Exchanging Words

Skopje’s enthusiastic push for Macedonian language classes for Albanian first-graders leads to a schools boycott. Part one of a series.

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This is the first in a series of articles on the challenges to education in post-conflict societies.

SKOPJE | Six-year-old Musa and his friend Vlatko live in the same apartment building and walk 40 meters to the same school every day. After school, they play together and have no trouble understanding each other. Their families celebrate holidays together.

But they don’t go to school together. Musa is Albanian and his classes are taught in the Albanian language. Vlatko, a Macedonian, learns in his native language. Their school divides their classes into shifts.

At this point in their education, the first-graders are learning words and numbers through games and descriptions. They also take classes in English.

But they were caught in an awkward situation when the second school semester began in mid-January and the Education Ministry announced a change in the language curriculum for Albanian pupils. Instead of beginning their studies of the Macedonian language in the fourth grade, they must now start younger, in the first grade.

Many angry Albanian parents kept their children home from school. Musa’s parents joined the boycott.

“We have nothing against the Macedonian language because we live in this country, and everyone in our family speaks the language,” Sulejman Memeti, Musa’s father, said. “We also have very good relationships with our neighbors. The only reason we decided to boycott the school system was because the majority of Albanian parents decided to.”

According to state figures, about one-fourth of the population of Macedonia is Albanian. The Ohrid Framework agreement, which ended fighting between Albanian separatists and Macedonian security forces in 2001, grants Albanian-majority areas the right to education in their native tongue.

The ministry agreed to delay the change and students went back to school, but the government’s plan has made a lot of people nervous, even in places where Albanians and Macedonians co-exist peaceably. Mustafa Fetahu, Musa and Vlatko’s principal, began yelling when approached for a comment about it.

“I don’t want to talk about this situation. The Education Ministry is responsible for this mess. They just want to experiment. If they would leave us alone, we know how to handle the situation,” he said.

But it wasn’t strictly the ministry’s idea. The proposal was originally part of an effort to integrate education championed by the OSCE mission in Skopje.

Education for Albanians and Macedonians has long run along parallel tracks, in different schools or in different shifts. Recently, many Albanian high-schoolers here have opted for universities in Kosovo or Albania.

But in January 2009, Knut Vollebaek, the OSCE’s high commissioner on national minorities, gave a speech at the South East European University in Tetovo in which he called for a careful integration of Albanian and Macedonian education. While acknowledging the importance of including minority languages in the country’s system of instruction, Vollebaek lamented that many young people were not learning Macedonian. “As the result, many children don’t speak the Macedonian language at all and this language can help them in their further professional and academic careers. If this language segregation continues, in the long term, it might reflect on the stability of Macedonian society. Learning the Macedonian language as the official, state language doesn’t mean that minority rights are less respected. Classes in the Macedonian language can be offered at the earliest age.”

From that speech came a plan that envisioned education officials in Skopje working with experts from the OSCE to create a curriculum for Macedonian-language instruction for Albanian first-graders. The goal would be for the children to learn 200 expressions in that first year through game-playing.

In a disputed account, Education Minister Nikola Todorov said the government decided to move forward with the plan in August, with an eye to implementing it in the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year or at the start of the second semester. But Abdulakim Ademi, the deputy prime minister whose portfolio includes implementation of the Ohrid Framework, said the decision was made by Todorov himself. Ademi is a member of the Democratic Union for Integration, an Albanian party that is in a coalition government with the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party.

Because of the heightened tension on this issue, exactly one year after Vollebaek’s speech in Tetovo, the high commissioner sent a letter to Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski suggesting that the project be delayed pending further study.

Vollebaek called for a dialogue between the concerned sides and emphasized the need for choosing appropriate teaching materials and for training teachers.

The next day, Todorov was defiant. “I don’t plan to take some radical measures in order to implement the decision, but I won’t back away from it,” he said at a press conference. Referring to a court case seeking to have the proposal declared unconstitutional, he said, “I think we should judge if this decision is constitutional and legal through expert debate. I’ll try to prove that this decision is scientifically and legally based.”

That suit was filed by Realiteti, a Skopje-based watchdog group that looks out for the rights of Albanian students in Macedonia’s educational system. The group says most Albanians and Macedonians get along well but such political interference could change that. It supports the current parallel system of education.

Realiteti recently organized a second schools boycott to force administrators to keep student information in ethnically mixed schools in both languages. Currently it is recorded only in Macedonian.

Realiteti’s director, Valjon Belja, said he was speaking on behalf of many Albanian parents.

“We’re reacting so strongly to this because Albanians in Macedonia see this as having the majority language forced on them, and that creates resentment.”

Belja acknowledged that many Albanian students don’t speak Macedonian but said that’s a problem of the educational system overall.

“Albanian students from the fourth grade in primary till the fourth year in secondary education have enough time to learn the Macedonian language, but that’s not the case because the students don’t take it seriously. They see it as one of many subjects in their education and that’s why they don’t speak the language. The ministry must strengthen this segment,” he said.

Members of the opposition Social Democratic Union said the government’s move was clumsy and ill-thought out. “The government is probably doing this just to provoke tension at a very sensitive period for the country,” said Andrej Petrov, vice president of the Social Democrats. Macedonia remains locked in difficult negotiations with Greece over its name in an effort to clear its path to the EU, and the country could hold early elections in the fall.

“If someone thinks that this will ease interethnic relations, then that’s a lie. This is one more example of the government making policy on a daily basis without any long-term vision. It’s a strong signal by VMRO-DPMNE to the Albanians that the only official language in Macedonia is Macedonian,” Petrov said.

The country’s constitution declares Macedonian, along with any other language spoken by at least 20 percent of the population, as the official language.

Mersel Bilali, a professor of international humanitarian law at the FON University in Skopje, said the real solution is a complete overhaul of the educational system. He said the issue of interethnic tensions in Macedonia is phony one, cooked up by politicians as a distraction from the country’s real problems.

“I think there’s no real resistance to learning the Macedonian language. It’s more a reaction by the Albanian population to the nationalist policy of the ruling party. Unfortunately, Gruevski has a very low rating among Albanians,” Bilali said. Gruevski’s VMRO-DPME has been on a campaign to boost national pride – some would say to fan the flames of nationalism – by claiming a glorious past for Macedonia that includes the planned erection of a statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje’s central square and the naming of a stadium after Phillip II, Alexander’s father. In addition, the party proposes to build an Orthodox church in the main square over the objections the country’s Muslims, many of whom are Albanian, and it is an Orthodox priest, not an imam, who accompanies government officials to give his blessing when a new building is opened.

Bilali, who is Albanian, said the attempt at integrating education had been bungled. “With the proper analysis and approach, this project could succeed. In ethnically mixed environments it’s not a sin, for instance, for Macedonians to start learning the Albanian language. In most institutions today people from different nationalities work together. If an Albanian comes to an office where Macedonians are working, and if they don’t speak the language of the other, they have to find translators. Instead of wasting time and energy, they should have at least a basic knowledge of the languages.”