SkopjeDiem Macedonia in English
In a podcast episode with Kanal 5 head Ivan Mircevski, VMRO-DPMNE MP Antonijo Milososki says that in 2011, during his term as Foreign Minister, there was a chance for the name issue to be solved by renaming the country to “Upper Macedonia”, for external use only.
According to him, the proposal provided for a change to just one amendment of the Constitution, without interference in the Macedonian language and identity. There were secret negotiations on the matter, the former Foreign Minister claims, adding that it was supposed to be made official at then-PM Nikola Gruevski’s visit to Washington and meetings with then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. However, Gruevski decided to reject the offer, according to Milososki.
“There was communication with intermediaries. [Then-Greek PM George] Papandreou had an intermediary, an American-Greek citizen, Alex Rondos, while [then-Security and Counterintelligence Administration Director] Saso Mijalkov was Gruevski’s intermediary,” the VMRO-DPMNE MP says.
The Gruevski-Clinton tete-a-tete, according to the MP, which had preceded the plenary one attended by Milososki himself, lasted unusually long. Milososki’s stand is that the then-Secretary expected the deal to be made official, not Gruevski to reject it. That, the MP claims, was the reason why there was no joint press-conference, that is, why Gruevski gave a statement on his own outside the White House.
“When we were going to Washington, I was under the impression that Hillary Clinton had received information that the deal had already been reached, that some fine finishing remained, that that was the reason for the meeting, and that it would end in success in terms of that dispute being solved. That was the reason for the anxiousness after that hadn’t happened. In my view, those moments were perhaps even crucial to give the order after that meeting that ‘this leadership or this PM are not cooperative, there’s no reason for us to try things further’,” Milososki stresses, adding that the visit’s outcome was one of the reasons why he resigned as Foreign Minister several months after that, that is, he says Mijalkov interfered in the negotiations, while “Upper Macedonia” for external use only was a good basis for a final solution to the name row, which was resolved seven years later, when Skopje and Athens signed the Prespa Agreement.
