Time to clean under the rug

Milan Marinković writes again from Niš, about 100 miles from the Serbia/Macedonia border:

For years Macedonia has seemed a forgotten country, even to someone who lives not far away.  After the 2001 Ohrid Framework Agreement put an end to an almost year-long armed conflict between Macedonian security forces and local ethnic Albanian militants , the name dispute with Greece appeared to be the only major issue Skopje had to deal with.

Up until recently, when a series of inter-ethnic clashes called to mind the events from more than a decade ago. Violence seemed to erupt out of thin air. But tensions were bubbling under the surface all the while.

As in most ethnically motivated attacks in the Balkans, the perpetrators were mainly members of football hooligan gangs and ultra-nationalist movements.  The same individuals often belong to both.  This time they were attacking innocent civilians, rather than fighting one another. The worst incident occurred when a group of some thirty thugs stormed into a bus and brutally beat ethnic Albanian passengers, including women, elderly people and minors.

The mixture of football hooliganism and aggressive ethno-nationalism is a commonplace in the Balkans.  Macedonia is no exception.  The issue is not sports rivalry.  There is a political dimension.  Politicians are lenient with extreme nationalist hooligans whom they view as a useful political – and, potentially even paramilitary – tool.

The good news is that the situation in Macedonia has, more or less, been put under control. The bad news is that this has happened only after the number of policemen patrolling the streets has been significantly increased. The extraordinarily high police presence might be a temporary measure, but hardly a permanent solution.

Nationalism is more consequence than cause.  The fundamental issue is mutual mistrust, rooted in the history of this region and its all-to-common inter-ethnic violence.

The Macedonian government is bi-ethnic, including an ethnic Macedonian (VMRO) as well as an ethnic Albanian party (DUI). While the two parties are largely focused on nominally satisfying EU criteria, they have done little, if anything, to relieve growing inter-ethnic tensions at home. Rather, both –VMRO in particular – have been using every opportunity to boost, implicitly or explicitly, nationalist sentiment among their respective voters.

This is no surprise. Nationalism is still the most lucrative commodity in all domestic political markets of the Western Balkans. To make their case, nationalists on each side selectively cite historical events, overemphasizing instances where people from their ethnic group were victims, while minimizing instances when they committed atrocities against others.  The still fresh memories of the Yugoslav wars in 1990s make it easy to convince people that they should fear their neighbors of a different ethnicity.  It is harder to promote constructive dialogue and cooperation – especially when there is a language barrier like the one between Albanians and Slavs.

In Macedonia, this latest ethnic violence poses the additional risk of spilling over the national border.  Albanians constitute about a quarter of the population of Macedonia. The leader of the main Albanian opposition party reportedly supported the idea of pan-Albanian unification in a single nation-state when he commented on the current crisis in Macedonia. In Kosovo, Albin Kurti’s “Self-determination” movement has been publicly advocating the creation of “greater Albania.”

Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci also recently said:

It would be the best for Albanians to live in one state, if there were any border changes in the Balkans.

Even if Thaci offered this hypothesis for his own domestic political purposes, such statements can have a detrimental effect on Kosovo’s international position.  Serb nationalists are already using it as “yet another proof” that the West’s support of Kosovo’s independence was motivated by anti-Serbian rather than humanitarian or moral reasons.

If the recent past has taught us anything, it is that any problem swept under the rug will inevitably reappear. Growing far right extremism and a steady increase in violent forms of crime – facilitated by ever-present institutional corruption and deteriorating socio-economic conditions – have contributed to a serious deterioration of public safety in Macedonia. An apparent lack of capacity on the part of domestic political elites to conclusively tackle these pressing issues through systemic reforms indicates that active Western interference might once again prove necessary to keep the region calm.

Macedonians and Albanians still have a real desire to get into Euroatlantic institutions.  While preoccupied with other problems, the Americans and Europeans could and should use this favorable circumstance to get them to clean under the rug.  The opportunity may not last forever.