Macedonian Connection

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Writing in Yes!, Search for Common Ground president John Marks and Eran Fraenkel, its Macedonia project director, note that the reconciliation efforts have taken many different forms. The group organized a cross-ethnic reporting team that published more than 60 articles simultaneously in the country’s Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, and Roma press. Meanwhile, young members of the same communities were the target audience for an eight-part television series co-produced with Children’s Television Workshop, the creator of Sesame Street. Called Nashe Maalo (Our Neighborhood), the series stars children from various ethnic groups who live in a talking apartment building that helps them resolve conflicts arising from cultural, gender, and language differences.

Search for Common Ground also opened three multiethnic kindergartens, called Mozaik, in Macedonia. Even as war raged next door in Kosovo, the parents of Mozaik students issued a press release declaring: "Mozaik is indispensable for promoting mutual respect and understanding among all people in Macedonia. We urge other parents to join us and to send their children to Mozaik."

Can peace actually prevail in this corner of a violent region?

Marks and Fraenkel suggest that Macedonians have heeded the bloodshed in other parts of the former Yugoslavia as a warning. "Macedonians of all ethnic groups, regardless of their mutual mistrust, recognize that everyone will suffer if their country follows the same path as their neighbors," they write.

That understanding has been reinforced over the past seven years by the international military units in Macedonia. United Nations peacekeepers began patrolling the country’s borders in 1993 and were replaced last year by a NATO-led contingent that now includes some 5,000 soldiers. "Macedonia can continue to be a good example for the Balkans," Macedonian prime minister Ljubco Georgievski told the Financial Times in March.

Others are not so sure. "Albanians and Macedonians barely coexist," Gilles de Rapper, a French anthropologist, tells G. Pascal Zachary in In These Times (July 11, 1999). But redrawing the region’s map won’t solve its ethnic problems. Encouraging the rule of law and respect for minorities within Slavic societies is viewed by influential Albanians as the only lasting guarantee of peace, writes Zachary.

Macedonia’s prime minister, meanwhile, regards integration with the European Union as an essential goal, according to the Financial Times. Many Macedonians believe that their future depends on increased aid from the United States, especially because the war against Serbia, a key trading partner, has brought economic growth in Macedonia to a standstill.

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