Macedonia and Kosovo After the Military Operations

 

by Antonina Zhelyazkova Translated from Bulgarian by Violeta Angelova  

I. Approaches to the research and methodology

II. Social specifications of the respondents
1. Albanian refugees in the camps and in the private houses in Tetovo
2. Albanians in Macedonia and Albanians in Albania. Their social relations with the Kosovars
3. The Macedonians

III. Psychological portraits of different ethnic and social levels
1. Albanian refugees in the camps and in the houses of Tetovo
2. Macedonians and Macedonian society as a whole

Conclusion


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II. Social specifications of the respondents

3. The Macedonians
The Macedonian respondents represent different social strata, i.e. governing bodies, politicians, scholars, intellectuals, hired workers, drivers, tradesmen.

According to their present social characteristics the Macedonians resemble, to a certain extent, the Bulgarians, i.e. high level of unemployment, the prevailing part of the population is poor living on the edge of the social minimum, the intelligentsia is also poor without any self-confidence, there is no finesse among politicians. The political elite in Macedonia very much reminds one of the Bulgarian opposition politicians at the beginning of the democratic reforms in 1990-1991.

The problems facing the state budget due to the refugees’ admittance is quite obvious. Ministries that are not of vital importance at the moment (e.g. the Ministries of Culture, Education, etc.) are functioning with a minimum budget and have practically stopped all activities, except for the most important ones. A respondent mentioned that some of these more peripheral ministries receive at the moment no more than 25-28% of their annual budget, hardly covering the staff salaries.

The Macedonian respondents very often, though unwillingly, make a comparison of their social and economical status with the one of the local Albanians and the result is not in their favor. This can be seen, by the way, when comparing the two markets in Skopie: the Albanian old market and the public market of Skopie.  The first one is clean and well arranged with many shops, boutiques, small restaurants and cafés. A kind of renaissance and cozy atmosphere is reigning there. The public market resembles a bazaar with Turkish goods. There is no atmosphere, no order, everything is chaotic.
Obviously, the Albanians are richer, their inner solidarity and the support they receive from their relatives from Western Europe probably contributing to this. In the town of Tetovo, for example (about 78,000 people), consumption has doubled because of the necessity to feed and dress thousands of refugees. This, of course, has strengthened the Albanian businesses.

One can feel the liveliness among the Albanians in Macedonia after the war in anticipation of starting an active business with independent Kosovo and the contrasting feeling of economic despondency that reigns among the Macedonians.

The taxi-drivers guild who earn their living running the risk to drive foreign journalists, humanitarian officers and all other observers to and from Kosovo, considers that this is their chance to accumulate money for their families before the deep economic crisis that is to follow the foreigners' departure. Some of them mentioned, by the way, that they would try to reorient their business to transporting fuel to Kosovo, which also gives promise for good profits. In a word, there is a sort of striving towards some kind of economic survival among the Macedonians through trade or semi-legal business in the post-war situation but this concerns a small strata of the population.

One gets the impression that there are a lot of families where only one of the work-able family members has a permanent job; this should not be taken as the rule given in the small sample.

A Macedonian woman coming from a native Skopie family, after complaining that only she had a permanent job as her husband was unemployed, her daughter, too and her son worked from time to time taking whatever comes, concluded, “The Albanians in Macedonia are doing well, they earn much more than us. So it is quite normal that I am afraid that the refugees could remain here, and let them not increase in number”. The same woman told us that she was living next to houses inhabited by Albanian families. To our question how they were living and whether their way of life strongly differed, she answered shrugging her shoulders, “I do not know, they are reticent people, we, too. We do not communicate, I do not know how they live but I know that they are rich”.

5^th July, 1999
Sofia