Albanian factions clashed in a chilling reminder of the country's inter-ethnic fragility.
To add to Macedonia's precarious standing, its greenhorn Minister of Foreign Affairs, Antonio Milososki, engaged in intermittent - and utterly avoidable - spats with its neighbor and biggest foreign investor, Greece, virtually guarantee delayed accession to both NATO and the European Union, the much ballyhooed strategic goals of the current administration. Milososki adopted a similarly belligerent and ill-informed stance against Bulgaria, another flanking polity and the newest member of the coveted European club.
Where the government claims great strides is in its uncompromising stance against all forms of malfeasance and delinquency in both the public and the private sectors.
From the army to various municipalities, scandals erupt daily in an atmosphere often bordering on a frenzied, media saturated, witch-hunt.
Gruevski is alleged to have rejected a bribe of 3 million euros (c. 4 million USD) offered to him by a Serb firm.
His government embarked on highly publicized campaigns against illegal construction (the "urban mafia") and other festering nests of corruption.
Alas, Gruevski himself appointed members of his family and innumerable political hacks to senior government positions in a series of blatant acts of nepotism and cronyism decried by the European Union and other watchdogs. Consequently, with one exception (Zoran Stavreski, the talented vice-premier), the government in all echelons is largely made up of utterly inexperienced operators. Plus ca change.
Politics, venality, and terrorism are the sole venues of social mobility in this tiny, landlocked, country of 2 million impoverished people. Immediately following their insurgency, the former terrorists of the Albanian National Liberation - courtesy of Western pressure and the Albanian voters - occupied crucial ministries with lucrative opportunities of patronage of which they are rumored to have availed themselves abundantly.
Comic relief is often provided by bumbling NGOs, such as the International Crisis Group. In 2001, its representative in Macedonia, Edward Joseph, went to Prilep to conduct an impromptu investigation of the thriving cigarette smuggling trade. Posing to the cameras he declared that only the local leaf-rolling plant was not involved in this pernicious line of work.
Macedonia is a hub of expats and consultants in the Balkans. Ante Markovic, an Austria-based former Yugoslav prime minister, who served as an oft-criticized economic advisor to the government until he was dumped, sued Macedonia for $1 million. In 2001-3, the youthful former minister of finance, Nikola Gruevski, was asked by USAID, on behalf of the Serbian-Montenegrin government, to serve as its consultant on matters of reform of the financial system. The author of this article acted as Economic Advisor to Georgievski's government and, later, to Gruevski himself.