[This post was originally published on kotle.ca, on June 30, 2012]
Greece’s
current financial woes brought forward many examples of bureaucratic
waste of sheer madness. One is the now famous Commission for the
Management of Lake Copais, whose members were happily cashing in
government cheques 53 years after Lake Copais has dried out. [i]
To
the north of Greece, in the Republic of Macedonia, a seemingly similar,
but far more sinister example of “Catch 22”–like bureaucratic inertia
took place. There the MIA’s (Ministry of Internal Affairs) Security and
Counter-terrorism Agency (DBK) got around to abolishing its department
tasked with fighting “Macedonian Extremism” and secessionism in
1998—seven years after Macedonia seceded from Yugoslavia. This sort of
department was very common in the former Yugoslavia, where sprawling
security agencies were established in all composing parts of the country
with the goal of keeping the population in line with the centrally
delegated economic and social five-year plans. The surest way for a
Serb, Croat, Slovenian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Macedonian or Albanian to
land in prison was by taking a “nationalist” stand in calling for his
particular republic to leave Yugoslavia, pursue independence, or join
with a neighboring country. Yet, in most cases “nationalism” had very
little to do with these separatist tendencies, as most of these
malcontents had pro-Western, pro-capitalist sentiments.
The
DBK’s definition of “extremism” was (and possibly still is) quite
broad. In general these “extremists” were generally not what people
think of, when they think of extremists, like, say the IRA, Al-Qaeda or
ETA. For one, they were not militant. For another, there were no rebel
organizations in Macedonia since the de facto dissolution of
VMRO-Pravda in the early 1950’s. In essence, under Yugoslav law, any
display of preference of one’s Republic to the Federation was illegal.
The Macedonian Extremism department of the Agency was put in place to
defend Yugoslavia from subversive, non-Communist Macedonians who might
in one way or another undermine the official policy of Singularity.
There
are two leading theories as to why the ME Line of Work within the DBK
stayed active for so long after Macedonian independence. The first, and
more naïve claims that this was a result of short-run personal interests
of the Agency’s employees seeking to preserve their jobs. After all,
having a government agency dedicated to preventing the establishment of
the country which funds it is probably the ultimate in government waste
and incompetence, and this sort of incompetence has always been a
trademark of Macedonian bureaucrats.
The
second theory is somewhat more complicated, and will be brought forward
in this article. It rests on the writings of a former Yugoslav Admiral
that suggest that at least to an extent the liberalization of
Yugoslavian society—the abandonment of Singularity in particular—was
planned and directed by the Yugoslavian DBK:
In
his book "Slučaj Jugoslavija" ["Case Yugoslavia"] Admiral Branko Mamula
gives a detailed explanation of the ideological, programming and
implementing approach of the JNA [Yugoslavian National Army] as a
political factor in the Yugoslav state. Finding themselves facing the
"challenge of internal turmoil and conflict," in the early 1980's the
army's top brass judged that it was necessary for the JNA and TO
[Territorial Defense] "to gradually begin preparations to deal with
situations of crises in the country." (P. 61) … Long before the process
of the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia formally began, the JNA was
ready to take a leading political role in Yugoslavia. Mamula wrote about
this: "In the second half of the 1986 and early 1987 an elaborate
political plan was prepared for the decision [of military takeover of
power] and operational preparations were commenced. The preparations
covered measures of vigilance and heightened combat readiness maintained
by the official decisions of the Presidency of the SFRY and the plans
of the Federal Secretariat of National Defense and JNA Headquarters."
(P. 88) Further developments, especially conflicts in the country's
Communist Party leadership, the increase of Serbian nationalism and the
"separatism" of the northwestern republics, confirmed expectations of
JNA's top brass of the inevitability of a military coup. Moreover,
Mamula writes "we were very determined. The basic plan was prepared and
the units to carry it out were ready" (p. 102). Mamula writes that the
intention was "to get time for a minimal political consolidation and
deferral of disputes, while postponing the solution of the largest
problems of the common state [Yugoslavia] until after the calming of the
thundering turbulence that gripped Eastern Europe: to preserve
Yugoslavia, and reform it in peaceful times." (P. 8) This meant keeping
the "status quo" until the anti-communist movement in Europe died down, a
time when the national individualization of Eastern European nations
comes to a halt, and the conflict between East and West is reinstated.
Then Yugoslavia would be able to assert itself as a geopolitical and
geostrategic factor as it was in the period after World War II.
By
the end of the 1980’s, with inflation raging and the economy in a
shambles, Yugoslavia was heading toward a certain collapse, as Ludwig
von Mises’ theory on the insolubility of centrally planned economies was
materializing throughout the Eastern Bloc. Fearing the loss of
privilege and power, the Yugoslav elite orchestrated the ethnically
based secessionist wars of the 1990’s. Perhaps emboldened by the fact
that the DBK had easily controlled the population for the previous 45
years, it failed to dawn on the planners that controlling the outcome of
this massive scenario may not be an executable task.
The
idea that the DBK was behind the apparent liberalization of the
political and social system in Yugoslavia is further supported by the
fact that the pre-disintegration elite, both political and economic,
remained in place in all of the former republics. In the Republic of
Macedonia, for instance, even though the newly formed right of center
VMRO-DPMNE party won the most seats in the first free parliamentary
election of 1990, it was not given the chance to form a government. Even
when a deal was reached among all parties to form a government of
technocrats, and since VMRO-DPMNE had won the most seats, it was to
choose an impartial candidate for prime minister, newly elected (through
Parliament) President Kiro Gligorov refused to formally hand over the
prime ministerial mandate to Aleksandar Lepavcev, forcing VMRO-DPMNE to
give up its right to appoint the prime minister.
In 2007 former Parliament Speaker Stojan Andov gave public testimony in weekly magazine Fokus
that Gligorov’s refusal to hand over the prime ministerial mandate to
any candidate put forward by VMRO-DPMNE was based on orders from the
Central Government from Belgrade. Eventual Prime Minister Nikola Kljusev
and President Kiro Gligorov both opposed Macedonian independence from
Yugoslavia. In fact, shortly after his appointment on May 29, 1991,
Prime Minister Kljusev had this to say regarding the possible
dissolution of Yugoslavia: “Macedonia [i.e. its Government] still
believes in the possibility of a political compromise and in the
decisions that would lead to a union of sovereign states.” Since
Yugoslavia was a union of sovereign states, as each republic
had declared itself independent and sovereign before willingly joining
the Yugoslavian federation in the aftermath of World War II, Kljusev's
statement simply translated to a wish for nothing to change. President
Gligorov, meanwhile, was so vehemently opposed to the idea of Macedonia
abandoning the Yugoslavian federation that upon his insistence the
question to which Macedonians were answering on the independence
referendum was expanded to include the option for the newly independent
state to have the option to join into federation with any or all of the
Yugoslavian republics. The question on the Referendum ultimately came to
be: “Are you for and independent and sovereign Republic of Macedonia,
with the right to enter into a future federation with the Yugoslavian
republics?” A week after the successful referendum of September 8, 1991,
in an interview for Turkish radio channel “Anatolia”, Gligorov would
remark that “the Macedonian people through the referendum expressed its
willingness for an agreement to enter into a future union of sovereign
states of Yugoslavia.” Of course, having the question worded the way it
was, it made it easy to manipulate the results according to one’s
wishes.
The
importance of this notion to the purpose of this paper is in the fact
that the Gligorov remained president through 1999. His first election
was through Parliamentary vote only; his second in 1994 was marred by a
widely contested electoral fraud. That notwithstanding, until the
attempted assassination upon his life, Gligorov was the most powerful
political figure in the country, meaning that he directed the efforts of
the DBK. Perhaps not coincidentally, the majority of dossiers from the
post-independence era were commenced under the suspicion of Macedonian
“nationalism.” It appears that the plan as described by Mamula was
abandoned with the signing of the Dayton Peace Accord—shortly after
which the attempt of Gligorov’s life was made.
***
Although
very little has been leaked out about the inner workings of any of the
DBK’s machinations, some information about the resources allocated to
this agency have been brought to light over the years. It is estimated
that at the time of the declaration of Macedonian independence, the
State Security Agency had about 50,000 citizens registered as its
permanent collaborators, out of a population of approximately 2 million
citizens; while 35,000 citizens are estimated to have been subjected to
politically motivated investigations. However, the number of persons who
actively supplied information to the agency, but were not registered as
collaborators normally runs at a half-a-dozen per subject; on top of
this, collaborators and informants also informed on the work of other
informants, effectively keeping them under surveillance. Thus a
conservative estimate of the DBK’s workforce approximates it at 200,000.
Collaborators
were recruited with the task of protecting Yugoslavia from enemies,
foreign and domestic, and it is estimated that their concentration
increased going further up the echelons of politicians, managers of the
state run companies, the judiciary, the media, the religious
organizations and the education establishment. The usual strategy for
recruiting collaborators was to abuse their perceived weaknesses:
criminals were offered reprieve from prison if they agreed to cooperate;
jobless individuals were offered employment; people with relatives
living abroad were manipulated by withholding the right to get a
passport; while homosexuals were routinely rounded up and given the
choice to cooperate or get very public police staged “outings.”
Collaborators were asked to report on their neighbors, relatives and
colleagues committing illegal acts. To be sure, Yugoslavia’s socialist
laws were quite perverted: while “extremism” and “local-patriotism” were
“illegal acts,” car theft, for instance was considered mere
“borrowing,” and was thus a non-crime.
Furthermore,
political parties were illegal, save, of course, for those constituting
the Union of Communists. Religious organizations were originally fully
banned until the 1960’s. Thereafter, even though the institutions
themselves became “legal,” attending them gave definite grounds for
reprimand. Private enterprise was also against the law, except for the
smallest crafts; while arable land was taken over by state run
collectives. The mere appearance of wealth was worthy of the utmost
suspicion of being a “materialist.” This last rule only applied to the
working, and not to the managerial or political classes, of course.
Besides Macedonian anti-Communists, the surviving remnants of the
merchants, the clergy and the bourgeoisie, the main targets for the
security apparatus in Macedonia were Albanian nationalists determined to
help Albanian majority in Kosovo achieve autonomous status within
Yugoslavia. Lastly, the Agency was widely used in fratricidal actions
between the Communist elites.
***
The
adoption of Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia on November 17,
1991 was supposed to end these nefarious activities. Yet when the time
came to turn the proverbial page, Macedonia did not disband or
ban the Communist party, nor its’ Party Police, the DBK. In fact, the
painted over Communists, under the guise of Social-Democrats (SDSM),
continued to run the country for the next 7 years. It was a tumultuous
period to be sure, as the SDSM formed their first government in early
1992 by means of a clever coup d’état, while extending their
rule through rigged elections in 1994; the former Communists would not
even allow the question of reforming the DBK to enter the public
discourse throughout their rule. SDSM ignored calls for early elections
in the middle of the second term, despite the fact that the opposition
managed to collect the constitutionally requisite 150,000 signatures
demanding so. It was not yet time for the old Communist Party to hand
the reins over, since, as later became evident, the purge its henchmen
in the DBK were conducting against the main opposition party, VMRO
DPMNE, was not yet complete.
By
late 1998 this mission mostly accomplished, VMRO DPMNE—the minority
winner of the 1990 election, and extra-Parliamentary opposition as a
result of a boycott of the 1994 chicanery—was finally allowed to form a
government. Despite promises made throughout the 1990’s to end the DBK
as soon as they formed government, VMRO DPMNE did not attempt to even
reform, let alone disband, the Agency. However, in the year 2000 the
Dossier Disclosure Act was passed and a most sinister suspicion was
confirmed: that in the years 1991 through 1998 the DBK had been operating wholly as it had prior to the Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia;
the released dossiers, though heavily redacted and limited in scope,
tell a story of a Communist system unchanged to the point that the DBK
officially governed itself by the Constitution of SFR Yugoslavia through
late 1995.
In
a telling act of the indifference toward its own liberty, SDSM was
voted back into power for another 4 year spell in 2002, after Macedonia
suffered a brief ethnic conflict between its majority Macedonians and
minority Albanians in 2001. Throughout the period between the power
changes, the MIA ostensibly underwent major reforms; yet, no mass
personnel changes took place, save for the top echelons which are
shuffled after every election.
Though
it cannot be positively confirmed, it is rather obvious that to the
this day the DBK continues to manage the network of collaborators;
adding new ones in the process, with one formal change: its Governing
Ordinances of October, 31 1995 no longer make reference to the
Constitutions of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia or SFR Yugoslavia.
Thus, the DBK at least on paper is following a democratic Constitution,
and is required to act against actual security threats, not political
crimes. Civilian control of the Agency remains patchy. The VMRO-DPMNE in
the first decade of independence accused the Agency of systematic
eavesdropping on its party headquarters, keeping tabs on people going in
its headquarters, as well as of planting agents in the local party
branches to follow up on events and act disruptively. Most of these allegations were proven right by the “Blue Bird Affair,” and even more so by the disclosed dossiers.
***
Having re-taken power, under somewhat new leadership, the ruling conservative VMRO-DPMNE [ii]
initiated a process of “lustration”—initially an attempt to purge the
public sector of persons at one time or another associated with the DBK,
all at the behest of the EU which imposed the purge as a membership
condition. The effort to date has been a six year saga of spinning
wheels.
Despite
the estimation of the existence of at least 4,000 dossiers for the
1991-1998 period not many have been publicized. Bafflement as to why
this is so is warranted, as it goes without saying that the subjects of
the DBK’s work were high profile members of the presently (now and as
well as when the Dossier Disclosure Act was enacted) ruling party, as
well as the party itself! One of the better publicized dossiers
is that of Jordan Petrovski, an entrepreneur and financial backer of
VMRO DPMNE in the early years of Independence. Petrovski, having fled
Macedonia due to increasing pressure from the DBK resulting from his
media exposés of his suspicions about its’ intrigues, used his
dossier commenced after Independence as the key evidence to his
successful political asylum claim in Canada. The “Proposal to Enter Into Preliminary Treatment,”
from March 1993, marked him as originating from “a hostile family,”
depicts his parents as “materialists;” details the sums he donated to
VMRO-DPMNE and few smaller parties; and finds him suspicious of being
used by the BNRS [Bulgarian Intelligence Agency], for “creating
conditions for his engagement toward our country,” since “[a]s an owner
of a company he has established private and business relations and
maintains regular contacts with persons from R Bulgaria, Russia and
other Eastern European countries.” Specifically, in a pre-operative memo,
the DBK makes clear that “[t]he information concerning Petrovski's
association and travel with two persons from the Republic of Bulgaria to
Russia, likewise Petrovski's good and unimpeded cooperation with companies
from the Republic of Bulgaria contains indications which make him
interesting, all the more keeping in mind his family origin.” (Emphasis
added) It is telling that Petrovski was forced into exile during
VMRO-DPMNE’s first stint in power.
In a disturbing development, Petrovski’s dossier details attempts
by DBK agents in 1997, six full years after democracy was officially
embraced by the Macedonian State, to have him collect a receivable from a
Bulgarian business associate through the Bulgarian Embassy in Skopje.
Petrovski claims that this was a plot by the police to have him arrested
leaving the Embassy grounds with a case full of money, giving the
impression that VMRO DPMNE was being funded by this foreign country—thus
confirming the rumors which the DBK had been feverishly spreading since
its inception. “The police agent was instrumental to my locating a
businessman who owed me money,” Petrovski said in an interview,
“even
though I could not reach him for three years heretofore. Having avoided
me for years, my associate then insisted that the money transfer be
facilitated by the Bulgarian Embassy; while the DBK agent even drove me
to the Embassy in order to make the arrangements with their staff. While
I played along early on, in an attempt to understand the intrigue, when
the time came to have the money transferred to me, I ceased
cooperating, as at that point I became sure that the entire episode had
been a set up, timed for the spring of 1998, mere months ahead of the
upcoming fall election.”
Since
the dissolution of Yugoslavia, most of the countries that once
constituted it have seen conflicts ranging from open war and genocide
down to trade embargos; thus having a working security apparatus is
thought of as absolutely necessary—for the security of the State, that
is. Presently, the “new” VMRO-DPMNE counts over 6 years in power, but
the memory of its founders, and of numerous others imprisoned for their
dedication to independent and democratic Macedonia, has kept a feeling
of injustice alive in the party, and in the public in general. The
party’s old guard, having been at the receiving end of the DBK’s
cloak-and-dagger polices, remains dedicated to the promise given by
former Leader, Ljubčo Georgievski in 1994 to dismantle this undemocratic
agency. Yet, the power it grants to the ruling party makes the DBK
indispensable to whoever is atop the political pyramid. Thus, Macedonia
today finds itself in a seemingly up-side-down debate in which the party
in power is ostensibly pushing for a lustration of police informants.
However, since a weakening of the DBK is sure to reduce its usefulness
to the ruling elite, VMRO-DPMNE’s leadership has only been putting
perfunctory efforts into the debate. At the same time, the opposition
SDSM has moved from half-hearted support of the law to open hostility to
it.
***
The
first lustration law, passed in 2008, set up a fact finding commission
with representatives from all significant political parties with a
mandate to comb through secret police files, and determine whether
persons holding public offices have provided information to the DBK that
led to basic human rights being violations. The law also applied to
police officers who issued orders violating human rights. If the
informant also benefited from his cooperation with the DBK—as in gaining
employment or a promotion, or receiving money—according to the Act, the
informant was to be forced to resign his post. The Lustration Act was
to affect anybody working for the State: from the top political leaders,
down to mid level officials, Academicians, the judiciary, and the
clergy.
The
Lustration Act provided that Macedonian journalists also be examined,
as the security services often engage in misinformation, the spreading
rumors, and character assassinations over the press. The law provided
that informants can remain journalists, but that the public needs to be
informed if a journalists was also a collaborator. Ljubomir Frčkoski,
one of first interior Ministers of independent Macedonia, is credited
with saying that the police ought to treat journalists like mushrooms:
keep them in the dark and feed them hot, steamy piles of manure; that is
to say, police approved information.
No
punishment for the informants was foreseen by the law, merely the loss
of the privileged post the informant achieved by breaking some of the
most basic human rights: those of free speech, political association or
freedom of worship. In an admission that the DBK and the few smaller
agencies covered by the law in many instances continued to operate in
violation of the democratic Constitution of 1991, the law was to be in
effect until 2019.
Security
professionals claim that the Lustration Act has made it much harder to
gather information from persons on the ground. Supporters of lustration,
on the other hand, point out to examples of gross abuse of the security
agencies, and claim that real security can only be found in an open and
democratic society; likewise they add that the DBK makes no distinction
between political threats to the ruling party and actual threats of
violence to the citizenry.
If
someone is surprised that Macedonia—and a number of other former
Communist European countries—is yet to conclude the process of severing
from a system that allegedly ended over 20 years ago, and finds the
debate irrelevant, they ought to look at the hostile reaction that the
Lustration Act has caused in Macedonia. When allowed to operate,
Lustration Commission has managed to confirm about a dozen police
collaborators. Some of them quitted their posts quietly, using the right
to remain unnamed if they vacate their posts in the Administration.
Others decided to fight. While the Commission found some irrelevant
retired Communist Yugo-nostalgics, it also netted some quite important
society leaders as well. Most prominent case was that of Vladimir
Milčin, head of the Foundation Open Society in Macedonia (FOSIM), better
known as the Soros foundation in Macedonia—a large Soros funded network
of non-Governmental organizations that deal in a long list of issues,
such as the European integration of the country, developing policies for
different areas, Roma issues, youth activism, media development, etc.
Since
2004 the lustration process became part of the work of the FOSIM. A
regional network of non-governmental organizations, in which Macedonia
was represented by the FOSIM, whose proclaimed goal, was to promote
lustration in the countries of South-Eastern Europe. The project,
bankrolled by the European Union among other donors, appears to have
broken down after a few years, but, in Macedonia at least, it was kept
alive and since the Social-Democrats lost the 2006 elections, the new
conservative Government led by the VMRO-DPMNE embarked on an effort to
pass a Lustration Act. Getting a Lustration Act passed is one thing; the
contents of it are another. In what critics have noted to be an excuse
to run the project aground—or at the very least to dilute the
Act—VMRO-DPMNE’s leadership insisted on full bipartisanship in the
effort. Thus, an old Communist era Member of Parliament, Stojan Andov,
was drafted to write the bill. The initial version of the law was passed
in 2008 with the full backing of all parties in Parliament. It was a
compromise. It not only failed to provide for a full opening of dossiers
and the setting up of an archival institution to educate the public on
what was being done, it actually banned any publication of the files.
Imagine the surprise of the informed public when, instead of supporting
the fact that a law was finally passed, few months after the law was
passed Vladimir Milčin, the long serving executive director of the FOSIM
Institute, filed a challenge of the law with the Macedonian
Constitutional Court. Milčin’s challenge was co-signed by a former
Yugoslav army officer, Filipov, who has challenged dozens of laws
through the Constitutional court, often for mere technical reasons, and
is seen as the slayer of laws. At the time Milčin explained that his
new-found opposition to lustration stemmed from the possibility of
dossier tampering while they were kept in security archives. The jointly
prepared Milčin-Filipov filing went far in defending the actions of
police informants, claiming their action were legal according to and
compliant with the laws of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Specifically, in his address to the Court, Mr. Milčin pointed out that
[t]he
founding of the Republic of Macedonia as a state within the federation
of Yugoslavia in 1994 and her half-century long development bearing the
clear attributes of a state is doubtless the most significant link in
the historical development of the struggle toward the modern Macedonian
statehood.
Therefore,
the state security apparatuses and their collaborators and informants
acted according to the written ordinances and warrants, as well as the
needs of the governments. This is in fact, still the case!
Superficially
this claim is true: the Government then had the legal right to seize
any property it liked, or to put a person in prison merely for setting
up a political party, or for being a homosexual, or a man of the Church.
Just as Nazi Germany had laws that made the snatching of the Jewish
property technically legal. Yet, if anything, Mr. Milčin’s claim that
the state security apparatuses were used according to the needs of
governments—not of the people—was enough to strike down his own
challenge. The fact that his statement suggests that such activity still
goes on in Macedonia in itself represents a reason for a thorough
examination of the DBK’s work. Needless to say, many were shocked to see
the Constitutional Court even take these arguments into consideration.
A
closer look at the Court itself provides a self-evident explanation as
to why it acted so. The Constitutional Court, whose members’ positions
depended on obtaining clearance from the Lustration Commission, examined
the challenge while the Commission was examining the files of the
President, the Prime Minister and the Members of Parliament. Ethical
etiquette would imply that the Justices of the Constitutional Court
(most of whom began their careers in the Communist Era) would reserve
judgment until the Commission cleared them of wrongdoing. Instead,
before their files were examined by the Commission, the Justices ruled
to defang the law and strike down some of its most important elements.
The Social Democrats, who voted for the Act, seemed visibly relieved,
and demanded that this be the end of the affair.
Despite
protests from its members nominated by the opposition, the Lustration
Commission kept working, and soon the name of the first major informant
was made public–that of Supreme justice of the Constitutional Court,
Trendafil Ivanovski. He was found to have supplied the ideological
police in the 1960’s about the activities of his friends who were
accused of being Macedonian nationalists. Several other smaller level
officials were exposed as well. In the summer of 2011 the Lustration
Commission determined that Vladimir Milčin had also collaborated with
the secret police.
Details
remain a matter of confidentiality, but Macedonian media quoting
anonymous sources claim that Milčin, who has worked as a theatre
director and dean of the state run Drama Faculty, contacted state
security agents and was involved in one of the most tragic dissident
cases in Macedonia: that of the beloved actor Risto Šiskov. Šiskov, born
to Macedonain emigrants expelled en-masse from Greece following World
War Two, a beloved star of many of the first Macedonian movies produced
in Yugoslavia, was arrested after an outburst against the forced
introduction of the Yugoslav identity and against the decision of
Yugoslav Communist to abandon ethnic Macedonians in Greece to their fate
after the war. Šiskov died an early death, after four agonizing years
in prison.
Milčin
denied these claims, and is challenging the Commission’s findings in
court. A large number of individuals, journalists and so-called human
rights experts tied with the Soros foundation in Macedonia have joined
him in round-tables and activities meant to discredit the entire process
of lustration, in a full about turn after initially supporting it.
After independence, not only has Macedonia inherited an Elite dominated
by leftists, but there is no conservative foundation or institute that
would come even close to the funding or the expertise that the
dominantly left leaning FOSIM foundation has to dismantle the Government
policies and produce talking points for the left.
Vladimir Milčin, described “as a voice of liberal values in the country” by a recent New York Times article,
became prominent as a reformist intellectual as a result of his
activities in the brief protest movement of 1968. To be clear: the
movement which Mr. Milčin was part of was not demanding a liberalization
of Yugoslavia—it was calling for a return to Stalinism. American
historian and economist professor Murray N. Rothbard makes a short, yet
telling statement regarding the events:
Sure
enough, by the early 1960s we already had seen the inspiring
development of Yugoslavia, which after its break from Stalin had evolved
rapidly way from socialism and central planning and in the direction of
the free market, a course which the rest of Eastern Europe and even
Soviet Russia were already beginning to emulate. (Rothbard, Murray N., The Betrayal of the American Right, pp. 183-184)
Mr.
Milčin, though he may be a self described liberal, has consistently
acted in promoting an aggrandized Stalinist state. It should come as
little surprise that he would have been a willing collaborator of the
DBK.
Early
in 2011, the VMRO-DPMNE Government, without the support of the
opposition, voted two extensive amendments to the Act. However, these
amendments failed to address the Constitutional Court’s judgment on its
previous endeavor. No narrative was added to the Act so as to explain
the need of the act; nor was any serious provisions added to address the
root issues: the abuse of power exercised by those in charge of the
agency. Jordan Petrovski, writing from Canada as the president of the
Committee for the Democratization of the Republic of Macedonia would
make his pessimism public by stating:
The
newly proposed lustration bill put forth by VMRO-DPMNE is just another
effort of the governing party to manipulate the public. The text of the
new bill betrays a desperate attempt at buying time, which will be
spent, as usual, at accomplishing nothing; since the new bill is
practically a carbon-copy of the present Act (which had its most
important provisions concerning the post-Yugoslavia period declared
unconstitutional by the Court). The adoption of the proposed bill into
law by Parliament would mean that the new Act will be met with precisely
the same fate that befell its predecessor.
Petrovski’s pessimism proved to be well founded, as his forecast came to pass in the winter of 2012.
***
In
the meanwhile, the charade went on in Macedonia, and another high
profile uncovering was made by the Lustration Commission. Former
Minister of Internal Affairs (Police) Frčkoski, who after his police
career turned into a potty-mouthed editorialist in a Soros supported
newspaper, became the third major lustration case. The Lustration
Commission found that he was issuing orders to open police files for
political and ideological reasons against a prominent Bishop he accused
of pro-Serbian sentiment, a writer he accused of pro-Bulgarian sentiment
and an ethnic Albanian. Tellingly, however, despite being awarded
political asylum in Canada—and, therefore, being the most high profile
victim of Frčkoski’s orders—Jordan Petrovski’s dossier remained
unmentioned by the Lustration Commission. In fact, despite the fact that
the DBK commenced an estimated 4,000 dossiers in his reign as Minister,
the dossiers used by the LC against Frčkoski were commenced by his
predecessor, Jordan Mijalkov (father of present DBK Director). Frčkoski,
SDSM’s losing presidential candidate in the 2009 elections, responded
with an inverse-Nurnberg defense. He said he was not to blame, since he
was merely signing the orders to begin police activities, after it was
suggested by his subordinates.
The
Constitutional Court’s decision put an end to the deliberations on
Frčkoski’s lustration. He has not been forced to vacate his
professorship at the State University’s Faculty of Law. It should be
noted here that Frčkoski has been enjoying some more grace from the
Macedonian judiciary. He and seven other former and current officials of
the MIA are the defendants in a suit filed by Petrovski in 2007,
claiming abuse of public duty. The suit originated as a Request to the
Public Prosecutor, which was rejected without foundation. Petrovski then
filed in civil court in 2008. The court has been idle in this case.
-----
Reasons
for insisting lustration must continue are both a desire to bring
justice to the victims, but also there are practical considerations, and
apprehension of the still considerable might of this network. It is
widely acknowledged that the agents of the political and the military
security services that former Yugoslavia developed were strongly
involved in provoking the bloody break-up of the country. When the end
of the Berlin wall came, and East opened up for the West, Yugoslavia
lost its privileged place of a neutral chokepoint connecting the two
opposing blocks, a position that often brought immense benefits and
helped keep the country afloat. In a nut-shell, the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia was a failed attempt to stretch a common South
Slavic identity over diverse people kept in a grossly inefficient
central-run economy (you understand why many in former Yugoslavia view
the current European predicaments with a grim feeling of déjà vu).
This developed many ethnic and religious fault lines and the security
services were sent to monitor them. The end of the privileged position
exposed the old Communist elites, left leaderless after Marshall Tito
died in 1980, to challenges, mostly from upstarts in the Communist
party. The security services, who best knew the weak spots of the
system, offered their services to the bickering Communist leaders. The
agents of the civilian and military intelligence often portrayed as good
shepherd dogs watching over the country, quickly transformed into
rampaging wolves. Some acting for political and ideological reasons,
others using the ensuing chaos to make small fortunes running guns,
drugs, cigarettes, or taking part in the privatization of the state
owned factories and land, but the end result was the very bloody
break-up the vast security apparatus was meant to prevent. Furthermore,
if it weren’t for their dark expertise, the Yugoslav wars would not have
been that bloody, if they were to happen at all. A rare leaked
testimony of a Serbian Army intelligence officer, details the tactics of
the Yugoslav National Army such as planting bombs in cafes in
ethnically mixed areas, spreading threatening nationalist rumors,
leaflets, graffiti. Tactics included sabotage of infrastructure and
distributing weapons from army caches to create ethnic paramilitaries,
in some cases calculating with chaos in order for the population to
demand that security is provided by the Yugoslav Army. The legacy is
blamed for a number of disruptive events in Macedonia even after the end
of the Yugoslav bloody break-up. First Macedonian President, Communist
official Kiro Gligorov narrowly survived a car bomb assassination
attempt in 1995, and the second President, VMROs Boris Trajkovski, died
in a plane crash in Bosnia in 2004 that is still a matter of
investigation. The first interior minister Jordan Mijalkov, died in a
suspicious car crash in 1991. Social Democrat leader Branko Crvenkovski
in 2000 publicly showed transcripts of phone conversations journalists
had with politicians, claiming that they come from an extensive
wire-tapping program. The conflict with ethnic Albanian guerillas in
2001, the legacy of large scale smuggling and shoddy privatization deals
in the 1990ies, the presence of major foreign intelligence services
over the 1999 Kosovo war, resource and energy elbowing in the region,
this all has turned into a breeding ground for all sorts of security
officials.
Currently,
the process of lustration in Macedonia remains stuck. The Social
Democrat opposition has refused to appoint a new rotating head of the
Commission, and have in general withdrawn support from the process and
are trying to discredit it, even though it is a move that limits the
authority of the police, that is run by their political opponents. The
VMRO-DPMNE, not known as people who give up or change their minds
easily, or at all, seem determined to see this one through.
***
Why is the question of Macedonia’s abortive lustration of any importance to non-Macedonians? Because it is a perfect example of the impotence of law over the abuses of power that abound in the name of national security. Because it is the perfect example of what Friedrich von Hayek wrote about in The Road To Serfdom when describing why the worst get on the top of the political pyramid, even in democratic societies—so long as there is a pyramid to climb. Because it is a vivid example of how once officials appropriate power to themselves do everything to maintain it. And because it is a perfect example of what happens to a society of individuals when those individuals fail to fight for their own rights enumerated in the society’s law books.
- [ii] Short for Vnatresna Makedonska Revolucionerna Organizacija – Demokratska Partija za Makedonsko Nacionalno Edinstvo, or Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity
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