Polyparty-ism - Search for Common Ground

supported the students who were victims
of the principal Bajatovska`s
autocracy, a VMRO adherent of the
minister Nenad Novkovski. At that
time, the more recent High School
Students` Union of Macedonia, led by
Aleksandar Nikolovski, was nowhere
in sight. This union's silence regarding
the behavior of the Negotino principal
helped to label it as "VMRO's"
and "Novkovski's union."
The change of government and
SDSM's coming to power revealed to
the High School Students` Union of
Macedonia the beauty of
acting in the opposition;
suddenly it turned into
the main supporter of
students' rights. It
rebels against everything
and anything: the
still unappointed minister
of education, the violence
against Albanian
students in Tetovo,
Shemshevo, Chair
neighbourhood, etc.
Meanwhile the once
104 severe union has now
decided to "give the new
government a chance,"
and thinks that the
future minister, Aziz Polozhani,
should be given an opportunity to
show what he knows. We may be
unfair to Bazerkoska and Nikolovski
by linking them to SDSM and
VMRO respectively, but their public
appearances and their vocabulary,
which seems to borrow from the
politicians` dictionary, make their
indirect duels look like a bad caricature
of the Crvenkovski-Georgievski
duels. Even the interaction of the
three student leaders follow the same
line of development as the coalition
bargainings. Bazerkovska and
Kruezi (on whose protests the Skopje
coordinator of DUI was seen) would
sit down and discuss, but they both
refused any contact with VMRO`s
Nikolovski. "Nikolovski is only
interested in creating tensions," says
Kruezi. Bazarkovska has a similar
accusation: "Our responsibility as
high school students is to build a
mutual life. Nikolovski destroys it,"
she says.
The misuse of young people for
political purposes has been massively
in practice since 1997, when the
opposition VMRO-DPMNE used the
student protests against higher education
in Albanian at the Pedagogical
Academy, and used the high school
students from Skopje to make the
protests more massive. Experience
shows that it is enough to show a finger
to the high school students to
make them leave the classrooms.
During the protests for support of
Macedonians in Shemshevo, comments
from the crowd sounded like
these :"In some village a school was
named after an Albanian," "I'll be
here until I meet all my friends, then
I'm going home," or "I don`t know
what we are protesting for. We get
out of classes." However, the traumatic
events in the country and the
appeals for righteousness may bring
the protests to a boiling point.
Comments such as: "What do you
mean, why are we on the streets?
They killed our man in Tetovo,"
could be heard on the streets of
Skopje on 23 October.
The perfidious murder of Vancho
Josifovski provoked a strong reaction
among high school students, while
the previous attack on a group of
Macedonian students in the market
"Bit Pazar" by a group of Albanians
turned the protests of 23 October into
complete chaos and anarchy. The
protests were followed by a string of
fights around the city. The public
transport authorities were powerless
and they could not count the number
of demolished buses. In Butel 2, a
Macedonian high school student was
shot in his legs with two bullets. The
Albanian high school students were
victims of violence as well. After
Kruezi`s decision to reinforce the
protests in front of "Cvetan Dimov"
and to block John Kennedy
Boulevard, he was kidnapped, brutally
beaten up, and got an
"L" carved on his stomach
with a knife. Two of his
fellow students and
activists in "Lehtisimi"
ended up even worse, and
the police are still searching
for the attackers.
The 1997 protests
ended without any serious
peace and safety violations
in the country; but they did
help VMRO-DPMNE in
the election campaign the
following year. Very few
of the protest organizers,
after fasting in front of the
Parliament, did not sit
down to eat meat in governmental
armchairs later. However, those
protests were conducted on a more
significant intellectual basis, and
Macedonia was then still an "oasis of
peace."
The October protests in Skopje
took place after a dirty war, when
everyone's passions had been heated
to a boiling point. We lived through
a dirty campaign as well, which started
with killings of police officers and
hostage dramas. The Macedonians
are still trying to swallow the inclusion
of terrorists in governmental
institutions. If somebody wants to
disturb the peace, they will certainly
continue to use the "always available
agitators and demonstrators" from
the high schools.
The question is, what will be
achieved by that?
(The author is a journalist
at Dnevnik)
A new beginning, November 2002