The Risk of War: Everyday Sociality in the Republic of Macedonia

1. Critical Events

chapter 1 Critical Events The 2001 armed conflict did not mark the first time that post-independence Macedonia and its people were confronted with high political instability, deriving from Macedonian and Albanian political struggles over the distribution of power in Macedonian society. During the 1990s, a series of critical events (in Veena Das’s use of the term; see 1995: 6), which disrupted everyday life and brought about new modes of sociopolitical action, took place. In what follows, I identify these key events and discuss each one of them as politically organized attempts to (re)define the categories and meanings of membership in post-1991 Macedonia: the 1991 Albanian boycott of the population census in Yugoslavia; the boycott of the referendum on Macedonian independence; the 1992 conduct among the Albanian community of a referendum on the political and territorial autonomy of Albanians in Macedonia ; the 1992 deadly shooting in Bit Pazar; the 1994 extraordinary census; the 1994 public opening of the Albanian-speaking Tetovo University; and, the 1997 demonstrations in Gostivar. Before delving into the main discussion, I first need to address sociopolitical developments during the socialist period, which set the stage for critical events to unfold in Macedonia after the dissolution of federal Yugoslavia. The Socialist Period The People’s Republic of Macedonia (proclaimed the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in the 1974 Constitution) was one of the smallest and most multiethnic republics of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. According to the 1971 census (see Friedman 1996: 90), it had 1,647,308 inhabitants: 69.3 percent Macedonians, 17 percent Albanians, 6.6 percent Turks, 2.8 percent 16 Chapter 1 Serbs, 1.5 percent Roms, 0.6 percent Vlahs, 0.2 Bulgarians, 0.2 percent Yugoslav , 0.1 percent Muslims, and 1.7 percent “other” (for the disconnect between declared nationality and declared mother tongue, see Friedman 2003). Importantly, Macedonia played a marginal role or, as Rossos puts it, was a “junior partner” (2008: 235) in the Yugoslav federation: it was economically underdeveloped and the poorest republic of all, largely rural, and lacked strong political leadership that could lobby for Macedonian national interests , such as the establishment of a Macedonian national church and the protection of Macedonians’ rights in Greece and Bulgaria, or influence government policy.1 External pressures, too, encouraged and sustained a climate of insecurity in socialist Macedonia: Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece continued a long tradition , firmly rooted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see, for example, Brown 2003; Irvine and Gal 2000; Wilkinson 1951), of advancing competing nationalist claims and denying the existence of the Macedonian language, church and identity, respectively. More specifically, Bulgaria continued to dispute the existence of the Macedonian language and view it as a “degenerate dialect” of Bulgarian (Friedman 1985: 34) as evidenced in The Unity of the Bulgarian Language in the Past and Today, originally published in Bulgarian in 1978 and translated and circulated as an off-print in English, French, German, and Russian by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (1980). Moreover, the Serbian patriarchate denied the existence of the Macedonian Orthodox Church after the Macedonian clergy proclaimed the Church’s autocephaly on 18 July 1967. Although the Communist government continuously urged the two national churches to settle their dispute and thus help diffuse political tensions between Serbia and Macedonia, the Serbian Church has been unwilling to revise its stance, arguing that the Macedonian Orthodox Church has not emerged in compliance with ecclesiastical rules, that is, from agreement among all Orthodox churches (see also Risteski 2009). As Brown notes (1998: 75), the refusal of the Serbian Orthodox Church to recognize the Macedonian one implies a dispute over the disposition of church property in Macedonia prior to 1967, when—between 1919 and 1941—Serbia controlled the territorial area where present-day Macedonia lies. Furthermore, denying the multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism of the northern Greek province of Macedonia (see Karakasidou 1993, 1997; see also Rossos 1991), the Greek state launched systematic efforts to undermine a separate Macedonian identity and develop a Macedonian cultural identity that was fundamentally Greek in character (see Mackridge and Yannakakis 1997). As a result, many Macedonian speakers who lived in Greece’s northern province of Macedonia Critical Events 17 fled, or were expelled from, Greece during the Greek Civil War (1946–49) and moved into refugee camps and orphanages before setting up homes across eastern Europe (see Monova 2002a). These political refugees, widely...