The Most Paranoid Country in Europe

The Most Paranoid Country in Europe

Macedonia’s democracy has been hardwired to keep Nikola Gruevski in power.

 

TODAY, THERE are three nexuses of power in Macedonia: the state, VMRO and Gruevski. The distinction between the three has slowly collapsed over the last decade. Anyone who protests against Gruevski or refuses to vote for VMRO cannot be a true Macedonian; they are by definition a fifth column for those who plot against Macedonia on the outside—a vast category of conspirators that ranges from Greece to the Red Cross to the CIA. In Gruevski’s worldview, these groups are in league with one another against him. The Social Democratic opposition? A “traitorous structure working against Macedonia’s national interests.” NATO? “The North Atlantic Terrorist Organization.” America? A front for Albanian interests. The EU? Happily blackmailed by Greece. Russia? In thrall to the Serbs.

Heavy state control of the media has convinced many Macedonians of this picture. “Gruevski understands how to control the modern nation-state better than Milošević ever could have,” Ljubomir Frčkoski, one of three men who authored Macedonia’s 1991 constitution, told me. “His authoritarianism is technocratic, often sui generis. He knows things Putin does not.” Towards the end of 2010, Mijalkov began giving Gruevski daily briefings on the opposition. Together, they implemented the largest illegal surveillance program conducted in Europe since the dismantling of the Stasi. Over the course of four years, the phones of at least twenty thousand handpicked Macedonians—in addition to six ambassadors and at least one U.S. official—were wiretapped. In its Nixonian rage for surveillance, the Gruevski administration also recorded itself. Last May, the transcripts of 675,000 recorded conversations—known throughout Macedonia as the bombi, the “bombs”—were made available to the public by Zoran Zaev, the leader of the Social Democratic opposition who claims he received the recordings from an antigovernment whistleblower. Gruevski says a foreign power handed them to Zaev, who was charged with attempting to coup the state shortly after made the tapes public. Zaev told me that he believes at least two million more conversations are still in Gruevski’s possession. Those that have been released reveal, in extraordinary detail, the depth of corruption and cronyism, not to mention the cover-up of murder and police brutality, committed by VMRO apparatchiks. Macedonians will go to the polls this autumn to decide Gruevski’s fate.

And yet the difficulty with turning Gruevski out of power electorally is that Macedonia’s democracy has been hardwired to keep him there. VMRO has developed an elaborate system of bussing voters to districts where it struggles to obtain a majority. It is something out of Gogol: Of the 480,000 Macedonians who vote for Gruevski, as many as one hundred thousand aren’t living ones—they are the so-called fantomski glasači, the “phantoms.” Ethnic Macedonians from the Albanian border are caravanned into Skopje on election days and given government-issued ID cards with VMRO-owned addresses. “We have to be careful because we are under observation. I fear that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe might start barking,” Interior Minister Gordana Jankuloska tells Gruevski in one tape. “I mean, you can’t have 40 new people in a village with a population of five.” Civic opposition to Gruevski’s rule has been an unmitigated failure. Antigovernment protests? Gruevski immediately shuts down the Internet and busses in counterprotestors from around the country, typically incentivized with free ice cream. Foreign NGOs? A parallel world of VMRO-funded QUANGOs—“quasi-NGOs”—has been established to counter the findings of each and every one. The cottage industry of anti-Gruevski blogs and YouTube channels? An army of VMRO-funded Internet trolls raids comments sections with government propaganda.

“We’d kill for a government like that in Bosnia,” one EU official remarked in 2011, referring to Gruevski’s regime. Nearly every NGO president I met in Skopje believes that Gruevski has been allowed to dismantle an already pseudodemocracy in exchange for providing an alleged bastion of stability in the heart of the Balkans. Most of these NGO leaders added that Brussels, in its desperation to show that it does something in the way of implementing democratic reform, often does nothing at all. For the last ten years, policy reports have been skewed to show that Macedonia’s democracy works. As late as April 2014, European observers were claiming that Macedonia’s electoral process—the one operating with some one hundred thousand fake voters—was “efficiently administered.” This has now left the EU in the awkward position of trying to do damage control through the very state apparatuses that Gruevski himself controls—namely, by prosecuting Gruevski through a judiciary, four-fifths of whose members are VMRO loyalists. In preferring stability over democracy in Macedonia, the EU today has neither. Gruevski, who is in regular communication with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Viktor Orbán, has perfected the blueprint of how to create an illiberal democracy on a smaller, Balkan scale. Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić is one man following Gruevski’s lead. The more dangerous figure is Milorad Dodik, a Bosnian Serb from Banja Luka and the author of the upcoming Republika Srpska referendum, which will almost certainly trigger Greater Serbia aspirations and throw much of the Balkan Peninsula into political discord.

 

ALMOST EVERYWHERE in the western Balkans the arrangement of the post-Yugoslav space—NATO would provide security, the EU would institute democratic reforms—has broken down owing to the inability of the latter to effectively carrot-and-stick local political elites. Fifteen years ago, however, Macedonia was the first great success of EU intervention. In February 2001, the National Liberation Army (NLA), a heavily armed force of some six thousand Kosovo veterans, jihadists, and drug and arms traffickers, nearly unleashed the “Fifth War of Balkan Succession” on Macedonia. Some NLA fighters wanted a Greater Albania; most just wanted equal representation in a Macedonian society that had only ever given them minimal say in public affairs. And yet within six months, the commander of the NLA, Ali Ahmeti, a one-time Marxist-Leninist with a steady place on the CIA’s blacklist, had disbanded his guerillas, descended from the Šar foothills and upended the old adage that an Albanian never gives up his guns. The EU-brokered Ohrid Agreement was responsible for this. By merely posturing towards insurgency, Ahmeti secured more political rights for Macedonia’s Albanian community in half a year than had a decade of parliamentary politics. The lesson hasn’t been forgotten by either side—not least of all the hard-line nationalist Gruevski, who now rules in a coalition with none other than Commander Ahmeti himself. “Today, Ahmeti commits worse atrocities against the Albanian community today than any Macedonian ever could have,” Georgievski, the prime minister who conducted the six-month war on Ahmeti in 2001, told me.

Gruevski’s most stunning achievement has been the hijacking of the Ohrid Agreement by institutionalizing two parallel societies instead of integrating two equal ones. In Macedonia today, Slavic Macedonians and Albanians have limited interaction. They live on opposite banks of the Vardar River. They rarely attend one another’s protests. Each is represented by twin strata of political elites that mirror one another’s corruption and cronyism. Gruevski is indisputably more powerful than Ahmeti; but only through the one-time rebel in the hills has he been able to puppet control over some five hundred thousand Albanians who hardly needed Zaev’s wiretaps to ascertain the depth of VMRO racism against their community. (“How about making a war on the Albanians?” a VMRO minister proposes to another in one recording. “If it’s about showing who is stronger, we will crush them in an hour,” comes the reply.)

In Macedonia today, political elites in both the Slavic and Albanian communities exploit ethnic tensions to distract from the narrative of corruption. The most salient example of this is what happened on Europe Day last May, while mass protests against Gruevski’s wiretapping program paralyzed Skopje’s city center. Forty kilometers northeast of the capital, in the city of Kumanovo, Kosovar gunmen entered the city, allegedly under orders from Albanian mafia bosses. At the same time, (ethnically Slavic) national police were dispatched from Skopje to Kumanovo to conduct a bust of a local drug ring. The two groups collided; a street battle ensued; twenty-two were gunned down. A trial is currently being held, though the defense has argued that shortly after the clash four of the surviving gunmen were executed in a nearby police station to prevent them from testifying against the state. Photographers I met who went to Kumanovo shortly after the shootings said that their memory cards were confiscated by police. Almost immediately Gruevski took to state TV with claims of a renewed Greater Albania insurgency, a new 2001, this one fomented by “participants from several countries, some in the Middle East, which points to their great experience in guerilla fighting.” But most freethinking individuals I met in Macedonia, both ethnic Slavs and Albanians, were convinced that Kumanovo—the deadliest outbreak of violence in the Balkans in a decade—could only have been jointly masterminded by Gruevski and Ahmeti.

 

THE CULMINATION of Gruevski’s unstable mixture of paranoia and hypernationalism is something called “Skopje 2014,” an Olympian-scale building project that has demolished Skopje’s Communist city center and replaced it with a ruthlessly kitsch classical theme park. It is theatrically provocative. Hundreds of bronze and clay statues of muses and Hellenistic kings and Byzantine saints have been mounted on dozens of new bridges, museums, government buildings, fountains and pirate ships. Some have speakers that blare Wagner and John Williams; others monitor passersby with small cameras; hardly any depict ethnic Albanians. Elaborate statuary is devoted to Alexander the Great being breast-fed and coddled by Olympia, his mother. It’s used as evidence by some Macedonians that “Skopje 2014” has a Freudian underbelly: Gruevski, who allegedly solicits political counsel from his mother, is straining to replicate his lost motherland. At the very least, he’s attempting to show that if Macedonia can’t join the EU, it will become the EU. Walk around Skopje today, and you find concrete-plaster reconstructions of the Arc de Triomphe, the London Eye, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon and the Brandenburg Gate. (There is also a glitzy reproduction of the White House, made out of waterproof plaster mixed with small pieces of glass that enable the building to twinkle when lit at night.)