DUI Vice-President Bujar Osmani has leveled fierce criticism at chants such as “death to Sh*ptars”, “gas chambers”, and “for a clean Macedonia”, made during the North Macedonia-Romania basketball game on Saturday in Kumanovo.
As he said on Sunday, the fact that PM Hristijan Mickoski attended the game but didn’t react is even more concerning because, in the ex-Foreign Minister’s view, it sends a message about normalization of “these trends”.
“Mickoski missed out on the chance to show he’s the PM of all citizens and that, at least symbolically, he’s concerned over the insults and threats directed at Albanians in this country. He should have left the hall right away and condemned these chants through a reaction on social media. The Government’s press-service, too, missed out on formally sending a reaction from the Government, which, as we have seen, has the capacity to produce even a series of press-releases over smallest needs”, the DUI Vice-President stated.
Osmani believes that the “scandal” in Kumanovo is not an isolated case, but yet another in the series of ones through which the cabinet encourages or, at the very least, “normalizes the anti-Albanian rhetoric in society”.
Among the other politicians that were in the stands were Interior Minister Pance Toskovski, Kumanovo Mayor and ZNAM leader Maksim Dimitrievski, Deputy PM and Intercommunity Relations Minister Ivan Stoilkovic, and Brane Petrusevski, MP of the PM’s party, VMRO-DPMNE. Commenting on the matter, Petrusevski himself said that the xenophobic speech issue had been caused by a very small group of citizens.
“In that context, we condemn any form of nationalist excesses and hate speech, regardless of which side they come from. Such misuse benefits all political currents and structures that have for decades employed a policy of hate towards one another. Nationalism and hate speech are the best defense of the crime of structures that have for years exploited interethnic relations and see a chance to save their careers and their existence in politics”, the VMRO-DPMNE MP underlined.
SDSM, too, condemned the case, stressing that hate speech and insulting any ethnic community was an attempt to cause divisions among citizens and aimed to undermine coexistence and peace in the country.
VLEN, on its part, stated that institutions and ruling parties, as never before, unanimously condemned xenophobia in sports. Also, it stated that DUI had never taken responsibility for tragedies involving ethnic Albanians.