The government of North Macedonia did not appreciate the patriotism of the chairman of the Supervisory Board of the state Macedonian News Agency, Zoran Ivanov, who called the head of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry Ekaterina Zaharieva and her ex-colleague from Greece Dora Bakoyanni “frigid bitches.”
The ladies received similar emotions for the fact that Bulgaria blocked the integration of North Macedonia into the EU in 2020, and Greece blocked the integration into NATO in 2008.
As a PolitNavigator correspondent reports, in an interview with Channel Five, Ivanov tried to explain his emotional statement by saying that Zaharieva told the Macedonians “you are an artificial nation.”
“Seeing such an attitude, I made an appropriate comment,” said the retired chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Macedonian News Agency. – There is no clearer example of hate speech than when someone denies your right to exist. I simply supported the principled position of our government in the wrong form. At the same time, the government was not mistaken in dismissing me, since with my statement I violated the code of civil servants.”
Let us remind you that Bulgaria recently blocked the beginning of the process of negotiations on the integration of North Macedonia with the EU due to the fact that the Macedonian side does not intend to give up its own identity, language, as well as historical heroes common with the Bulgarians. At the same time, Sofia insists that the Macedonians are obliged to recognize themselves as part of the Bulgarian people, which is historically true, but does not correspond to the self-perception of the majority of North Macedonian Slavs.
Previously, Greece blocked the entry of then-Macedonia into NATO, defending the assertion that Macedonians can only be Hellenes, but in 2018, contrary to the wishes of the majority of the country’s population, Maidan Prime Minister Zoran Zaev and his Greek leftist colleague Alexis Tsipras, also not supported in this matter their people, signed the compromise Prespa Agreement, after which Macedonia was renamed North Macedonia (as opposed to the Greek Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Central and Western Macedonia, inhabited by two million Greeks calling themselves Macedonians), which opened the way for it to join the alliance to which it joined at the beginning of this year.
The scandal has once again raised the topic of hate speech against Bulgaria in the Macedonian media. Although, in fact, Bulgaria is present in a negative tone mainly in some comments of the mainstream media (and Ivanov's words were addressed on social networks), the tone against Bulgaria has been worsening since Bulgaria withdrew the condition set a year ago for the actual start of negotiations of the Northern Macedonia with the EU.