Macedonia Officials Dispute ‘Mass Poisoning’ of Albanians

After a mystery incident that caused ethnic jitters, police in the town of Gostivar insisted that dozens of Albanian high-school students had not been poisoned, but the local mayor disagreed.

Sinisa Jakov Marusic

BIRN

Skopje

Mayor of Gostivar, Nevzat Bejta | Photo by: gostivari.gov.mk

Police on Tuesday officially confirmed that their forensic examination failed to identify any traces of toxins in the 60 students and professors from the local Economy High School who last week complained that they had been the victims of a mass poisoning, in a case that sparked fears of a targeted attack.
Police also said they would investigate the possibility that the entire incident had been faked.
But the mayor of the ethnically-mixed western town of Gostivar, Nevzat Bejta, insisted that the poisoning was real.
“I personally felt the symptoms of the poisoning in the school. If there was no poisoning, why did so many students and professors ask for medical help? I went there myself and felt the symptoms, a burning in the eyes and the throat,” Bejta, an ethnic Albanian, told media.

The mayor, who is member of the junior ruling Democratic Union for Integration party said he suspected a targeted attack because, he said, similar cases in the past have never occurred in the east of the country where there are no ethnic Albanians.

“This should be cleared up once and for all. We cannot allow someone to play with the feelings of the parents and with the lives of our children,” he said.

After complaining about symptoms of poisoning last Friday, 12 of the 60 people were hospitalised at the Skopje toxicology clinic but left soon afterwards.

The incident quickly picked up an ethnic tone after news spread that it happened during the high school’s second shift, when only ethnic Albanian students were present.

It happened just two months before presidential elections in April and among growing speculation about possible parallel early general elections.

Mirjana Maleska, a political science professor at the South East European University in Tetovo, told website faktor.mk that the case must be viewed with caution because it is very hard to prove that some sort of gas was fired into the classrooms, as has been speculated.

But she said that cases of mysterious mass poisonings of ethnic Albanians are not unknown in the region and that they “have been used in the past to create mass hysteria in critical pre-election periods”.

In one similarly mysterious case in 2002 in the town of Kumanovo, some 200 young Albanians, most of them high school students, complained of poisoning symptoms that caused many of them to be hospitalised.

However the authorities failed to determine any cause for the mysterious outbreak which fed suspicions that their sudden illness might have been faked.

Nikola Tupancevski, a law professor at Skopje state university, said that if the Gostivar incident was faked, “it was surely done in a political context” and that “legally speaking, false reporting is a criminal act”.
In 2001, the country went through a brief armed conflict between Macedonian security forces and ethnic Albanian insurgents, which ended with the signing of a peace deal that granted greater rights for the Albanians, who make up a quarter of Macedonia’s 2.1 million population.