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Blerim Reka
The story of 10 years of the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA) resembles
the not fully-filled glass. For someone the glass is half full, for the others only half
empty. Similar evaluations have been noted for the process of the implementation
of the Ohrid Agreement during these ten years, as well.
The Diopter: black and white, was moving from one extreme to the other; or,
that the OFA is fully implemented (an opinion that still dominates with the
Macedonians); and the evaluation that this Agreement has not been implemented
at all (a stance of the Albanians).
I shall try, with no intention of taking the role of an arbiter between these
two ethnically divided perceptions, to provide facts about how much has the OFA
been implemented or not during this decade.
The initial and indisputable fact for a serious scientific analysis of OFA is the
following: the 7 year delay of the incomplete implementation of this Agreement.
As is already known, its implementing process should have been finalised by 2014,
while we are now entering the second half of 2011, and as seven more years have
passed, we are still confirming its incomplete implementation.
In order not to take sides, I will start my analysis with an official political
assessment of the EU, given by the Stabilisation Association Council in 2002,
which estimated the event of 2001 as: ”a very serious political crisis”. A year after
the signing of the OFA, the European Union was expecting the political elite of
the country to target causes of the outbreak of this serious political crisis and, on
the basis of a cold and objective reflection, to prevent the repetition of a new
crisis.
Thus, from the very beginning, the international community supported the
OFA as a new political philosophy, which should have inaugurated a new model
for the functioning of a multi-ethnic state.
But what really happened in the due course? To what extent was this
Agreement implemented, and where is the lack of implementation?
I will try to answer these questions by concentrating on 4 main directions:
The Ohrid Framework Agreement put an end to the conflict, but it did not
put an end to the sources of this conflict.
This peace Agreement preserved the sovereignty and territorial integrity of
Macedonia, but it did not preserve the national integrity of citizens who did not
belong to the majority.
The Ohrid Agreement excluded from consideration territorial solutions to
ethnic problems, but preserving the unitary character of the country was not
accompanied with the relevant implementation of measures by which all citizens
of this unitary country would be equally treated.
The war in Macedonia was the only case from the wars in the former
Yugoslavia which did not occur for territories, but for the status of state-building
and equal rights to all its citizens.
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