Conclusion: Sigh of Relief or Democracy’s Last Gasp?

The New World Order’s loyal chorus let out a sigh of relief.[1] On the day after the vote, Reuters declared, "Macedonia was a rung higher on the ladder to EU and NATO… Nudged by Washington and cajoled by Brussels, most Macedonians stayed away from the polls on a rainy Sunday, dooming what the West had viewed as a retrograde step.,"[2] The result of the referendum confirmed the tribal totalitarianism of the Albanian community in Macedonia. Whereas the ethnic Macedonian population was divided roughly in to two halves, one voting the other boycotting, the Albanians of Macedonia acted as one conformist bloc. Civil society with its pluralism and inherent splits across ethnic and religious lines seems as far away from Macedonia’s Albanians as ever. It was only in Albanian-controlled villages like Kundovo that armed men appeared on the streets to enforce the boycott and offer a picture of what Albanian-controlled municipalities are like. Yet the archetypical “open societies” of the West applauded the lock-step mentality of Macedonia’s Albanians as a key factor in determining the country’s suitability for Euro-Atlantic integration!
Macedonia’s civic society died when an alien-ordered boycott determined the outcome of a constitutionally valid referendum. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the issue on the ballot paper, in any normal democracy it would have been defeated by voters expressing their views in the ballot booth, not by pressure to toe a public line by demonstrably not going to the polls. The secret ballot protects the rights of all citizens. Demands by the powerful that citizens stay away from the polls are an order to the little man and women to make their preference public. It is a disgrace that ministers from NATO and the EU’s supposed model democracies backed the suppression of the secret ballot in favour of public demonstrations of fealty.
The fact that a key campaigner for the boycott, Prime Minister, Hari Kostov, resigned only one week later saying that economic reform was thwarted by the “corruption and nepotism” of one of his coalition partners – universally read as DUI – shows how irrelevant to any real improvement in conditions for ordinary people the re-districting issue is.[3]
Both NATO and EU enlargement are more and more including corrupt, mafia-ridden bogus democracies into their midst. The post-Cold War security architecture of Europe resembles a protection racket rather than a community of democratic societies. The new mafia’s media loyalists shout down any dissent and down out alternative information about the reality of the process under way in the Balkans. Soon enough Old Europe will realize what kind of states are sitting at the high table in Brussels with it, determining our common fate.

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[1] For ToL’s predictable response, see Biljana Stavrova and Robert Alagjozovski, “Macedonia: A Sigh of Relief: Plans for increased local autonomy are on track after a referendum fails” @ http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/section.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=75&NrSection=1,
[2] Quoted at http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/nov04/hed6783.shtml,
[3] For Kostov’s resignation, see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4013467.stm.