Awaiting the release of INSTAT (Statistics Institute) results for the 2023 census, one of Albania’s largest minorities, the Macedonian, accuses that the process is manipulated.
The former MP, current president of the Macedonian Alliance for European Integration, Vasil Sterjovski, tells MCN that due to the pact between Albania and Bulgaria, the minority he represents is in danger of disappearing.
– Everyone wonders how Albania allows this. Should Bulgaria be given free rein to conduct the census in Albania!? It’s absurd. This was a war of the Albanian citizens of Macedonian nationality with the Bulgarian institutions, with the Bulgarian extremists, but also with the Albanian institutions that did not help us in this whole process to protect us from all these threats that came from the Bulgarian state. And the credibility of INSTAT (Institute of Statistics) is falling because the whole process was controlled, especially in the areas where the Macedonian community lives, it was controlled by the Bulgarian structures, from Bulgaria, said Sterjovski.
When observing the census, Sterjovski mentions high-ranking officials and radical Bulgarian exponents who interfered directly with the citizens, blackmailing them or offering them large sums of money to declare themselves Bulgarians.
– From the second day of the beginning of the census, the Bulgarian ambassador went to the villages in the Golo Brdo area, in Trebishte, where he distributed tablets and phones on the streets, convincing people to declare themselves as Bulgarians. Especially after the first week when they saw that all these activities did not produce results and the residents did not declare themselves as Bulgarians, open pressures began, various extremist circles from Bulgaria that the passports of all resident Albanian citizens who have Bulgarian passports will be taken away or that the procedure for those who are in the process of removing a Bulgarian passport will be stopped. From our information coming from the field, this census was like a cattle market, where if you took a photo of the form from the tablet that you declared yourself Bulgarian, you would have received 300 euros from the Bulgarian structures for that photo, said Sterjovski.
Sterjovski also addressed these accusations to the government of Macedonia, but Kovacevski told them that he had received a guarantee from Edi Rama for a transparent process.
– We also told the Macedonian Prime Minister about these concerns, that there are violations, which we have reported. The Prime Minister told us that he received assurances from Prime Minister Rama that the process will be carried out according to Eurostat standards. This is what the Macedonian Prime Minister said, if the Eurostat standards are applied, there is no concern, but we did not agree, we told him that in our country, especially in the areas where the Macedonian community lives, not a single Eurostat standard is applied and Bulgaria left it with free hands to do what he wants, said Sterjovski.
The Bulgarian minority was officially recognized by law in Albania in 2017, overlapping areas that for decades had been recognized as a Macedonian minority.
The Macedonian Alliance for European Integration says that in the 2011 census in the entire territory of the Republic, there was not a single self-proclaimed Bulgarian citizen, while even in the pilot census in 2019, there was only 1 in total.
In the last census held in Albania, the Macedonian minority results in 0.20% of the population, otherwise translated to 5,512 citizens declared as Macedonians.