the same time when certain circles in Skoplje were accusing the Gligorov-Crvenkovski team of inclining toward the Albanian-Muslim side, an accusation was made in Sofia as well an assessment by the first person in Bulgarian intelligence, General Asparukhov, that at least 60 to 70 percent of Macedonia's political leadership was "pro-Serbian". Last weekend, the VMRO took a Bulgarian prince on a tour of Skoplje, and to many this served as proof of the Macedonian leadership's pro-Bulgarian orientation.

Tightening the circle from different sides could, in the end, save Macedonia from cracking on the outside, but it could also speed up the possibility, intimated time and again, of an internal explosion. Officially, unrecognized, this state at the same time is statistically non-existent, as many are wont to say in jest. The foreign debt and obligations are enormous, production is dropping at dizzying speed, the monthly inflation rate stands at around 23 percent, almost one third of the employable population (some 173 thousand people) is jobless, while the workers with jobs earn between 50 and 70 dollars a month. Tens of thousands of workers go on strike every day in Macedonia, and the government is unable to help them or to seriously embark on privatization, as it has promised.

The danger of cracking up inside led to another cooling in relations between Macedonians and ethnic Albanians last week over the final adoption of the law on citizenship. The debate on this law, which is to complete Macedonia's statehood, began in Parliament in August. The government believes that citizenship should be granted only to those who have been living in Macedonia for at least 15 years, VMRO mentioned 30, while the representatives of ethnic Albanian parties advocate only 5 years, because every other solution would directly affect a large number of ethnic Albanians who became citizens of Macedonia in the past few years.

If the representatives of the parties which rally ethnic Albanians walk out of Government, Macedonia could be forced to schedule new elections, even though "international factors" are not requesting this. According to some estimates, the ethnic Albanians will continue to take part in Parliament as though nothing had happened, just as they did after the adoption of the new Constitution, which they also boycotted. However, entirely different opinions can be heard in Skoplje, the gist being that the ethnic Albanian leaders will finally abandon the legal means of political battle, because of pressure exerted by Albanians outside Macedonia.

One of the leaders of the Party of Democratic Prosperity (PDP), like VMRO leader Ljupco Georgijevski, accuses the present "communist regime" of many things that are not good in Macedonia today. This unanimity of the otherwise fiercest political opponents is yet another paradox on Macedonia's political scene. Many Western diplomats, who tour Macedonia from time to time, believe that the present Macedonian authorities are the wisest and most liberal of all the regimes in the former Yugoslavia. In private meetings, they express surprise at Greece's stubbornness and exclusivism, and belief that the citizens of Macedonia will continue to be tolerant and patient. Finally, with an apology their produce, from their diplomatic bags, the latest proposals on a name change.

The weakest point of such actions and thoughts is that one forgets that not a single serious policy can be built endlessly on somebody's patience. It would also be extremely difficult to explain why the people of Macedonia should be smarter or luckier than the Serbs, Croats or Muslims in the game of Russian roulette, which has been played for years in this part of the world.