Prisoners protest – they also want “reconciliation”
Everyone wants to get on the boat of amnesty in a situation of incredible political and legal stunts to pay the price for Euro-Atlantic integration, ie to find some compromise between what is called individual responsibility for April 27 and the integration of the country into NATO and the EU.
More than 600 prisoners serving sentences in the Idrizovo penitentiary have been on hunger strike yesterday dissatisfied that they will not be covered by the amnesty law drafted by the Working Parliamentary Reconciliation Group, which left an additional room for the finalization of the legal solution.
“We are starting with a two-day warning hunger strike, because despite all requests to the Government and the Prime Minister, we have not received any response regarding the law on amnesty that has been announced”, reads the letter sent to the Idrizovo director, Bobi Mojsoski, who confirmed the newly emerging situation.
It is a request for amnesty, which in a form of petition was sent by part of the convicts two weeks ago to the Government, the Ministry of Justice and the President of the Assembly. Convicts seek a law on general amnesty for all acts permitted by the Constitution, and for prisoners of life imprisonment the sentences will be changed to prison terms for a number of years. If they do not receive a response from the Government and the working body for reconciliation within two days, they announced that they will continue the strike and organize peaceful protests in front of the Government.
Not long after they announced their strike, the prisoners were “disciplined” by Prime Minister Zoran Zaev.
“” There is no plan for drafting a law on general amnesty with regard to 27 April 2017 Parliament incidents, except for those who were not involved in masterminding, organizing the attack on Parliament and in the acts of violence” Prime Minister Zaev said yesterday in response to a reporter’s question after the debate on constitutional changes under the Agreement with Greece, which was held in Stip.
He confirmed that he had received a letter from prisoners in the Idrizovo Prison saying that several months ago a law on amnesty had already been passed. “Not a single modern state could adopt a Law on amnesty every six or nine months. The practice in the world is general amnesty laws to be adopted every four to eight years. Therefore, 30 percent of what is allowed to be pardoned everywhere in Europe was also allowed in Macedonia,” Zaev said.
The amnesty law was adopted earlier this year. With this law, more than 800 people with a final verdict got a complete release from prison, while the reduction of the sentence by 30 percent covered over 3,000 convicts. The law did not envisage amnesty for the perpetrators of murder, rape crimes, election violations, criminal acts against the state etc.
The members of the working group where informed of the prisoners’ strike while at a meeting which, according to the initial announcements, was supposed to present the draft version of the amnesty law for April 27th. The meeting lasted less than an hour, and, as some of the members told us, few new proposals emerged from the brief discussion.
“Both co-chairmen Frosina Remenski and Emilija Aleksandrova are on a business trip to Brussels. We decided to wait for them to return so that we can finalize the legal solution by finalizing the ideas,” Nola Ismailovska-Starova of the independent parliamentary group of VMRO-DPMNE told Nezavisen Vesnik yesterday.
According to unofficial information, yesterday there were new dilemmas about the legal qualifications that should be further considered in the parliamentary groups, before today’s, or possibly tomorrow’s new meeting of the Working Group.
Like it or not, it will have to end the process of “reconciliation” by January 9th, when Parliament Speaker Talat Xhaferi scheduled the session on amendments to the Constitution. According to him, the process should end by January 15th, when a two-thirds majority will be needed for this final phase.
For now, no one knows exactly how a clear legal distinction will be made between those who committed violence, and those who only took part in the events and “we’re caught up in the moment”. However, what’s clear, according to some legal experts, is that justice will be the sacrifice. The question is how big of a sacrifice it will be. Criminally legally treated, as the experts say, all those who entered the parliament have committed a criminal offense, but now the selectivity should move towards those who committed a crime for which there are real consequences, such as causing serious physical injuries, and some other crimes that are covered in the indictment.
Amnesty is not justice, participants of yesterday’s debate at the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities have also expressed this opinion, referring to the results of the polls in which the citizens in the majority are against amnesty for the so-called “bloody Thursday”.
Ex-MP and vice-president of SDSM, Gordan Georgiev, announced that the Institute is preparing a comprehensive analysis of the announced reconciliation process titled “How to reconcile without hatred”.
“We do not have great divisions in the society, it is assumed that large groups of citizens of the warring and polarized parties may not think they should reconcile,” Georgiev said, according to which the idea of the ruling elites is to present the amnesty as reconciliation.
(N.K.)