Photo by: Sinisa Jakov Marusic
Macedonian police briefly clashed with Albanian protesters who tried to break through a cordon and get to a controversial new statue of the Serbian Tsar Dusan in central Skopje.
Police set up a cordon at the entrance to the old Skopje Bazaar on Friday to prevent several dozen protesters, mainly young people holding Albanian flags and wearing traditional hats, from reaching and possibly attacking the disputed bronze statue that was recently installed about 200 metres away.
During the half-hour standoff, the protestors tried to break through the cordon, briefly clashing with the police. Soon afterwards, they dispersed.
It is so far unknown who organised the protesters.
The police have been closely guarding the area since the start of the month because the statue has already been vandalised and severely damaged, causing ethnic strife.
Two weeks ago, a group of Albanians in the presence of high-ranking members of the junior ruling Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, made a night-time attempt to demolish the statue of the medieval Tsar.
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They insisted that the statue, recently installed on the new ‘Bridge of Civilisations’ in the capital alongside some 30 other statues of eminent figures from various epochs and ethnic backgrounds, is offensive for the country’s Albanians and thus illegal.
This put the DUI in a confrontation with their senior government partners, the conservative VMRO DPMNE of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski. The main ruling party called the attack “an act of vandalism”.
The statue was erected as part of the government funded “Skopje 2014” revamp of the capital.
But Albanians, who make one quarter of the population in Macedonia, do not look kindly on figures from the Serbian history who they consider symbols of oppression./balkaninsight