There cannot be amnesty for the “Fortress” case

Aleksandra M. Mitevska

The current ruling government has hit a “minefield”, set probably in the period before the outbreak of the political crisis in the country, given the information that the devices for wiretapping the PBX in the new public prosecutor’s office date back to the still inviolable rule of VMRO-DPMNE. More precisely, from the period before the opposition’s so-called “bombs” shook the foundation of the “fortress” of the then government, as was later called the case opened by the SPO for illegal wiretapping in the UBK and the destruction of the equipment used for that purpose.

In fact, many other political and corruption-criminal affairs came out of the “Fortress” case that surfaced from the footage of wiretapped conversations. There are several processes that are currently being conducted for these affairs at the Criminal Court in Skopje – the second address on which the devices for interception of communications were placed, as pointed out recently.

Perhaps after the “Target – Fortress” case has entered the Criminal Court and during the weekend, when the court was deciding whether the detention of the former director of the UBK, Saso Mijalkov, would be canceled for this case, so that he would be assigned another detention for one of the recent cases of the SPO – “Empire”. At that time, several hundred meters away – the Parliament counted votes for the support the draft amendments to the Constitution. The two-thirds majority that was hardly reached for the opening of the constitution has now dropped to sixty votes.

The MPs, who were instantly excluded from VMRO-DPMNE on October 19^th, at this stage of the constitutional changes, has fired backed for Mijalkov’s detentions, who, just like them, has earned a send-off by the opposition party. The express and extraordinary session of the working group on reconciliation, which followed immediately after the announcement that the independent parliamentary group would vote “abstain”, brought back the hope of a “happy” ending to the saga with the constitutional changes. Because the key mission of the newly formed Coordinative Body is a selective amnesty for the events in parliament on April 27 – as a kind of gesture for the approval of some of the MPs, which meanwhile, conditioned the process of changing the Constitution with “reconciliation and forgiveness.”

Devastating is the knowledge, which began to unfold as early as October 19^th, that the opposition MPs who supported the further implementation of the Prespa agreement did not do this because they believe that this document guarantees Macedonia’s accession into NATO and the EU as the only perspective for the country. But they have entered that story, most likely, only to avoid personal responsibility for their contribution to the “bloody Thursday” in parliament.

It is also devastating that the ruling party, in the inability to achieve political consensus for reaching the strategic goals of the state in a regular way, is forced into political bargaining. And in the form of amnesty for those who opened the parliamentary gates on April 27 2017, or whose voices echoed in the so-called “bombs” on Bihac Street.

In a situation where the main opposition party does not show constructiveness and flexibility in terms of key political processes in the country that lead to its Euro-Atlantic integration, consolation for the ruling government can only be the assurance that certain concessions must be made, and a certain political price paid in name of the greater goal. As long as those concessions do not go beyond April 27, and the red lines for which Prime Minister Zoran Zaev spoke of some time ago, which must not be crossed.
The new wiretapping scandals in the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Criminal Court, which erupted amid reforms of the security-intelligence system and the judiciary, are a warning that the political price would be too high if one even thinks of amnesty for the so-called “bombs”. Especially if it is proven that it is a recidivism from the previous “wiretapping affair”, which caused the political crisis in the country.