“For the first time, open academic dialogue has been initiated on the topic and it needs to continue!”
This was the dominant view shared by all participants of a public debate organised by FES Macedonia together with the Institute for Political and Intercultural Studies to promote the new publication “Power Sharing and the Implementation of the Ohrid Framework Agreement” (FES Macedonia 2008). In this regard, the publication has lived up to its main aim, summarised in the following statement by Florian Bieber (University of Kent), an expert for questions of power sharing in the Balkan region who was chairing the debate: “to replace the vague ideological statements that have dominated public debate on the Agreement so far with academic analysis of facts.” Stefan Dehnert, the Director of FES Macedonia added, that the fact that the publication with one exception brings together mainly contributions from Albanian authors owes to this aim of initiating transparent debate by giving the floor first to the academic perspective of the group most directly affected by the Agreement.
The event itself brought together not only scholars dealing with the topic from academic perspective, but also practicioners, who had been directly involved either in the drafting (Vlado Popovski, University Sv. Kiril i Metodij) or the implementation of the Agreement (Musa Xhaferi, Former Vice-Minister for Implementation of the OFA). Most of the contributors to the volume were also present to answer to questions from the audience, such as e.g. how to deal with the vagueness in the term of a “community” used by the OFA, that could potentially apply to non-ethnic communities as well and which examples of successful power sharing we find worldwide.
With its mix of participants, the debate opened up the opportunitity to discuss the more narrowly academic publication within the wider perspective of ongoing practical challengers of the implementation process. As became clear from many contributions, one of the biggest of these challenges challenges is still the fact that political discourse tends to present the OFA as a zero sum game, where politicians try to mobilise their “own” community by dividing the Macedonian society into winners and losers. That is why it will be crucial to “continue interethnic dialogue on the OFA topic by topic” (Popovski). The floor is now open for further debate.
The publication is currently available in hard copy in our office and for download on our web site in Macedonian, Albanian and English.
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