North Macedonia Archaeologists Halt Controversial Highway Legislation

After a protest by archaeologists in Skopje on Monday, MPs shelved a controversial legal change that would have bypassed any state decision-making over any archaeological finds along the routes of new highways that are due to be built.

The proposed change to article 65 of the Law on Protection of Cultural Heritage was to state that if the construction firm finds an archaeological site, it will no longer have to report it to the state authorities, but only to a supervising engineer who will also come from a private firm. The engineer will not have the obligation to report it either.

"You must not let a supervising engineer who does not have any knowledge, education, experience and has even less competence in the field of cultural heritage protection, to decide what is cultural heritage," said Ordance Petrov, the head of the Macedonian Archaeological Society, MAD, which staged Monday's protest in front of parliament.

In a first for North Macedonia's Social Democrats-led government, which was previously dragging its feet on other key construction projects, the cabinet had decided to fast-track construction work on the new highways and strike a direct contract with what it calls its "strategic partner", Bechtel-ENKA.

At a cost of more than 1.3 billion euros, the company was given just close to five years to build four key stretches of the highway corridors, basically completing the highway connection to Albania to the west and building a highway between the towns of Prilep and Bitola, which are important business hubs.

Parliamentary commissions on Monday adopted eight of the legal changes aimed at speeding up the construction of the four highway stretches, but did not adopt the ninth, then one which concerns the archaeologists. Since...