Eurasia Press & News
North Macedonia’s former PM is entering into the crossfire of the bilateral historical dispute with neighbouring Bulgaria with dangerously high expectations on all sides.
t is his fate in life to enter wars after important battles have already been lost.” This was how one colleague journalist portrayed North Macedonia’s former prime minister Vlado Buckovski during the 2001 armed conflict with ethnic Albanians, when he headed the country’s defence ministry in the then coalition government.
He took the post in the later stages of the conflict when his party, the then opposition Social Democrats, joined a broad coalition government tasked with rescuing the country from deep crisis.
Since then, 19 years have passed, but Buckovski’s karma seems to have stayed the same.
Almost two decades on, he is again entering crossfire. This time the bullets are verbal – but the mines on the road are still dangerous.
Bulgaria is blocking the start of Skopje’s EU accession talks, accusing its neighbour of promoting “anti-Bulgarian propaganda” and of denying its Bulgarian roots.
Bulgarian historians in a joint history commission continue to dispute the adjective “Macedonian” used in North Macedonia’s history text books.
In this tense but absurd atmosphere, Buckovski is heading for Sofia as North Macedonia’s a new Special Representative to Bulgaria. The Bulgarian capital has long been a frequent destination of his, but so far the reasons for the trips were academic.
“Over the past four years, due to my professorial duties, I stayed in Sofia every month for a few days,” the Roman Law professor recalls.
Since 2005, he has been an honorary professor at the Bulgarian UniBIT university, while since 2016, he has been part of that university’s post-graduate studies.
One year before that, he started participating in the regional Jus Romanum project at Sofia’s St Clement of Ohrid University.
While his professorial work has led him to these two universities, from now on it will be a less easy ride.
The new addresses he is expected to be frequent are No 1 Knez Aleksandar Dondukov Nr. 1, the seat of the Bulgarian government, and No 2 Aleksandar Zhendov, the seat of the Foreign Ministry.
Buckovski is aware that the obstacles between Skopje and Sofia are not small. Buckovski has been given a one-year term to complete his task, described as one of “shuttle diplomacy”.
“I will constantly be on the route between Skopje and Sofia and vice versa. I will also be responsible for coordinating the implementation of the action plans in the field of infrastructure, joint capital projects, education and culture that stem from the 2017 Friendship Agreement,” Buckovski told BIRN, while completing his preparations for his first meetings with his interlocutors.
Weighty politician – but with a troubled past
The idea of appointing a special representative was a sign of Skopje’s wish to demonstrate a strong commitment to resolving the current disputes between the two countries.
It also had to find someone who knows bilateral relations inside out, and whose voice will be heard in Bulgaria.
The Roman Law professor with a strong political biography, who was Prime Minister from 2004 to 2006 as well as Defence Minister in two terms, was seen as someone with the right political weight.
This was even more so because, during his term as prime minister, in 2005, North Macedonia received EU candidate country status.
The vocabulary of this former defence minister, moreover, never featured the sound of rattling sabres. He is seen as a dynamic but non-conflictual man who prefers talking about friendship, understanding and integration.
That was one side of the coin. The other side, which the opposition right-wing VMRO DPMNE party has focused on since his appointment, is linked to controversies including allegations of crime.
In 2013, Buckovski was at the centre of a high-profile affair dubbed “Tank parts”. He was sentenced to three years in jail by a first instance court for misusing state funds while buying spare parts for army tanks during the 2001 conflict. He denied the charges.
He never served jail time. After appealing the sentence, and after many legal moves, the case became out-dated in 2019.
Another affair that never saw a legal conclusion in court was the “Telecom Bribery” case.
In this, Buckovski’s name was unofficially mentioned as one of the politicians who allegedly received a bribe from Hungary’s Magyar Telekom, in exchange for Macedonia delaying the entry of competitors onto the mobile phone market in Macedonia in 2005 – when Buckovski was PM. Buckovski again denied the claims.
Buckovski was also accused of involvement in the 2006 “Bacilo” [Sheepfold] affair, in which a shepherd, Isnifaris Xhemaili, duped the Defence Ministry into paying him damages of 730,000 euros for the alleged army bombing of his herd during the 2001 conflict.
While this claim was later deemed false, Buskovski was accused of letting, or deliberately allowing, the attempted fraud to pass in the first place.
Having this in mind, the opposition now claims North Macedonia’s Prime Minister Zoran Zaev has found in Buckovski someone very similar to him – that is, a corrupt figure. They have dubbed Zaev and Buckovski the “Sticky Fingers Tandem”.
This was despite the fact that, before his latest appointment, Buckovski frequently presented his views on current matters in public, with no one questioning his moral right to do so.
In Buckovski’s appointment, the opposition also sees a carefully selected potential “victim” who can take the blame for the defeat of Zaev’s policies when it comes to Bulgaria – policies that VMRO DPMNE deems treasonous.
A consistent advocate of friendship
Between these two sides of the coin, it cannot be overlooked that in the chronology of attempts to break the ice with Bulgaria – and having in mind that the first bilateral friendship declaration signed in 1999 has mainly stayed a dead letter – Buckosvski has created the aura of an academic and politician who can openly discuss the problems between the two countries, free from the usual stereotypes.
Some 14 years ago, Buckovski openly advocated a joint Macedonian-Bulgarian celebration of the “Ilinden [St Elijah’s day] Uprising” of 1903 against the then Ottoman rulers of Macedonia.
That idea drew strong reactions in the country, because it happened when, for several years in a row, Macedonians attending the commemoration of Ilinden rebel Jane Sandanski’s death in Bulgaria had met provocations.
They were greeted in front of Sandanski’s grave with a Bulgarian flag, a banner reading: “Macedonia is Bulgarian” and various other slogans. Due to these incidents, in 2006 the Bulgarian Ambassador to Skopje, Miho Mihov, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry.
The Ilinden Uprising of August 1903, which resulted in the formation of a short-lived republic in today’s North Macedonia, the Krushevo Republic, is celebrated in both North Macedonia and in Bulgaria as a national holiday.
However, Bulgaria insists that Ilinden fighters like Jane Sandanski and Goce Delcev had a Bulgarian, not a Macedonian, identity and must be viewed as such.
In the years that followed, the governments in Skopje led by former VMRO DPMNE chief Nikola Gruevski, who replaced Buckosvki in 2006, made no attempt to relax the situation.
Buckovski, however, continued to uphold the flame of good neighbourliness, and gave many statements in which he defended that goal.
Today, he has no secret formula to persuade Sofia to open up North Macedonia’s EU integration path.
However, as Prime Minister, and during his later teaching engagements in Sofia, he has gained a circle of friends in Bulgaria who have significant influence in its society.
“I have intense communication with the former Bulgarian Prime Minister, Simeon Saxe-Coburg and with the former Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev. We are family friends with the former Defence Minister Boyko Noev and former Bulgarian speaker and Interior Minister, Mikhail Mikov,” Buckovski notes.
They are not his only friends in Sofia. But private life is not identical with the sphere of the state, and Buckovski, who until recently was often present in the media in both countries, will now have to “tone things down” in the interests of the process.
As he himself put it: “It is better when there is silence, so that we can reach the desired solution.”
And since the opposition wants to know what is being discussed with Sofia, we may assume that after Zaev, Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani and EU affairs Minister Nikola Dimitrov, Buckovski will likely become the next “punch bag” for the opposition – on the receiving end of its dissatisfaction with the current bilateral talks.
Buckovski will have to deal with the dissatisfaction also produced by the clogged communications between the opposition and government in North Macedonia, aggravated by the latter’s refusal to meet opposition demands for a summit of party leaders on Bulgaria.
Lingering ill will over memories of World War II
The political terrain in neighbouring Bulgaria is equally tough.
Two days before his appointment as special envoy, in an article for Bulgaria’s BGNES, Ivan Nikolov, editor-in-chief of Bulgaria-Macedonia magazine and director of a publishing house, criticized Buckovski’s views on the anti-Fascist movement in World War II in Macedonia and Bulgaria.
Replying to Buckovski, he said that ASNOM, the Anti-Fascist Assembly of the People’s Liberation of Macedonia which formed the de-facto first Macedonian government from 1944-45, faked a connection with the historic Ilinden rising, “so that the people [in Macedonia] would be deceived that true freedom was coming to Macedonia.”
Describing the mindset in today’s Republic of North Macedonia as “a lake frozen by decades of ice”, and referring to the statements of Buckovski, he said these only “suggest that this ice has begun to melt and barely noticeable drops of water shine above the ice cover. However, the ice is still very thick”.
Bulgaria objects to the claim that it was a Fascist occupying force in Macedonia in World War II and insists that this idea is hate speech.
In 1941, the then kingdom joined the Axis powers, and as such was given much of today’s North Macedonia, which it had long claimed as Bulgarian territory.
As the Soviet Red Army got close to its borders, in September 1944, Bulgaria switched sides and joined the Allies.
But while the former occupying Bulgarian troops that switched sides participated in the later stages of the liberation of Macedonia and Serbia, the fight in Macedonia was spearheaded by the Macedonian Partisans who then formed part of the Yugoslav Partisan movement that later formed the new Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia.
Amid these and other disputed views on history, Buckovski risks being “crucified” by the more sensitive elements of the Macedonian public, who will see the talks with Bulgaria as a threat to their identity – while the Bulgarian public will expect unreserved understanding of their own historical “canons”.
In decision-making circles in Bulgaria, there are no visible nuances from the narrative of Bulgaria’s Defence Minister, Krasimir Karakachanov, who is seen as a Bulgarian hard-liner.
The views of some of Buckovski’s friends are not much milder. That is especially true of the Bulgarian establishment historians, whose catchphrase is that their history has been stolen by the Macedonian side.
To make matters more difficult, this moment is also seen in Bulgaria as time to compensate Bulgaria for what it lost or failed to gain in relation to Serbia, after it gave Serbia’s EU membership unconditional and unreserved support – only later to complain that the Bulgarian minority there was being “subject to systematic national assimilation/Serbianisation”.
It is easy to assume that Bulgaria won’t wish to repeat that mistake in the case of North Macedonia.
The obstacles before the newly appointed envoy seem so high that it seems unlikely that any step can be taken without the help of political-expert logistics from the current strategic facilitators of the talks between the two countries.
In one interview with Bulgarian media, Buckovski drew a red line: “Anyone who tries to endanger our language and Macedonian identity, including in Bulgaria, is opposed to the reconciliation between our two fraternal peoples.”
This is the position from which he now starts his talks. He is heading to Bulgaria with goodwill – and certainly not in the spirit of the epic Spartan refrain, risking all to return “with his shield – or on it”.
