Terrorists released, no re-socialization program

Mullah Rexhep Memishi, who was also the teacher of the seven Macedonian citizens who were sent back to Macedonia last week, was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2016. For five years, a mullah from the Tutun Suz mosque in Skopje’s Cair will be released from prison and no one can guarantee that he is not going to recruit new fighters to travel to the war zones in Syria and Iraq.
Moreover, some of the convicts who received sentences of at least two years of imprisonment are already at the end of serving their sentences, or have already been released. The people remember the Skopje citizen Stefan Stefanovski who became Sufiyan by converting to Islam. Two years ago, he said before the court that  he did not feel guilty because they were also taught at medical faculty to help those who need help regardless of their faith. However, after that, he changed his mind and admitted his wrongdoing, after which he was sentenced to two years in prison. After he served his two year prison sentence, Stefanovski was released.
Although some of the convicts have already served their sentences, there are still no specific programs in the prisons throughout Macedonia to re-socialize returnees from wars that hypothetically killed people there, took part in terrorist attacks with which even the world’s largest military forces can not cope, and are faced with the latest challenge, terrorism.
The head of the Directorate for execution of sanctions, Jovica Stojanovic, expects the program for these people to be developed in the shortest time possible.
“We do not have specific programs for resocialization, but we have established working groups with the support of the Council of Europe with experts. We are working on finding the most adequate solution and programs for the de-radicalization of these individuals. I hope that we will develop a strategy to act on in the near future. Terrorism is still a new phenomenon in our prisons,” said Stojanovic.
There are 23 convicts in the Macedonian prisons for participation in a foreign army. A group of convicts prepared people who would go to participate in the fighting, another group provided cash and other support in a material sense, for persons to be prepared for a trip before and during their participation in a foreign army, while the third group participated in the fighting on the side of the Islamic State in Syria.
The first dozen people convicted of taking part in a foreign army, after this crime was introduced with the amendments to the Criminal Code, pleaded guilty before the court and received minimal prison sentences.
Sociologist Gjorgji Tonovski says that these people are not provided with special types of resocialization and that they are treated the same way as other convicts, with intensified supervision afterwards, while assessing whether they are ideologically and practically done with radicalism.
“They do not need to be separated in any way when it comes to re-socialization. They simply served the sentence, got the sanction from the community for what they did. The conclusion is that during the serving of the punishment they found their error, they went through the correctional facility and came out of there cleansed of sin in accordance with the standards prescribed by the society which it considers sufficient to overcome the consequences of their offense. Whether they succeeded or not, it is already a problem of the penitentiary correction institution,” says Tonovski.
According to him, these people present the same threat as the other criminals, which no one can guarantee that, after serving a prison sentence, for example, bank robbers will not continue to rob.
“After serving their prison sentences, these people are entering a surveillance system. For a number of prisoners, agents are tasked to monitor where they are, what they do, they care to provide them with a job or help them in their everyday life. This re-socialization is further connected with the reaction of the public, the people,” explains the sociologist Tonovski.
He recommends that the public should not make a big fuss about these people, because they all went there for some reason, whether it was money, drugs, or ideals. According to information from the security services, most of the Macedonian citizens went to Syria and Iraq to fight on the side of jihadists for some personal ideals.
However, according to their assessment, the situation in our country is peaceful and there are no terrorist threats. The possibilities of such endangerment exist as everywhere else, but at the moment there are no indicators of such a threat in the country, state the security services in the country. However, experiences from other European countries are not so appealing.
Macedonia is the first in Europe to transfer terrorists from Syria, although Syria has captured jihadists from both Germany and France. Security services sources argue that this is the safest step for the country as it is a controlled process.
The services in Macedonia estimate that the country has the capacity and can handle this burden because it is not a big number of jihadists, as is the case with some other European countries who refuse to accept repatriation due to the fact that the number of their citizens who fought in warzones in Syria and Iraq and are now captured, is а three-digit figure.

Frosina Fakova – Serafinovic