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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
In a vote hailed as a landmark stride for democracy, Macedonian voters elect an ethnic Albanian guerrilla leader many authorities still denounce as a terrorist.
Sep 17, 2002 | Joyous machine-gun fire filled the air of Skopje and young people swarmed into the streets after voters in Macedonia threw out the ruling party and elected a multiethnic coalition government in parliamentary elections held Sunday. Viewing the government as corrupt and economically incompetent, and mistrusting its ability to shepherd the nation to reconciliation after a violent guerrilla campaign by ethnic Albanians last year, Macedonians voted into power two coalition parties -- one of them headed by Ali Ahmeti, the military leader who led last year's uprising and is still denounced by many Macedonians as a terrorist.
Observers and Macedonians alike hailed the elections for the 120-seat parliament, the fourth held since Macedonia broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991, as largely free and fair, saying they showed that the young Balkan state was taking great strides toward democracy. But tensions in this impoverished, mountainous state remained high: Sporadic violence marred the election, and even though the government and the Albanian rebels, under pressure from the European Union, reached agreement last year on a peace deal that gave the Albanians more civil rights and access to government jobs, extremists on both sides pose a threat to peace.
Macedonia, about the size of Vermont, is a country rife with ethnic tensions that go back to the Ottoman empire. The people are divided by geography, culture, and religion. Ethnic Albanians, who are mostly Muslim, speak a different language than the mostly Christian Macedonians. The educational system is a mess, unemployment is incredibly high (in ethnic Albanian populated areas, it's as high at 85 percent) and organized crime, sustained by Western Europes demand for the countrys massive underground heroin racket, has created a world that in many parts looks and feels medieval.
Despite all these problems, however, many of the Macedonians partying in the streets clearly saw Sunday's vote as a hopeful sign: a vote for peace and a democratic breakthrough. They seemed simply happy to have made it through the day without any major violence: The full-scale street fighting and shootouts many predicted never materialized.
By Western standards, to be sure, the election was far from spotless. Just ask the villagers in Lesok, in a mountainous region about 25 miles from the capital of Skopje and less than a mile from the scene of pre-election day violence in which Macedonian police shot and killed two ethnic Albanians. The dirt road to Lesok looks like backwoods Mississippi in the 19th century -- crumbling concrete houses, roaming wild dogs, old men with rifles sitting in wagons passing the day drinking from rusty tin cups, boys guiding donkeys whose backs carry rows of dried tobacco.
The rare tourists who come to Macedonia these days are kindly warned not to venture up this way. The quiet that pervades these villages, tucked along a mountain that overlooks Skopje, are deceptive: The area was the site of gun battles between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians that captured headlines last year.
On election day, Lesok was again the scene of a violent incident. Sitting on the steps of a ramshackle home, six old ladies, their heads covered with scarves, screamed and pointed to a group of male Lesok dwellers who were going in and out of a car, apparently looting it. The vehicle had been abandoned, the men said, by a member of the Lions, a paramilitary unit ostensibly set up to combat terrorism, but which ethnic Albanians claim has been used to intimidate them. Six days ago several Lions were arrested for blocking a main road to an ethnic Albanian neighborhood.
Villagers claimed that the Lion driving the car had smashed the glass door of Lesoks polling station, placed a gun to the head of one of the village women and ordered her to vote for the ruling party, known as VMRO. When she refused, the man fired two shots near her ear, and smashed her on the head with the butt of his gun. He then grabbed Lesoks ballot box and took off on foot. (It was impossible to determine why he abandoned his car.) About 25 feet from his abandoned car, on a playground where young boys continued to kick a soccer ball as if nothing had happened, lay a dead bonfire of voter registration cards.
Lesok was one of two violent incidents on election day: An ethnic Albanian was shot and wounded at a polling place just north of Skopje Sunday night. But for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the continents largest conflict-prevention group, the stolen ballot box, the shooting, and other problems, including widespread ballot stuffing, were minor setbacks. The OSCE had worked for months to train both Macedonian election workers and more than 800 monitors from 55 nations, including the United States, on how to prevent "voter irregularities."
An OSCE monitor insisted the election was a success. "This isnt what I would define as democratic, but in Macedonia, 'democracy' has to be a subjective term right now," he said.
Monday morning, with the ballot box still missing, Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski, head of the VMRO party, conceded defeat, calling the vote "the most democratic election in the history of Macedonia."
"True, the missing box is bad but that is the biggest problem with the election," said Zoran Tanevski, spokesman for the Macedonian State Electoral Commission late Monday. Tanevski, who worked as a journalist at Radio Skopje for 17 years, insists that that one ballot box would not have changed the outcome of the election. "We are very happy. It was democratic by our terms. No one was killed. That is really a step forward."
Perhaps an election without murders is indeed a cause for parties in Macedonia. During the last election in 1998, the bodyguard of a Macedonian politician killed an ethnic Albanian Muslim teenager, and the 1999 and 2000 local elections were tainted with serious allegations of voter fraud.
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