Orban should resign

Slobodanka Jovanovska
Editor in Chief of Nezavisen Vesnik

There is no one to resign in Macedonia for the major scandal that happened this week, Nikola Gruevski’s escape. Moreover, the way Prime Minister Zoran Zaev started with the excuses, the only one he would ask to resign would be Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Yesterday, Zaev gave a long explanation to journalists that everything was in accordance with the law, that Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski – whose name he did not even want to mention in order to avoid making even the smallest accusation against him – did everything according to the procedures, and now Viktor Orban is the one who should show that there was rule of law in Hungary! Looking for salvation in the procedures and in the strong desire to respect the laws reached such an absurdity that it would be best if the government closes itself in a library and read laws from dusk ‘till dawn, because reality in Macedonia requires much more than that.

What happened with Gruevski’s escape, it must be said, is an unseen embarrassment even for Macedonia, and something like this does even not happen to Pakistan, not to mention European countries. And the fact that a former prime minister, an authoritarian ruler, a criminal and a pathological liar fled with ease from the country, until recently was not sufficient reason for the ruling majority in parliament, at the price to be legally held accountable, to at least deprive him of the salary that Nikola Gruevski gets according to law and procedure, while seeking political asylum in another country. And let a pathologist criminal scream that he is a victim of political persecution, and by continuing to pay him salary the Parliament to give legitimacy to his parliamentary term and his complaints. Such a disintegration of the system in every way, and such absurd functioning of the legal state to the detriment of the rule of law itself is unlikely to exist in another country in Europe. And, still, the Prime Minister believes that he is fighting the corruption in Macedonia, and believes that the European Union will buy it. And that by this example, anyone would follow what our delegation in Brussels negotiates on the topic of rule of law, when each day reality delivers a political debacle.

Zaev and the ministers, above all, should remember on what agenda and with what kind of demands they came to power in Macedonia. That the fight against corruption was the main idea, and much later came the membership in NATO and the European Union. That in that struggle not only does not result, but from this perspective, all the processes conducted by the Special Public Prosecutor’s Office have now become absurd, and the very existence of this prosecutor’s office has become absurd. After all, why should we pay for some expensive institution whose defendants get pardoned or are fleeing the country? And, after all, what is the fight against corruption in which the brain of criminals, and possibly Gruevski’s escape from the state, Saso Mijalkov, is left, just like the ex-Prime Minister, with a very “strong” measure of protection – taking away their passports – when even the birds know that the Macedonian passport is one of the many he owns and that it is even easier for him than Gruevski to leave Macedonia. What kind of fight against corruption is this when there are no charges against Trajko Veljanovski and his role on April 27 after all those audio recordings of evidence, and is even allowed to irritate the publics by selling political morality in parliament.

Zaev and the ministers should leave the offices and hear what the public thinks about the way they allowed Gruevski to escape, and now they are running away from responsibility for it. That, for most, this is a poorly directed farce, an incompetence of the government, the functioning of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as in a bankruptcy procedure, a parody of action for the disclosure of the ex-prime minister and for the unreliable transfer of (non) responsibility from one institution to another institution. The public wants to know what is worse than this should happen, so that someone from the government would finally come out and resign moral reasons, however much he/she worked according to the Constitution and law. The fact that Gruevski laughed in our faces from Budapest, revealing his whereabouts on his own after the ridiculous police car search took place, not only did not diminish the confidence of the head of police Oliver Spasovski, but on the contrary – he is still ready to implement the rule of law in Macedonia so that he would just quote the law, until those who violate the laws and leave the country’s borders illegally feel ashamed one day and say – what kind of non-European criminals are we? Is this how one joins the EU and NATO?