“Skopje 2014” and Macedonia‟s ethnocracy or how to divide a city Goran Janev Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Goettingen “Where are you going?!” – rudely yelled at the three of us promptly stopped our laughter. We were slowly drifting towards our favourite hanging place located just at the entrance of the Skopje Old Bazaar before that policeman interrupted our joyful evening. Answering his direct question we simply told him that the pub where we are heading is just twenty meters behind him and showed it to him and he nodded in approval and stepped aside to let us continue. We all greeted him and forgot about him at the moment we entered the semi crowded pub and ordered our drinks from the door. He was absent from my life for almost twenty years now and I recalled the scene as I was halfway through the writing of the pages that follow. I recalled the scene as I was reading Steve Pile‟s account of Guy Debord‟s conception of the “settled geographies of power relations in the city, the places where access is denied – from the gates of government institutions, to military sites, to buildings for spies, to private houses. The city is more closed than open … Moreover, the freedoms of the city appear to be constantly under attack in the modern city, constantly circumscribed, constantly surveyed – often enough in the name of freedom, service and protection (2005: 12-3).” Following the official line of explanation, that policeman was protecting me, Macedonian citizen of Macedonian ethnic origin living in the capital of Republic of Macedonia, freshly baked new nation-state. The danger was coming from Macedonian citizens of Albanian ethnic origin living in the capital of Republic of Macedonia. 1 The previous weekend, on 6th of November 1992, almost twenty years ago, violent riots broke out in this part of the town that left four killed, three Albanian men and one Macedonian curios lady that was peeking through a window of her apartment when a stray bullet met her. The story goes that that morning two policemen acted brutally when they tried to prevent one young street seller of illegally procured cigarettes to escape them. The rest of the street sellers got very irritated, were quickly joined by many others, hundreds of them, and started protesting and trashing shops and clashed with police, setting to fire abducted police vehicles. Before the night had set, tens of policemen and demonstrators were hurt or wounded in exchange of fire. In the aftermath of the open clashes, heavy police forces patrolled the adjacent part of the town and made numerous arrests on the streets or in the houses where demonstrators were escaping after the attacks. That part of the city was sealed off for more than a week and heavily patrolled for couple of months. They closed off that part of the town. They marked it as dangerous. They proclaimed Albanians as dangerous. The ethnic labeling was materialised, the ethnic belonging was located at a territory and state sent uniformed and armed personnel to patrol the unsafe frontiers. The image of Skopje from open city was turned into divided city. It did not happened that quickly and continuous efforts are made in this direction with the advent of ethnocratic regime in Macedonia. Territorial claims of the two largest ethnic groups are reinforced through various symbolic means, from waving and displaying national flags, to erecting monuments and constructing buildings. I use the term frontiers inspired by the work of Wendy Pullan (2011) on Jerusalem. We could notice a great deal of similarities in terms of political processes that shape and structure ethnonationalist states and cities. This does not mean that Macedonia has reached such a difficult and almost irrevocable situation, but Israel and Jerusalem in particular is a perfect negative 2 precedent. Pullan uses the frontier to mean zone rather than borderline, it can grow, or shrink and moves back and forth, even above and bellow the ground as streets still remain Palestinian while the Israelis live above them and dig beyond them in the Old City. The frontline is „inherently contested‟ and despite the common connection between nationalism and the territoriality of state, as Pullan argues and as I will demonstrate, it is highly rewarding if we look at the conflict in the cities by applying the concept of frontiers to the analysis of this contestation. The wider context is provided by the research group that organizes this conference. [of which Pullan is part, and that is the project Conflict in Cities and the Contested State: Everyday life and the possibilities for transformation in Belfast, Jerusalem and other divided cities.] Skopje certainly fits nicely in the framework for studying these divided cities that emerged at the fault lines of the former empires as James Anderson (2008; 2010) formulates it. In the Macedonian case we should include the multiple fault lines of the Cold War divisions and Huntingtonian civilizational fault lines between Christianity and Islam, and for twenty years in the making now - the fault line between EU and the rest that does not deserves the membership, to name just a few. This creates multiple spatial and temporal ruptures expressed as geographical, cultural, political, economic and historical fault lines. Macedonia is to be found deeply buried inside the Balkan constructed as exemplary other from within Europe. I am only mentioning this to point to the devastating effects of postponed integration or prolonged isolation of the region and of this country in particular. Cutting off Macedonia from the global and European flows incited the local politicians to develop introvert viewpoint and contributed towards development of a public sphere with matching narrow horizon obsessed with interethnic dynamics. There is more to be said about the complicity of the Macedonian immediate neighbourhood and the political developments there, but I will leave it there for the time sake. 3 The unfortunate developments from outside and from within contributed to the rise of the ethnocratic regime and now it is being reflected in the spatial arrangements. While more homogenous nation-states concerns with territoriality are most obvious at the international borders, by applying the same logic the ethnocratic regimes in contested states are forced into defining internal borders. Building the case for the more serious engagement with spatiality and nationalism George White points to the cultural landscaping, whereby it is important that cultural identity of a place reflects the identity of its inhabitants (2000: 26). Apadurai notes the similar proceses of nationalization of all space under a given nation-state control (!996: 189). White illustrates his point with the change of the regime in Eastern Europe and the efforts to change the Communist landscapes. To an extent the current symbolic reconstruction of Skopje can be taken as one such project, only, some twenty years later. For the past two decades Macedonia slowly and with certainty was drifting towards the establishment of ethnopolitical order. The Bit Pazar riots in 1992 set the tone for the further development of Macedonia into ethnocratic regime. I understand ethnocracy as a political system in which individual democratic rights are substituted for the collective ethnic rights. It is a deviant form of multiculturalism that yields minimal social cohesion and maximizes the ethnic segregation. The ongoing efforts of the Macedonian elites of the two largest ethnic groups respectively, to divide Skopje along ethnic lines are very illustrative of these processes. To me the institutional reactions to the Bit Pazar riots were divisive. As a consequence of their narrow and ethnicised imaginary, the Old Bazaar was transformed into frontier zone. That pub, Mondrian, remained open for another two or three years or so. My mother also kept her ceramic studio/gallery in Bezisten, at the heart of the Old Bazaar, for another three years and I kept going 4 there on regular basis all that time and I have easily managed to forget that moustached policemen. Until that passage about restrictive city spaces brought him back. However, soon afterwards, the Old Bazaar “became” Albanized in the popular imagination and gradually Macedonians stopped coming across the old Stone bridge and Bazaar that I revisited for a research after 15 years was a pale and sorrow shadow of the earlier glorious times. It was turned into a border zone as those policemen have marked it with their patrols. I resisted accepting that Skopje is a divided city, but many started accepting it as such, avoiding venturing to that side of the river Vardar that cuts the city in two. In Skopje, as in western parts of Macedonia where Albanian minority lives in greater concentration, the geographies of power relations tend to follow ethnic lines and here lies the greatest paradox of Macedonian ethnopolitics. As the ethnonationalist political elites try to draw those lines as clearly as possible, the everyday reality betrays their intentions. In Skopje, as in many other parts of the country that are allegedly divided along ethnic lines, the ethnic divisions become more blurry as we focus closer to the ground. The residential ethnic segregation, apart from some remote rural settlements, is hard to be found in the cities and towns. Certainly, as we will see, after 20 years in the making, the ethnocratic regime that only recognizes ethnicity as main political force is finally bearing fruits as divisions in the country grow more apparent. I will explore the main drivers behind this divisive policies and responses to it. To do so I will put emphasis on the spatial aspect of the ethnopolitics. Let me now skip those twenty years and point to the latest incident of ethnic violence that happened in Skopje. The Old Fortress overlooking the Old Bazaar and the central part of the Skopje is duly scrutinized by archeologists and the government under the leadership of the 5 IMRO-DPMNE is particularly keen on excavating historical evidence to prove the Macedonian national continuity. As a part of the larger project for symbolic reconstruction of Skopje into Grand National Capital the Old Fortress plays prominent role. The latest endeavour was the reconstruction of a church, that was intended to be used as a museum for the excavated artefacts. The building was to dominate the linescape of the Fortress, thus to change the cityscape. This provoked reactions from the Albanian politicians. The building was stopped. Actually, somebody ordered the continuation of building at night. That same night the local mayor and other party representatives and many local citizens, of Albanian ethnic origin, came with machines to cut the steel construction for the church and chased away the construction workers. Police just watched. One week later, on Sunday 13.02.2011 one obscure Macedonian nationalist party scheduled protest gathering at the excavation/construction site. And one Albanian NGO announced their presence at the fortress at the same time. When they came, they got supporters from the football fan clubs. The Macedonian Komiti (the popular name for the rebels against the Ottoman Empire) clashed with more prosaically named group of „Albanian‟ football club Shverceri (smugglers). Allegedly outnumbered and improperly protected by the police the Komiti got beaten. The next weekend when I met with my friend we already knew that the heavy police presence prevented the „second half‟ of the fighting to happen the day before. But the genie was out of the bottle. In the intervening week on Facebook the hatred was rampant and the evidence of it is now erased from the servers of the social media service. This archeological battle can be expected if we read Pullan‟s analysis of similar processes in Jerusalem: “Archeology is a favoured vehicle for attempting to legitimate the settlers‟ presence in the Old City, primarily in order to enhance their claim to biblical continuity. In doing so, they follow a long tradition of using archaeology for nationalist purposes, and sometimes the excavations have resulted in violent clashes (2011: 8).” 6 She can be quoted word by word to explain the situation in Skopje “where many groups and individuals wish to impose their national and religious identities upon the city.” In its eventful history Skopje gathered quite a few contenders. It could be instructive if we only glimpse at events that happened in between these twenty years of Macedonian independence and also at what was happening before that in terms of transforming the city as the political rulers were losing and gaining ground in it. After taking the city from the Ottomans, Serbian occupiers shifted the center of the city southwards and created the city square. Photos They knocked down a mosque and built an Officers‟ Club in its place and opposite of it constructed a building for a National Bank. At the entrance of the square they put two monuments of horse riders, The king Alexander and King Peter‟s statues. These two were drowned in the river Vardar when Bulgarians occupied the city and were not saved after the war when socialist revolutionaries took over the control. There is a story that they used the bronze to cast the monument of the Freedom Fighters. When the disastrous earthquake in 1963 shook and damaged the Officers‟ Club and the National Bank they were readily finished to the ground by the Skopje planners. Even today many would claim that these buildings could have been saved and reconstructed. But Macedonian national state was happier without such significant reminder of the Serbian occupation and colonization. The new city was imagined as modern, redesigned by the great Japanese architect Kenzo Tange who won the UN competition. Photos. His plan was in the International Stile, with Brutalists aesthetics that became very fashionable. Photos. Postearthquake Skopje was imagined as an open city, city of solidarity, cosmopolitan and respectful and grateful for the help that came from all over the world. Many streets still bear the names like 7 Helsinki, Mexican, Athens, Prague etc. It is than that Skopje became prominently industrial city as it is after the earthquake that the Steel factory was opened alongside many other industrial capacities that employed tens of thousands of workers and almost tripled the population of the city in four decades. It is these newcomers and their offspring that now claim some nostalgia for the old Skopje, a city that they never knew and a city that never existed, a city that the current government allegedly reconstructs and rebuilds, not according to some original blueprints, but in some eclectic historicist style, reinventing the city according to their limited nationalist imagination. Skopje today is a city torn apart by segregationist planning policies as Pullan (2011: 13) aptly defines them. More precisely, here we also see implementation of „frontier urbanism,‟ “characterized by two primary conditions: the settling of civilians as frontier populations, and the use of urban spaces and structures to promote a particular power and to foster confrontation.” Nevertheless, Skopje is not Jerusalim and the schismogenetic (Bateson, 1935) processes are not that advanced, although if we pay attention to the administrative divisions and ethnonationalist politicians that control them the potentiality is there. However, it is the reaction to these developments that actually interests me. As I was torn between actual fieldwork and writing up for this project I was not in Skopje when the government promoted the video clip “Skopje 2014” a grandiose, expensive and nationalist project that would transform the central part of the city beyond recognition. They even started with dressing up some Modernist buildings into baroque facades. I was confined to follow the reactions via new social media, especially Facebook and here I present some of the artworks and other creative reactions that followed. Photos. From the interviews with some of the organizers 8 of the protests against the not-transparent and aggressive remaking of the central public spaces it is clear that the media is only that a medium, but at this age of immediacy it has quite transformative role exactly for the capacity to communicate instantly. As Apadurai points to the two problematic sources for the imposition of homogenous national state, the neighbourhood and virtual neighbourhood (1996: 190-191) we can trace the reactions in Skopje in spatial practices of its citizens and in the space of internet. In just three days after the video clip was first aired the fan group “Skopje 2014, no thank you!” got over 12 thousand members. It is a clash between two different imaginaries of the city, one that is simplistic and reductionist as promoted by the ethnonationalist politicians and the other that acknowledges diversity plurality and multiplicity and respects it. “Skopje 2014” is not an odd project because of its discourse or scale, nationalist and grandiose as it is a project that had happened elsewhere, or should I put it everywhere, when new regimes were established and new capitals built.1 The oddity is in the timing, 20 years after the 1 The practice or remaking capitals after the regime changes has been established on a regular base throughout Europe‟s eventful history and the region of Central and Eastern Europe that received greater share of regime shifts is quite illustrative in this regard (Damljanovi*c and Makaš 2010; Czaplicka, Gelazis, and Ruble 2009). It can also be safely assumed that greater the disparity between the two regimes, greater the change in the look of the new capital. Damljanović and Makaš (2010) illustrate quite well the transformation of capital cities as Grand National Capitals after the two empires, Habsburg and Ottoman, collapsed in the age of nationalism. They note that due to the shared architectural heritage, or „urban topography‟ in their wording, Central European cities evolved more easily into national capitals. Their counterparts from Southeastern Europe had first to destruct Ottoman urban fabric, where the construction of national identities by means of architecture and urban planning coincided with modernization as in Central Europe, yet here it “was also synonymous with the notion of Europeization“ (2010: 9). Further and quite frequent regime changes were unavoidably accompanied by remaking of capitals. Following the destruction of the WWII and the transformations of Central and Eastern European capital cities that came with socialist revolutions, the collapse of communist regimes triggered new set of changes. Geladis, Czaplicka and Ruble (2009) start their analysis of post-communist transformations in East Europe by rehearsing Anselm Strauss‟ question, „What time is this place?‟ They identify several crosscutting vectors of identity, global, European, national, local, and personal, that guide the processes of cultural, economic, and political reorientation (2009: 2). According to them the post-communist setting presents us with exemplary urban admixture, best captured by concepts of heterotopias and heterochronias. The basic concepts of place and time are simply coordinates of history, while the urban admixtures of post-communist cities results from building and redesigning, conserving and 9 independence and well into the twenty first century on the model from nineteenth. Most striking is the failure to see the potentiality for breeding conflict, if it is not doubtlessly „frontier urbanism‟ that we are observing in this case. But cities are not made of buildings only or of those who inhibit them at the moment. It is in traces, shadows and resonances (van Loon: 2002), phantasmagorias ghosts and magic (Pile: 2005). Cities (Amin and Thrift: 2002) and spaces (Massey: 2008) are constructs of multiple layers, temporal, spiritual and material and this urban assemblages (Farrias and Bender: 2010) are hardly susceptible to ethnopolitical simplifications. For those to function, as Jerusalem or Belfast shows us a great amount of sustained organized violence is needed. It is at the intersection between the public space and public sphere, or the concerns about public space as expressed and shaped within the public sphere, mediated and co-constructed by the new social media where we can see the most important fault line that shapes the future of divided cities. It is this clash between the essentialist ethnopolitical reading of the city and poor imaginary against the creative, multiple and unbound public sphere that has been transformed from controlled into self-generating and uncontrollable field of urban civil imaginary that holds the promise of the imminent failure of the anachronistic political projects. renovating that are „political acts making history in these cities‟ (2009: 3). At present one such project is unfolding in the heart of the Balkans and there are certain peculiarities that make this Macedonian case interesting. 10