Macedonia NGO Awarded For Bridging Ethnic Divide

Photo by: NDC Skopje

The award, along with the prize money of €50,000, will be presented at a ceremony on Monday in The Hague, the OSCE’s High Commissioner on National Minorities, announced on Friday.

The award is presented every two years to a person, group or institution for extraordinary and outstanding achievements in improving the position of national minorities in any of the OSCE participating states.

Nansen Dialogue Skopje, established in 2000 as part of the Nansen Dialogue Network, was particularly praised for taking up the challenge of bringing together students, parents and teachers from areas caught up in Macedonia's ethnic conflict in 2001.

Macedonia suffered a short-lived armed conflict that year between ethnic Albanian rebels and the security forces.

The conflict ended that year with the signing of the Ohrid Peace Deal, an internationally brokered accord guaranteeing greater rights to the Albanians who make up about a quarter of the population of 2.1 million.

But ethnic divisions in Macedonia remain strong and are particularly pronounced in the education system in which there is little or no contact between ethnic Macedonian and Albanian students.

In 2005, Nansen Dialogue initiated a programme on “Dialogue and Reconciliation” in Macedonia’s north-western municipality of Jegunovce. This led to opening of the first Integrated Bilingual Primary School in that municipality in 2008.

Since then, its integrated education model, the so-called “Nansen Model”, has been extended to primary and secondary schools in other municipalities across the country.

The award, established by the Dutch Foreign Ministry in 2001 honours the late Max van der Stoel, a Dutch statesman and former foreign minister.

Van der Stoel was credited with helping greatly to improve Albanian language higher education in Macedonia in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2001 he helped set up the first legal Albanian language university in Macedonia, the University of South Eastern Europe, in Tetovo.

Van der Stoel died in April this year at age 86.