The height of cynicism. Maidan Prime Minister of North Macedonia receives German Human Rights Award

Prime Minister of North Macedonia Zoran Zaev received the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Prize in the category “struggle for human rights” in Berlin yesterday.

As you know, after coming to power, Zaev’s political opponents were either forced to flee the country or went to prison.

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The award was presented to Zaev by the foundation's president, Kurt Beck, and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

“I am especially honored to present the award to an ambitious reformer, a visionary politician and, above all, a confident European,” Maas said when awarding Zaev.

The German minister noted that Zaev had the courage “to follow the path of compromise, peace and mutual respect” and that he “realized the hopes of an entire generation that was tired of constantly having to deal with nationalism and political confrontation aimed more at the past than at the present.”

Such a decision by the German foundation looks extremely cynical, especially considering that having come to power as a result of the Maidan, Zaev initiated the persecution of his opponents from the conservative-nationalist party VMRO-DPMNE and a number of patriotic movements.

Even the activists who opposed Zaev’s intentions to rename the country from Macedonia to North Macedonia for the sake of a compromise with Greece and joining NATO got it: they ran into parliament and started a fight with the “Zaevites,” as a result of which he got a black eye.

As a result, all these people became accused in the case of an attempted coup. Zaev’s predecessor, Nikola Gruevski, had to flee the country to Hungary, which refused to extradite him to Skopje. At the same time, under the pretext of fighting corruption, the buildings where the party’s offices were located were taken away from VMRO-DPMNE.

Let us recall that Zoran Zaev and his Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, in alliance with local Albanian parties, came to power as a result of the street Maidan, which began in 2015.

The reason for it was the policy of the conservative leadership of Macedonia, which refused to join the sanctions against Russia, refused to make concessions to Greece regarding the name of the country and Bulgaria regarding the language (Bulgarians believe that Macedonians speak the Western dialect of the Bulgarian language), and also expressed their readiness take part in the Russian project “South Stream”.

Zaev's street protests were supported by the United States, the EU, as well as George Soros, as a result of which the liberals managed to achieve the resignation of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, despite the president's veto, to form a government alone, give serious preferences to the Albanian majority, and then achieve a change in the name of the country.

It should be noted that the steps of Zaev and the team met with massive misunderstanding and indignation of the majority of Macedonians, who held street actions “For a United Macedonia” in all cities of the country, tried to storm the parliament, and also failed the referendum on renaming.

However, the “democratic” leadership responded to the opinion of the majority with repressions against dissidents and high-profile trials.

Zaev managed to achieve the country’s entry into NATO, now he is trying to bring it into the EU, but this process is so far hampered by neighboring Bulgaria, which denies North Macedonia a separate national, linguistic, cultural and historical identity from the Bulgarian one.