Pollution Website Closure Worries Macedonian Greens

Skopje

The page called “Skopje Dishe” (Skopje Breathes) has been down for a month, raising suspicions among Green groups that it was deliberately shut to stop the public from obtaining information about pollution levels.

“There is no justification for the site staying down for so long,” Biljana Dukovska, project manager at the Skopje-based NGO, Griner, told Balkan Insight.

“We urge the city to put back the site as soon as possible,” Dikovska said.

The city hall turned off the page in early June some months after a smog crisis it in the capital the previous December. The page then revealed an alarming level of air pollution.
 
The official explanation for the closure of the site remains technical difficulties.

“We still have problems with connecting the measurement instruments to the web page but we are working on it,” Cvetanka Ikonomova, head of the ecology sector at city hall, said.

She said that the page was not deliberately killed off.

“The city introduced this page last autumn to allow Skopje residents to have a daily idea of the quality of the air they breathe. Why would we silence it?” she asked.

Ecological activists are not convinced.

“As soon as people got the taste of it, they [the officials] got scared,” Facebook user Liliana 2000 noted in a post for one Green group.
 
“The money from the big polluters has silenced them [city authorities],” another Facebook user wrote.

In December air pollution levels in Skopje, according to the web page, reached 360 index points. Judging by European air quality standards this was seven times normal levels.

The news caused widespread alarm, prompting the authorities to advise people to stay home and reduce their activities.