After the city government drew up a plan to hire 20 people this year, the city's human resources director connected it to Balancer, a website run by the government of North Macedonia, a Balkan country.
A few seconds later, he received a chart with the required ethnic breakdown for the job. Sixteen people were Albanian, three were Macedonian and one was Roma.
Computer-generated quotas for different community sizes in Tetovo, a city in northwestern Albania with a large ethnic Albanian population, are among the world's most One of the most comprehensive and rigorous mathematical government programs.
It is also a deep-rooted controversy. Critics say the policy emphasizes ethnicity over merit, while supporters believe it helped pull the country back from ethnic civil war. Both sides argue that the system has become rife with fraud, especially as ethnic-based political parties seek to take advantage of it, and that the system and other efforts to promote diversity have led to unnecessary state-sector job losses. agree that it is contributing to the increase in
Many of the Macedonian majority see these efforts as unfair social engineering, and in May, the strongly nationalist party VMRO-DPMNE, which has pledged to appeal to the majority and abolish the balancer, This was one of the reasons for the party's big victory in the election on the 8th.
North Macedonia, which became an independent state in 1991, was initially spared the violence that rocked neighboring Kosovo and other parts of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but in 2001 Albanian extremists overran Kosovar fighters. Rising with support, it fell into a brief but bloody conflict. Providing weapons to Macedonian-majority security forces.
The conflict, which raged in the mountain villages around Tetovo, ended when the Albanian National Liberation Army agreed to disarm and drop any demands for an independent state or a merger of Kosovo with Albania. In return, the Macedonian-led government promised “fair representation” in government and “positive discrimination” in university admissions.
It also recognized Albanian as a second official language and allowed students in state schools to be taught in Albanian.
Tetovo's head of human resources, Fatmir Sabliu, said the government's employment quotas had “worked” insofar as they brought more Albanians into the state apparatus, especially the police. They now make up 79 percent of the city's workforce. But he said diversity programs have been distorted by “the cancer of our society: the influence of politics on everything, especially jobs.”
He said ethnic-based parties are exploiting quotas to place supporters in bloated state sectors, including by instructing them to lie about their ethnicity to meet balancer demands. In addition to new institutional staff aimed at promoting diversity, new jobs were created to ensure each group is represented according to the balancer calculations.
The city government currently has 362 employees, up from 125 in 2006, Sabliu said.
Shevkete Hamza, a Roma woman from Tetovo who said she got the city job through a balancer, said the other five applicants (three Macedonians and two Albanians) were all Roma, a particularly disadvantaged community. I remember that I had made a false declaration. “I was the only real Roma,” she said.
North Macedonia does not list ethnicity on birth certificates or identity documents, making it difficult for applicants to know that they are part of an ethnic group to apply for a job, even if their true identity is revealed by their name or language. All you have to do is admit it. Therefore, it has become impossible to call fakes, the human resources manager said.
The 2001 settlement created a proliferation of government agencies responsible for enforcing its terms. Alexandra Temenugova, a researcher who studies diversity programs, said many public institutions employ “a lot of people who get paid but don't go to work.”
A 2020 study by Temenugova's Institute for Communication Research, a research group in Skopje, found that a ministry set up to oversee the implementation of the 2001 diversity pledge had 1,410 employees with a predominantly Albanian workforce on its payroll. It was found that although there are over 30,000 employees, only 44 have reported for work.
Hostility to the quota program is most pronounced among the Macedonian majority, who make up about 60 percent of the country's 1.8 million people.
“We have placed too much emphasis in this country on ethnicity rather than merit and ability,” said Timko Mukanskiy, deputy leader of the winning party, which won the presidency and a majority of seats in parliament.
Until recent elections, the prime minister, finance minister, and foreign minister were all Albanians. (Due to the divided electoral system, Macedonian parties that win elections without a majority usually have to partner with Albanian parties in exchange for key positions.)
Mr Mukanski's party campaigned on the slogan “Macedonia, yours again”, which his rival accused of being a dog whistle against ethnic minorities, especially Albanians. Mukansky said this is just a promise to all groups to “take back the homeland that was abducted by the political elite.”
The constitution recognizes six official minorities: Albanians, Roma, Bosniaks, Serbs, Turks, and Vlachs, who make up almost 30 percent of the population.
There is no official register of individual ethnic affiliations. Last year, the government's move to record ethnicity on birth and marriage certificates was ruled unconstitutional by the country's highest court.
Last week's elections resulted in a landslide defeat for the Social Democratic Union, a progressive party that came to power in 2017 promising to root out corruption and unite ethnic communities. It was a failure on both counts.
Bisela Kostadinovska-Stojcievska, a university professor who served as culture minister in the defeated government, said the defeat of the progressives was due to a revival of ethno-nationalist sentiment among both Macedonians and Albanians, and a push to promote equal opportunity. He blamed this on widespread disgust over abuse of the system.
She was stunned to learn last year that two senior officials in the ministry whose positions were designated for Macedonians were actually Albanians. They continued their work. “If people say they feel Macedonian or they feel Albanian, there's nothing I can do,” she says. “If you raise an issue, you could be taken to court for discrimination,” she added.
A 2001 peace agreement that promised “fair representation” “resolved the issue of war, but now everything is back to nationalism,” she said, referring to the main ethnic groups of Albanians and Macedonians. “They're addicted to it.”
Before the election, the leader of the largest ethnic Albanian party called for a rally in the center of the capital Skopje, shouting “UCK, UCK” (the Albanian abbreviation for the National Liberation Army, which terrorized ethnic Macedonian villages in 2001). . To many voters in the majority nation, it sounded like a call to arms.
Ethnic communities have steadily dispersed, with mixed schools that once taught primarily in Macedonian giving way to separate classes and divided schools catering to different language groups.
“Instead of cooperation between communities, we are only seeing more polarization,” says researcher Temenugova.
The feeling of being relegated to an inferior position among many Macedonians is partly a typical view of majorities everywhere, said Celal Hodzic, Bosniak Deputy Director of the Community Rights Enforcement Agency. He said that it arises from. “This is what they think: We have to be the boss and everyone else has to be second-rate.”
However, he described the balancer as a “broken tool”.
“When politically connected people apply for a job, they are told what ethnicity they need to be,” he says.
Pro-diversity advocates complain that well-intentioned efforts to reverse serious imbalances are being corrupted by ethnic politics.
“You won't get the smartest and most talented people, but you will get people who are loyal to their political parties,” said Petrit Saracini, director of Skopje's Institute of Media Analysis of Albanian descent. The result was an administration “filled with party members,” he said.
