THE OHRID AGREEMENT - AN UNFINISHED AGREEMENT

Naser ZIBERI

Abstract

The eighties of the last century were extremely difficult years for Albanians in their lands in former Yugoslavia, including Albanians in North Macedonia. Murders, punishments, discriminations, based on ethnic belonging, had turned into widespread phenomena everywhere, especially in Montenegro and Macedonia. These were the final efforts of a totalitarian-communist system to maintain a status quo that implied denial of freedoms and rights of citizens and especially denial of the national rights of Albanians. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the changes in the countries of Eastern Europe prompted by perestroika in the USSR and Solidarity in Poland, raised hope for a positive change in the situation even in the Albanian lands outside the administrative borders of Albania, namely in Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Preshevo Valley. The constitutional changes at the federal and republican levels in the former Yugoslav state community enabled the implementation of political, ideological, and economic pluralism in all the republics. But, these changes for Kosovo were retrograde because Slobodan Milosevic's regime exploited them to suppress the political-territorial autonomy of the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo. The Socialist Republic of Macedonia was entirely unprepared for this new spirit of change, hesitantly approaching the reform of its political system. However, changes were unavoidable, so the installation of political pluralism, and thus the introduction of a multi-party system for the Albanians of North Macedonia, was seen as a great hope for changing the dire situation they were in. At that time in Macedonia, Albanians were denied the right to education in their native language, even in secondary schooling, even that little right to use Albanian language was limited, the right to baptize children according to the parents’ will was denied, access to the administration and the public sector was entirely limited, while violence and reprisals increased. The differences, political punishments, job exclusions, the demolition of courtyard walls of cult houses-mosques, and other religious objects were preparing the ground for a new wave of deportations, but now not towards Anatolia, but to Western European countries, the USA, and Canada.

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