Macedonia: recreating history through Skopje 2014 urban renewal project
Sie haben keine Berechtigung Anhänge anzusehen. Anhänge sind ausgeblendet.
It is a hot, summer Sunday lunchtime, and Senad Hodzic is having his photo taken by his young, polyglot nephew in front of the fountains in Macedonia square, the focal point of Skopje city centre. Towering above the pair on top of a 16-metre high column is a 14.5m bronze statue of a warrior on a rearing horse.
“It’s very good. It beautifies the square and attracts tourists,” says Mr Hodzic, a truck driver and ethnic Bosnian with Macedonian nationality living in Skopje.
But when questioned as to costs, and best use of public resources, his enthusiasm wavers.
“Yes. We don’t need all of these,” he says, pointing to other statues dotted around the square and along the banks of the nearby Vardar river. “We only need one statue, not so many. They should have spent some of the money on hospitals.”
The statue – generally understood to represent Alexander the Great, although not named as such – is just one element of a giant project involving scores of new state institutions, civic buildings, statues and ornamented public facilities initiated by the government of prime minister Nikola Gruevski – who claims the concept as his own.
Dubbed Skopje 2014 (the title indicating the year of completion), the project is designed to give the Macedonian capital – previously a nondescript provincial town dominated by uninspiring Socialist-era architecture – an imposing image meant to raise national pride and attract tourists.
The new state buildings will save on rents and, it is hoped, enhance the efficiency of public administration.
“We are a very young country, only 23 years old. As part of Yugoslavia, national feelings were suppressed, and Yugoslav feeling had to be cultivated. [On independence, we had] one country, one nation with a history, [but] no monuments or statues to express our nationhood,” Mr Gruevski explains.
Moreover, by creating up to 10,000 jobs at its peak, the project has “helped the construction industry to survive,” the prime minister argues.
But Skopje 2014 has provoked fierce protest: apart from what opponents say is the opaque squandering of scarce public funds, the project is denounced on grounds ranging from racism and sexism to the falsification of national and cultural history.
Ivana Dragsic, a co-founder of Freedom Square, a civic association formed to oppose the project, points to the first manifestation of government plans for the city – a kind of proto-Skopje 2014 proposal to construct an orthodox church in Macedonia Square – as symbolic of all that is wrong with both the concept and its backers.
“They wanted to use public funds – so money from all citizens, including atheists and Muslim minorities – in a secular country to build a church on public land. And, of course, if they built a church, the Islamic community wanted a mosque. We thought this a very bad idea in a society such as ours; it creates potential conflict,” Ms Dragsic says.
More fundamentally, the government appeared set on implementing its plan without consultation, spurring the first street protest from a motley collection of activists, centred on a group of architecture students.
“It was March 28 2009. There were about 150 of us, and, according to police reports, 4,500 counter protesters, who attacked us. It was a messy affair, the police did not react, we were spat upon, sworn at and pushed off the square,” she recalls.
Although the government later relocated the planned church – it has yet to be built – when the full Skopje 2014 plans were revealed a year or so later, these went ahead based on a similar pattern, with no public discussion, no transparency – and widespread intimidation of opponents.
“They say they are against the communist Yugoslav era, but they are acting just the same,” Ms Dragsic says.
Meanwhile, with the project now well on the way to completion, the cost has escalated from an initial target of €80m to – according to opponents’ estimates – €400m and above.
Mr Gruevski sticks to the latest official figure of €207m. To put this in context, he says “in the same period, we have spent €100m on new hospital equipment, €100m on hospital modernisation, and €100m on farmers’ subsidies and other expenses.”
He admits that, for some citizens “it’s too much in a too short time”, but stresses opinion polls show “more than 60 per cent support the project”.
But in Skopje’s Centar district, home to many new developments, voters showed their disapproval by electing Andrej Zernovski, an opposition candidate, as mayor in March. “Voters decided it was too expensive and they were right ... We face big cost overruns that we can’t afford. We have no idea where the money went,” he says.
We had no baroque in our architectural history. But we can’t pull them down and take them away.” The statues are a different matter, Mr Zernovski says. “People from other cities complain they’re paying for statues which are only in Skopje. They are easy to remove. We could send them all around the country.”
Macedonia: recreating history through Skopje 2014 urban renewal project - FT.com
Die Gruppe "Freedom Square" formierte sich 2009, um gegen das Projekt "Shkup/Skopje 2014" zu demonstrieren. Die Gruppe bezeichnet "Shkup/Skopje 2014" als ein rassistisches und sexistisches Projekt, welches die nationale und kulturelle Geschichte der Ex-Jugoslawischen Republik Mazedonien verfälschen würde. Bemängelt wird von Ivana Dragsic (Mitgründerin der Gruppe "Freedom Square) auch, dass eine mazedonisch-orthodoxe Kirche (nicht anerkannt!) auf dem "Mazedonien-Platz" durch öffentliche Gelder finanziert werden sollte, was die Muslime des Landes dazu bewegen könnte, auch eine Moschee einzufordern. Dies könnte zu weiteren sozialen Spannungen führen.
Ivana Dragsic spricht auch von militanten VMRO-Anhängern, welche eine Demonstration von 150 Architekturstudenten im März 2009, mit einer Zahl von 4,500 konterten. Die Demonstranten wurden von den VMRO-Militanten beschimpft und vom Platz weggedrängt. Die derzeitige VMRO-Regierung unter Gruevski mache sich nichts aus Transparenz und öffentlicher Diskussion, versuche also eher, kritische Stimmen im Keim zu ersticken. Die Regierung würde sich, obwohl sie sich stets gegen das frühere Jugoslawien aussprach, genau mit Methoden aus der kommunistischen Ära antworten.
Desweiteren wird im Artikel der Financial Times erwähnt, dass das Budget von 80Mio. € weit überschritten wurde und man die derzeitigen Kosten auf über 400 Mio. € schätzt. Gruevski spricht auf der anderen Seite von 203 Mio. € und einer Zustimmung von über 60% des Volkes, was aufgrund der Tatsache, dass im Wahlkreis Shkup Qender / Skopje Centar nun ein Bürgermeister, der als Kritiker des Projekts gilt, gewählt wurde, nicht stimmen kann.
Der neue, sozialstische Bürgermeister Andrej Zernovski formuliert das so: "Die Wähler entschieden, dass dieses Projekt zu teuer ist und sie haben Recht. Wir sind mit enormen Kosten konfrontiert, welche wir uns nicht leisten können. Wir haben keine Ahnung wohin die Gelder gelangten!"
bin selbst alles andere als ein FAN von Gruevski aber deine Anti-MK Parolen kannst du dir sonst wohin schieben :idiot:
