If there are two countries in the world that have absolutely no need for intermediaries in their dialogue with each other, they are Bulgaria and North Macedonia.
I simply wasted my time. For several days in a row, I tried to remember when, where and for what reasons the idea of intermediaries in the dialogue between Bulgaria and North Macedonia had emerged. Who started it first, as they say in many of the songs sung on the other side of the border, as well as here. My memory proved unhelpful, so I searched through my archives, but could not find anything there either. The fact that there are examples of mediators between our neighboring country and other states is a fact.
Let us take only the role of the intermediaries in seeking a solution between Athens and Skopje, which resulted in the signing of the Prespa Agreement in June 2018. But as far as our bilateral relations are concerned, I was unable to find evidence of who first came up with the idea of seeking arbitrators and moderators, given that we know each other so well that we do not need anyone to „shine a light for us“ when we talk.
These are the kinds of thoughts that have occupied me in recent days on the occasion of yet another statement by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of North Macedonia, Timcho Mucunski, that because of the low level of trust between us, someone from the European Union needs to sit down and help with the talks. Let us say, between him and his Bulgarian counterpart, Velislava Petrova, as the heads of diplomacy of the two neighboring countries.
I assume that Mucunski saw this trilateral formula as a universal instrument in the dialogue with Bulgaria at all levels, including those higher than that of foreign minister. For example, Rumen Radev and Hristijan Mickoski could arrange a meeting, and someone would sit between them – let us see who? – ah, Kaja Kallas. Or Iliana Iotova and Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova might find time to meet and try to untangle one of our bilaterally knotted issues, while that charming Portuguese man, António Costa, would hover around them. We are talking about the appropriate level, after all.
This is hypothetical, of course, and the construction is deliberate, but it looks comic enough to turn into some kind of concrete political reality. Let me just add that when it became clear that Iotova was winning the presidential election on 1 November, one of the first media reactions from Skopje was that, as in many other cases in history, Bulgarians were taking an example from Macedonians by choosing a woman as head of state. After all, they have Gordana Siljanovska.
We could ask, if we are going to look at our immediate Balkan neighborhood, whether we perhaps took an example from the Croats, right? Or maybe from the Slovenes?
No, on the banks of the Vardar they continue to live with the „joke“ that everything happening in neighboring Bulgaria necessarily comes from them or at least has some connection with them. This is a remnant of the times of Tito's Yugoslavia, when they accused us of lacking modernity compared with them and mocked Bulgarian „backwardness“. Whether they were right or not is a matter for debate, but in any case this invented and implanted sense of superiority has remained to this day, even though the SFRY has long been dead. But as someone whose family and professional background is connected with the life and customs of today's North Macedonia, I have always maintained that the last people I would allow to advise me on a modern understanding of life are those from the Vardar. Let them be angry with me if they wish.
In fact, Bulgarian Foreign Minister Velislava Petrova has already responded to Skopje's requests for a mediator in the negotiations between the two countries. According to her, such a formula is unusual, to put it mildly, between an EU member state such as Bulgaria and a candidate country such as North Macedonia, regarding arrangements that are not bilateral in nature but have been adopted and approved at the European level. Apparently, the diplomatic tone was also maintained in this case, although it could have been sharper and revealed the complete absurdity of Mucunski's idea that a third party should sit between him and Petrova.
The fact that Mucunski insists that this should be a representative of the European Union and its institutions should also be interpreted as a refusal by Skopje to engage in direct dialogue with Brussels, something that has been proposed more than once since the adoption of the so-called „French proposal“ in July 2022 as the consensus position of the EU member states. Since this concerns the process of the Republic of North Macedonia's accession to the European family, and since the framework for this process has been adopted and constitutes the position of each member state and of all of them together, decisions should be sought in dialogue precisely with the EU, not with an individual member state. This does not rule out talks on purely bilateral issues that do not concern the negotiations for EU membership. It is so simple that it is almost insulting to repeat it once and twice, as if speaking to slow pupils.
But evidently Skopje does not understand it. Or it is fully aware, but is simply trying to be clever. Or it is so accustomed to having someone else from outside fix its problems. The mediation in the negotiations between Athens and Skopje, which ultimately led to the Prespa Agreement, has already been mentioned. The moderator in the final phase was American diplomat Matthew Nimetz. A rather small, slick, soft-spoken man, a true mediator in the image of a kindly uncle, whose image even reached the point of portraying him as some kind of peacemaker who, with a hand on the heads of the two arguing diplomats, brought them into line with a kind word. Something like that.
Every meeting he organized between the negotiating teams from Greece and the Republic of Macedonia was followed closely on the banks of the Vardar in the hope that it might be the last and that the unilateral Greek blockade, introduced in February 1994 and supposedly scheduled to be lifted in September 1995, would finally collapse, and the hated name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FIROM in Latin transcription, would go down in history.
With the signing of the Prespa Agreement, to which Nimetz also contributed, FIROM really did disappear, but the Republic of North Macedonia emerged in its place. From the frying pan into the fire, as we say here and on the other side of the border. So what was Matthew Nimetz's contribution, and should it be accepted at all that he made one, given that the hostility toward the country's current name is much greater than toward the FYROM with which it communicated around the world before?
Many of us wondered at the time why Nimetz's mediation had been necessary at all. And knowing the local mentality of the people and politicians on the banks of the Vardar, the answer came naturally – as an American, Nimetz was needed by those in power in Skopje not so much to balance the positions of the two sides and soften them, but to make Athens give way at the expense of preserving the interests of the Republic of Macedonia. In such cases, the thesis of the small state and nation is always brought into play there, a state and nation to which all its neighbors lay claim and which, apart from the historical truth about its identity, has no other defense.
And that loyalty to one of the great powers on the planet, in this case the United States, can help in the dispute. Do you remember the theses of the first president of the Republic of Macedonia, Kiro Gligorov, about equidistance, that is, being equally distant from all neighboring countries? It was a continuation of another, by no means diplomatic, phrase he uttered about the four wolves standing in the four geographical directions and looking toward the „sheep“ that was the Republic of Macedonia, hoping to snatch it. Those were the days of such statements during the first years of the sovereign and independent Republic of Macedonia. They were turbulent and rather primitive political times. But this gives me cause to ask myself now whether Mucunski, with his idea of EU mediation in the dialogue with Bulgaria, is not aiming for the same thing as in the case of Nimetz in the negotiations with Greece back then.
About two years ago, around this time, I attended a meeting of historians and journalists from North Macedonia and Bulgaria in Strumica. A debate like any other, with some points of contact on both sides and more differences in the positions on how relations between our countries should proceed. One of the guests was Prof. Petar Todorov, who had recently resigned from the Macedonian section of the Joint Commission on History and Education. He explained the reasons for his resignation, one of which was his rejected demand for the introduction of international arbitration into the work of the expert body.
In other words, he had proposed inviting one or more respected scholars from Europe to mediate and arbitrate the dialogue between Bulgarian and Macedonian scholars. Naturally, his idea was rejected, and after VMRO-DPMNE came to power in May 2024, the entire composition of the Macedonian section of the commission was replaced. At the time, I allowed myself to disagree with Prof. Todorov, otherwise a likeable and intelligent man, saying that if there are two countries in the world that have absolutely, but absolutely no need for intermediaries, arbitrators, moderators, judges and so on in their dialogue, they are Bulgaria and North Macedonia.
And I maintain that now; I have even put it in the subtitle of today's article. And do you know why I think so? Because when people from the two sides of the border sit down together, whether at a table in a tavern or to conduct difficult and complex negotiations, they are the only ones in the Balkans where each person speaks their own language and they understand each other. Oh yes, on the banks of the Vardar, especially lately, they believe that the Serbs are their closest people. But why, when Macedonians and Serbs sit down together, is the „working language“ Serbian? The Joint Commission on History and Education has been treading water for years, but one thing is certain – both sides speak their own language and do not need anyone to mediate or translate for them.
Source: trud.bg