Report: Macedonian State TV Wages Hate Campaign

Ljube Boskoski

Macedonia's state owned public broadcaster, Macedonian Radio Television, MRTV is waging a hate campaign against the former Interior Minister and presidential candidate Ljube Boskoski, the country's Journalist’s Association has said.

The TV for several days in a row has broadcasted You Tube videos from Boskoski’s 2004 testimony in front of a Croatian court in the town of Pula in which Boskosi is reading a statement. It is not clear whether the statement is his or someone else's. In it he says that it was not him but the late President Boris Trajkovski who ordered Johan Tarculovski into the village of Ljuboten in the summer of 2001.

Tarulovski is currently serving 12 years after being found guilty by the International War Crimes Tribunal of war crimes in the village, were several civilians were killed. Boskoski has denied writing the statement. 

MRTV has advertised the You Tube videos as “the newest videos from Boskoski’s betrayal''. The TV claims Boskoski stitched-up his subordinate Tarculovski when he was head of the Interior Ministry in order to save himself from indictment.

ZNM’s Council of Honor says MRTV broke the principles of non biased reporting and “definitely made a professional capitulation”, by accusing him of betrayal based on a few dubious videos.

“The marking of ‘traitors’, using harsh propagandist rhetoric is not only unprofessional but is also dangerous because it ignites an atmosphere of violence,” ZNM said, asking the State Broadcasting Council to sanction the TV.

Boskoski says this is a deliberate set-up by his former party, the ruling centre right VMRO DPMNE.

In 2004 Boskoski was apprehended in Pula and later handed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY under charges of war crimes. 

Boskoski and his subordinate, the police commander Tarculovski were charged for attacking an ethnic Albanian village near the capital Skopje and killing civilians.

Last year Boskoski was acquitted from all responsibility, while Tarculovski got a 12 year jail sentence in The Hague for leading the police task force in the village.

In the run-up to presidential elections in March VMRO DPMNE refused to back Boskoski’s bid to run for president on the party’s ticket. However, even as an independent candidate, the former minister managed to garner 150,000 votes, many of which came from the traditional VMRO DPMNE support base.

Following the split, Boskoski quickly became a vocal critic of the Prime Minister and VMRO DPMNE head Nikola Gruevski, slamming him for stalling the country’s Euro-Atlantic progress.