Macedonia Accused of Concealing Ethnic Hate Crimes

In its latest report on hate crimes, the Helsinki Committee reported 116 such incidents in 2013, and said the authorities often downplayed them as routine acts of violence.

Over 80 per cent of the hate attacks “involved ethnic Macedonians and Albanians”, the report noted.

Sexual orientation and gender identity were factors behind another nine per cent of attacks, while religion was a factor or motive in seven per cent.

Most of the incidents took place in the capital, Skopje, and in western ethnically-mixed parts of the country, in Tetovo, Gostivar and Struga and Kumanovo. The report noted that 72 per cent of all hate-related incidents took place in Skopje.

By contrast, in the ethnically-mixed western town of Debar not one incident was registered.

According to the report, police last year tracked down the perpetrators of only 27 hate-related crimes while only one case, involving one of many attacks on the LGBT centre in Skopje, went to court.

“It is worrying that the authorities stay silent about ethnic violence. These crimes are either not reported or the police investigate them improperly,” said the head of the Helsinki Committee, Uranija Pirovska.

Pirovska said there was an institutional tendency to camouflage hate crimes as common acts of violence, which are not as severely punished by law. This painted a wrong picture of what was going on, she said.

One example, the committee said, was last week’s incident in Radisani, a suburb near Skopje, predominantly populated by ethnic Macedonians, where two hand grenades were thrown at the home of an ethnic Albanian family.

Police officially treated this and a series of other attacks on the same household as ordinary...