The liberation of Skopje along Adem Demaci Street: Kurti against the Second Macedonian Strike Brigade

Kurti's visit to Skopje and Tetovo, the renaming of a street in the suburbs of Skopje, and the presentation of a plan for a road over the Sar Mountains turned into an international political scandal, with possible regional consequences. In a country that, as the Western media likes to say, is considered an example of multi-ethnicity in the Balkans, communism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism have been discussed for days.

Marching music and folk songs are thundering and screams and ecstasy of joy echo. Immovable fresco. Liberators in silent, motionless embraces with families, friends, acquaintances... You don't know who is looking for whom, who is avoiding whom, who hasn’t found the right one, and who misses whom. And who is afraid. That's how the morning turned into the evening..."

As Dusan Jovanovic wrote in the play The Liberation of Skopje, the renaming of a street in the suburbs of Skopje and the presentation of a road plan over Sar Mountains turned into an international political scandal, with possible regional consequences. In a country that, as the Western media likes to say, is considered an example of multi-ethnicity in the Balkans, communism, ethnocentrism, and nationalism have been discussed for days.

Almost 80 years after the end of the Second World War, the liberators of Skopje were left without a street, because the alley in the Chair neighborhood, which until mid-August was known as the Street of the Second Macedonian Strike Brigade, was renamed the Street of Adem Demaci, a Kosovar politician, dissident, political prisoner, the would-be political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army and a fierce critic of all the regimes he lived under, including the international community.

For a short time, Demaci lived in Skopje, which led local officials to the conclusion that that period should be marked more significantly and a street in Skopje should be named after him. Thus, in this Skopje settlement, Demaci joined John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Kemal Atatürk, whose names are written on the boards of the buildings surrounding the sports center of the great wrestler, Olympic champion Saban Trstena.

Marching music and folk songs are thundering

In honor of his political mentor, Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti also appeared in the suburbs of Skopje, allegedly without the knowledge of the Macedonian authorities and in violation of protocol. The "triumph of freedom", as Kurti called the naming of the street after Demaci, did not cause excessive reactions, until, a little later, the flag of "ethnic Albania" - Shqiperia Etnike - appeared in Tetovo.

A black flag on which, along with the figures of Isa Boletini, the leader of the uprisings against the Turks, Serbs, and Montenegrins, and the first Albanian Prime Minister Ismail Qemali, and a map of the territories claimed by the Albanians, which includes parts of Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, and Montenegro, appeared in the middle of the audience at a ceremony held in Kurti's honor.

On the square in Tetovo, where the Albanian rebellion started a little more than 22 years ago, which almost pushed Macedonia at the time into a civil war, the Prime Minister of Kosovo said that North Macedonia should move closer to Kosovo, Albania and Bulgaria and away from Serbia and several others things about the importance of the road between Tetovo and Prizren, due to the construction of which the road to Western Macedonia came about.

"We have said several times that in heaven it seems that Prizren and Tetovo were one city, but God brought down the Sar Mountains to earth, which separated them and made them two cities - Prizren and Tetovo," Kurti said.

People in the audience waved Albanian flags, while standing side by side with Kurti were representatives of Macedonian Albanians, with the intention on shaking the two-decade primacy of the Democratic Union of the Albanians and the leader of that party, Ali Ahmeti, in the next elections in North Macedonia.

The flag of "ethnic Albania", whose owner is now being sought by the Macedonian police, was first presented to the general public by Ismail Morina at the chaotic Belgrade match between Serbia and Albania in 2014. After that, Morina was declared unwelcome at sports events, and he was arrested by the Albanians, the Croats, and finally the Italians.

This flag, on the other hand, has since been widely accepted and has become a part of the scenography whenever anyone wants to emphasize their Albanian origin - from cafe owners, through those who stuck flags on the hoods of cars, all the way to Dua Lipa, who protested with this sign because "Apple", a few years ago, at the marking of the borders of the Balkan countries held to the Resolution 1244 of the UN Security Council.

Liberators in silent, motionless embraces with their families

The issue of Demaci Street was resolved two years ago. The Macedonian Government, headed by Zoran Zaev at the time, approved the renaming of several streets in Skopje, so, apart from the Kosovar dissident, such an honor was given to one of the greatest actors from the area of the former Yugoslavia, Bekim Fehmiu from Prizren, then Gonxha Bojaxhiu from Skopje. who later became world famous as Mother Teresa, and finally the former leader of the Kosovo Albanians, Ibrahim Rugova.

Only the weak Macedonian Left stood up decisively against changing the name of the street, accusing the Government of trying to revise history, considering that during the Second World War, more than 300 members of the Second Macedonian Strike Brigade died, mostly on the Srem Front in 1944. As a sign of protest, posters with the names of the martyred fighters of that unit were pasted in the center of Skopje.

Subsequently, after the meeting in Tetovo, the largest Macedonian party, VMRO-DPMNE, joined the condemnations, whose spokesperson Naum Spasovski accused the ruling Social Democrats of " being behind all the shame and humiliation that Macedonia is facing".

Prime Minister Dimitar Kovacevski tried to make the situation better, warning the leaders of the Chair municipality that if they really wanted to name a street after Demaci, they should have built it first. His cabinet assessed that the event in Tetovo and the highlighting of landmarks such as could be seen during Kurti's visit were "against the protocols and laws" related to the visits of foreign statesmen, leaving the police to identify the culprits and shed light on the case.

"This kind of iconography, in the presence of a high representative of a foreign state, is without a doubt unacceptable in a country that is a member of the United Nations and NATO," the cabinet of the Macedonian Prime Minister stated.

Later, the major of Skopje also got involved in the confusion, an independent politician with the support of VMRO-DPMNE, Danela Arsovska, submitted an initiative to urgently take away the street from Demaci and return the signs with the name of the Second Macedonian Strike Brigade.

President Stevo Pendarovski also requested an urgent investigation, and the police immediately wrote several misdemeanor reports to the mayors of Chair and Tetovo, Visar Ganiu, and Bilal Kasami.

"During the manifestation, the national anthem was not sung and the flag of the Republic of North Macedonia was not displayed, thus committing a violation under Article 30 of the Law on the Use of the Flag, Anthem, and Coat of Arms of the Republic of North Macedonia," the police announced.

It is not known who is looking for whom and who is avoiding whom

The person who waved the flag of "ethnic Albania" is still being sought.

The Kosovo Ambassador in Skopje, Florian Qehaja, was found and handed a protest about the events in Tetovo, after which the President of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, spoke up, calling the whole performance "a big misunderstanding", stressing that with a little goodwill, all problems could be solved.

The police search, however, did not prevent political representatives of the Macedonian Albanians from lashing out at Government officials in Skopje, accusing them of Albanophobia, cooperation with the Serbian authorities, and a return to communism.

Former Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha also tried to use the opportunity to escape from anonymity, accompanying the events in North Macedonia with a tirade about the "trilateral alliance of Tirana, Skopje, and Belgrade", "Russian projects" and "anti-historic reconciliations". Berisha, who less than a year ago announced a lawsuit against US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, adding him, "out of the blue", to the list of opponents of the development of democracy, supported Kurti and his "resistance to the Serbian-Russian Open Balkan project".

Even more harsh was Blerim Sejdiu, the second man of the Albanian party Besa, who called the reaction of the Macedonian institutions hysterical and supplemented with "a dose of ethnocentrism".

"As the hosts, we are not responsible for what happened in the audience," Sejdiu said, accusing the highest authorities in North Macedonia of nationalism. "The Macedonian Government, fearing the mobilization of Albanians, has returned to the patterns of the hidden communist ideology between Skopje and Belgrade," Sejdiu said, whose party, in cooperation with several other Albanian parties, is trying to take primacy among Albanian voters from Ahmeti's Democratic Union for Integration.

Who hasn’t found the right one and who misses whom

Tensions on the Albanian political scene were raised mainly because Kurti recently supported an alliance of parties which, for now, presents itself as the Front of the United Opposition, which is made up of several smaller parties of Macedonian Albanians and several "renegades" from Ahmeti's party.

For more than two decades, as long as Ahmeti has been in coalitions with Macedonian Social Democrats or VMRO-DPMNE, there have been unsuccessful attempts by political rivals to remove him from the position of the most influential Albanian politician in North Macedonia. Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM), headed by Zoran Zaev, came closest to that goal in 2016, which owes a significant part of its victory over Nikola Gruevski to the votes of around 80,000 Albanians, the new voters of the Social Democrats. In this way, SDSM became the second strongest Albanian party in Macedonia, right after the Democratic Union for Integration, for which barely forty more voters voted. Macedonian analysts explained the unexpected development of the situation as the fatigue of the Albanian voters and a series of disappointments and corruption scandals that their leaders had showered them with.

DUI officials did not appear at the ceremony in Tetovo, who, including Ahmeti, joined the silent boycott of the Kosovo Prime Minister, whose ideological leader is, for many reasons, the first man of the Albanian government, Edi Rama. Kurti's support for Ahmeti's rivals, they say in Skopje, can also be interpreted as a desire to expand his "Self-Determination" project after the failure in Albania to North Macedonia, whose Albanian part of the electorate is hungry for fresh options.

Kurti's rival, on the other hand, the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, warned the Albanians in North Macedonia not to trust the first man of the Government in Pristina. "Since he can no longer lie to the people of Kosovo, he has come to lie to you. He tried the same in Albania," Haradinaj claims.

As for the name of the street, it will be decided between the Kosovar dissident and the Macedonian partisans at the session of the Skopje parliament announced for August 31. Posthumously, Demaci will be one of the first items on the agenda. Or, as he described it to me twenty years ago, "In this part of the Balkans, everyone behaves like bulls in a china shop, including us, and surprisingly the international community as well".

By: Rade Maroevic, journalist