February 28, 2004
Crash
The President of Macedonia is dead. His plane crashed into the side of a mountain in Bosnia, where he'd been making a state visit.
I visited Macedonia a couple of years ago, and liked it a lot. Skopje, the capital, is an ugly little city -- it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1964, and rebuilt as a jarring combination of socialist blocks and Sixties modernist flying-toilet concrete fantasies. But the people were the friendliest and most pleasant in all the Balkans. And Albanians and Slavs were living side by side, if not in amity, then at least in glum mutual tolerance.
There's been plenty of violence in Macedonia, but it's never quite jumped the tracks. The country remains at peace, more or less, and one of Europe's best kept secrets -- the people are delightful, as noted, and once you get out of Skopje it has some of the most spectacular scenery in the region.
A Fistful of Euros has given a neat summary, with which I agree:
Throughout the recent Balkan wars, Macedonia was the shoe that stubbornly refused to fall. Wars in Bosnia, in Kosovo did not spread to Macedonia. The blockade imposed by Greece in the early years of independence did not rise to open conflict. Latent Bulgarian claims were amicable resolved. Chaos in Albania did not become contagion. Many reasons account for Macedonia's relative good fortune, and capable leadership is certainly one of them. Now the country's president has crashed into a hillside in Bosnia.At present, Macedonia is doing something that no state in Western Europe has managed: running a state while accommodating a minority population that is (estimates vary) between one quarter and one third of the total. Good luck to them, and I hope that Trajkovski's successor can stay the course.
Indeed.
Posted by claudia at February 28, 2004 10:25 AM