Polyparty-ism - Search for Common Ground

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tions; the President of the Republic
practically led the discussion with his
team being superior to the other representatives
of the Macedonian political
entities.
INTERNATIONAL
GUARANTEES
International guarantors of the
agreement (and this is a rule for successful
agreements) must possess
enough authority to establish a framework
and a lasting agreement. They
should provide what is known as carrot-and-stick
measures. They provide
clear-cut and decisive threats which
effectively penalize and marginalize
any violators of the agreement. They
also provide some sort of assistance
package and further international integration
for successful implementation
of the agreement.
In spite of much criticism entangled
in the mist of frustration stemming
from the war, the Ohrid agreement
creates a win-win combination.
During normal assessments there are
no losers and there are standard, legal,
international grounds for balancing
ethnocultural identities. The
Agreement does not set forth solutions
for minority rights beyond what is
considered standard and all solutions
can be traced to the framework convention
of national minorities or in the
Council of Europe's Charter for
Minority Languages. It affirms the
unity of the state, sets up grounds for
significant power sharing, puts individual
human rights first with a significant
level of protective rights for cultural
identity (that have collective
implementation), etc.
Soon after the signing and the
implementation of the constitutional
amendments it was concluded that the
civil dimension of the political system
had not been jeopardized.
The extremists were disappointed
and the criminal Albanian gangs continued
to unsettle the mostly Albanian
population in the villages with kidnappings,
murders and robberies. The
capacity of those destabilizing factors
is not so great as to jeopardize the stabilization
based on the new relations
established with the Agreement.
Those "new" relations were not so
new that they had to be understood as
such. They promoted a new Albanian
political presence and exhausted the
option of violent clashing as a political
platform. Most importantly, the
agreement engaged the international
community, actors who require a successful
outcome. The situation is still
the same, and it is being promoted
with the same attention. The
Macedonians accepted the agreement
regardless of the feeling that it has
been imposed by war. In essence it
strengthened the state internationally,
although it weakened its control over
the area while it was in the renewal
phase.
The most important short-term
objectives of the implementation of the
Ohrid Agreement would be: to
strengthen the efficiency of the state's
control over the area and so-called
human security; to guarantee the rights
of those "new" minorities in the municipalities
in which Albanians are a
majority; to continue the political
struggle for full implementation
together, including the marginalization
of ethnonationalists who feed on
bizarre interpretations of the agreement
provisions and the slow pace of the
implementation of some of its parts.
(The author is a
university professor)
Why doesn't the
Albanian population in
Skopje lead a cultural life?
Ali Aliu
Albanian demographers think
that Skopje's urban centre alone
has approximately 100,000
Albanian citizens, while together
with the surrounding area, the
number doubles. With occasional
absences, I have lived in Skopje
since the end of the '50s of the
past century. Even then, Skopje
had a teacher's college, Albanian
drama under the rubric of the
Theatre of Nationalities, the
weekly newspaper Flaka and the
Albanian program on Radio
Skopje.… Of course, the number
of Albanian citizens would be
smaller then. Years after that, the
editorial staff of Flaka founded a
publishing department and the
literary magazine Jehona.
These were all the cultural,
educational and media organs that
covered Skopje and the Albanian
population in Macedonia. If we
observe carefully, we will notice
that the same scheme and structure-in
culture, education and media-has
remained unchanged for Skopje
and in large part for all the
Albanians in this country, with
minor variations.
* * *
I have asked myself on several
occasions why Skopje, with so
many Albanians, doesn't succeed
in creating the ambience for cultural,
educational and media life
Two years of the ohrid agreement, August 2003