Ethnically-charged riots in Skopje in March 2013.
Photo: Sinisa Jakov Marusic
The Macedonian authorities are ignoring crimes inspired by ethnic hatred, the local Helsinki Committee for Human Rights said in its latest report.
In its latest report on hate crimes, the Helsinki Committee reported 116 such incidents in 2013, and said the authorities often downplayed them as routine acts of violence.
Over 80 per cent of the hate attacks “involved ethnic Macedonians and Albanians”, the report noted.
Sexual orientation and gender identity were factors behind another nine per cent of attacks, while religion was a factor or motive in seven per cent.
Most of the incidents took place in the capital, Skopje, and in western ethnically-mixed parts of the country, in Tetovo, Gostivar and Struga and Kumanovo. The report noted that 72 per cent of all hate-related incidents took place in Skopje.
By contrast, in the ethnically-mixed western town of Debar not one incident was registered.
According to the report, police last year tracked down the perpetrators of only 27 hate-related crimes while only one case, involving one of many attacks on the LGBT centre in Skopje, went to court.
“It is worrying that the authorities stay silent about ethnic violence. These crimes are either not reported or the police investigate them improperly,” said the head of the Helsinki Committee, Uranija Pirovska.
Pirovska said there was an institutional tendency to camouflage hate crimes as common acts of violence, which are not as severely punished by law. This painted a wrong picture of what was going on, she said.
One example, the committee said, was last week’s incident in Radisani, a suburb near Skopje, predominantly populated by ethnic Macedonians, where two hand grenades were thrown at the home of an ethnic Albanian family.
Police officially treated this and a series of other attacks on the same household as ordinary “violence”.
The committee marked a sharp spike in hate violence in the two months that followed the March 2013 ethnically-charged protests in Skopje.
Around half of all the recorded incidents last year took place at this time, often in angry encounters between ethnic Macedonian and Albanian pupils and students on buses.
In early March 2013, ethnic Macedonian hooligans clashed with riot police in Skopje while protesting against the appointment of Talat Xhaferi, a former ethnic Albanian rebel commander, as defence minister.
The next day, clashes escalated when Albanians took to the streets in a counter-protest, alleging they had been targeted by mob attacks.
The committe also noted a spike in hate-related violence during April’s general and presidential elections when party HQs were attacked, party supporters were beaten up and members of NGOs prevented from monitoring the polls.
The European Commission progress report on Macedonia for 2013 noted that the country lacks systematic gathering of data as well as investigations into and indictments for hate-related crimes./balkaninsight/