COVID-19 has Worsened Hate Speech in North Macedonia

Social media was flooded with conspiracy theories, disbelief in the existence of the virus and hateful talk. Some people went as far to say that COVID-19 was just a stunt devised by governments to scare their populations and capitalize on the subsequent fear.

One notorious example of using religious animosity in this context in North Macedonia came from the former leader of the Islamic Religious Community, Sulejman Rexhepi.

He went completely over the limit by pronouncing COVID-19 "dead" during the Eid Mubarak holiday, which ultimately led to his firing from the Islamic Community.

As coronavirus continued to increase, an ideology of ethnic and religious hatred continued to spread as well.

There was the scandalous claim that 64 per cent of the citizens of North Macedonia who were deemed eligible to receive a compensatory voucher from the government were ethnic Albanians, and only 16 per cent were Macedonians - when Albanians make up only a quarter of the country's population.

Even though this news was completely fake, it was shared by many Macedonian media outlets, and claims that the government was biased towards other ethnic and religious groups continued to be made all over social media.

The spread of hate speech and negativity towards other groups is still going strong. A recent case was a tweet written by academic Katica Kjulavkova who wrote on June 6 that "we are paying for cohabitation [with other ethnic groups, presumably] with life." Meaning the cohabitation with other ethnic groups than Macedonian.

This tweet suggested that the steep rise of new COVID cases was directly attributable to citizens of North Macedonia coming from a different ethnic group or religion, specifically Muslim population.

At a time when...