Skopje Incident Stirs Ethic Tension

The ethnic Albanian boy was injured after a group of some 30 masked hooligans carrying emblems of the Skopje football club “Vardar” started throwing stone blocks and metal bars at the people gathered at the ice skating rink in the square.

“We are working to identify all of the perpetrators,” police spokesman Ivo Kotevski said on Sunday, explaining that several “Vardar” fans dubbed “Komiti” had been brought in for questioning.

According to witnesses the incident started without any obvious reason. This provoked reactions from political parties and NGOs, which voiced suspicions that the violence was ethnically motivated. The government has been criticised in the past for not aggressively going after prepetrators of ethnically motivated violence.

“We wonder where the fan club “Komiti” gets such strength and support to spill its anger on Skopje’s Albanians for the second time in a short period,” the junior ruling party, the ethnic Albanian Democratic Union for Integration, DUI said, arguing that the conduct of these football fans borders on fascism.

Last year in August Vardar football supporters clashed with the ethnic Albanian residents of Skopje’s Nerezi neighbourhood. Several of the fans were later charged for causing unrest.

The leader of the opposition ethnic Albanian party New Democracy, Imer Selmani, argued that this and previous incidents were part of a scenario of the main ruling centre-right party VMRO DPMNE.

They say that the government is directly sending a message to Albanians that “they are not welcome in the centre of the capital”.

The main opposition party, the Social Democrats, said that the incident was orchestrated to raise ethnic tensions in order to deter the public’s attention from real problems like the economic situation and the unresolved name spat with neighboring Greece.

The prime minister and head of the VMRO DPMNE, Nikola Gruevski, said the incident is not ethnically or politically motivated.

“Fights between groups of young people can happen in any state and it is up to the authorities to find them and punish them so it won’t happen again,” Gruevski noted.

The ethnic Albanian NGO “Razbudi Se” accused the authorities of trying to force Albanians to leave Skopje and urged them to stop with their “devilish intentions” and “animalistic methods”.

The fan club “Komiti” rebuffed accusations that they were behind the incident, arguing that they cannot be blamed for the acts of individuals.

One quarter of Macedonia’s residents are ethnic Albanians. In 2001 the country suffered a short-lived armed conflict between ethnic Albanian insurgents and state security forces. The clash ended the same year with the signing of the Ohrid Peace Accord, which envisaged greater rights for the Albanian community.

However, after the VMRO DPMNE came to power in 2006, ethnic Albanians have slammed several government projects as being bad for the ethnic cohesion.

Last year’s controversial state-funded Macedonian Encyclopaedia, and the recently revealed state plan for the revamp of Skopje’s downtown were among those criticised for presenting a monoethnic representation of the state which favoured the Macedonian majority and neglected the interests of the Albanians.