Tabique múltiple (5 placas) con doble estructura de 48mm y 2x35mm

From 2008 and onwards, the European Commission pressure in Macedonia with respect to the equitable representation was primarily directed on the police and the armed forces. This is illustrated both in the EU and national strategic documents which set targets exclusively in relation to police reform following the adoption of the new Law on police. The adoption of this Law was also an element of EU conditionality since the country was granted a candidate status and was also part of the 2006 Accession Partnership (Council, 2006b) which in the following Accession Partnership was transformed in a priority to ensure the implementation of the Law on Police (Council, 2008b). Moreover, in the 2008- 2009 period the communication between the country and the European Commission focused solely on the so-called “key priorities” of the 2008 Accession partnerships which included the police reform, but not equitable representation in general (Council, 2008b), further confirming the focus on the equitable representation in the police.187

In response to these EU ‘stimuli’ in 2008, the Government adopted a document with activities for the implementation of the most important

Author’s interview with civil servant from the Secretariat for European Affairs, Skopje, 23 December 2010.

187

There were activities directed towards equitable representation in the police prior to 2006, through trainings conducted by OSCE and European Agency for Reconstruction (EAR), see RAGARU, N. 2008. The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia: Between Ohrid and Brussels. In: BATT, J. (ed.) Is there an Albanian Question.

recommendations from the Progress Report immediately after its publication. This document, called Blueprint on the Realisation of the Recommendations in the European Commission Progress Report on the Republic of Macedonia 2008 was assessed positively by the Commission.188 In terms of the equitable representation it puts forward specific targets for minority representation in the police forces for 2008, 2009 and 2010 through the increase of 1.5% in 2008 and 1% in the following two years (Government of the Republic of Macedonia, 2008a). These targets are the most precise benchmarks in relation to equitable representation which are to be found in any of the European or national documents. My interviews with EU officials confirmed this by underlining that “the equitable representation was chosen as a suitable benchmark due to its potential of quantification”.189 Due to this focus on the police forces it is not surprising that the Contribution to the Progress Report which the Macedonian government adopted in June 2009 also focuses solely on the equitable representation in the police structures (Government of the Republic of Macedonia, 2009b). As a result, by 2009 the number of minority employees in the Ministry of Interior had risen to 20.33% in comparison to 2006 when it was 14.9% and 2000 when it was 8% (Ragaru, 2008, Daskalovski, 2009).

In addition, interviews with European officials in Brussels have pointed to the equitable representation in the police as “one of the success stories of the impact of the EU in Macedonia”.190 My interlocutors at the national level largely confirmed this observation and considered that the EU pressure brought results in relation to the equitable representation in the police.191 The latter have emphasised that the main reasons behind the relative success in this area have been clear benchmarks which were given to Macedonia as well as the parallel reforms taking place for the purposes of the visa liberalisation process (On the police reform as part of the visa liberalisation process see Trauner, 2011). The same remark was made by a representative of a think tank working on these issues underlining that “the visa liberalisation process assisted in the police

Author’s interview with European Commission official, Brussels, 11 October 2010.

189

Author’s interview with European Commission official, Brussels, 11 October 2010.

190

Author’s interview with European Commission official, Brussels, 11 October 2010.

191

reforms, including the minority representation”.192 The link with the visa liberalisation process in relation to the effectiveness of conditionality largely confirms the findings of recent research. Trauner argues that “the key to understanding the compliance of Macedonia, whose membership prospect is less certain or even questionable, is to take into account policy conditionality in addition to membership conditionality” (Trauner, 2009b p.777). His conclusions however, are limited to the justice and home affairs sector, where the Commission has at its disposal clear rules and acquis.

Still, the equitable representation in the police has not been immune to critiques. Research has argued that in this field, the efficiency of international programmes was prioritised and the people that joined police ranks as minority police officers were extremely badly trained (Ioannides and Collantes-Celador, 2011). At the same time, the question also remains as to the potential discriminatory nature of these provisions, which have already been noticed in the EU, notably in Northern Ireland, as the common EU reference point on these policies. According to the Recommendations of the Patten Commission on Recruitment in the police in Northern Ireland, a pool of qualified candidates was to be created, out of which an equal number of Catholics and Protestants should be employed (Patten, 1999). Due to potential clash between these mechanisms and the Employment Equality Directive, the UK has negotiated an exemption from the latter, although it allows for positive action measures. According to De Schutter (2010), “this illustrates how, unless EU anti-discrimination law is reformed, policies aimed at the inclusion of certain minorities may be discouraged, or even made impossible, under the existing legal framework” (p.31). The situation in Macedonia on many levels mirrors these problems, furthermore, as will be shown later it has resulted in neglect of the other smaller communities and has amplified the importance of ethnicity as the sole cleavage.

7.3.2 Implementation of the policy at the central level – burdened with