By Nikica Korubin
The “EU Civil Protection Mechanism” was activated by our side yesterday, on a day of immense tragedy, to help those affected by the fire in the nightclub in Kochani, as a candidate country for the EU. Just as it was activated for the massive fires last year and a few years ago. The first to take in the severely injured was Bulgaria, which will treat them in its specialized centers and sent its own plane — with or without that mechanism, it doesn’t matter. Bulgaria will also cover travel and accommodation expenses for the families.
Greece took in severely injured individuals in its specialized centers, and neighboring Serbia also accepted injured people, sending its own transport. Through the EU mechanism, other countries are involved too: the Netherlands, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary. Turkey is also taking in injured people who will be treated in their specialized centers. Is this the EU that we supposedly “don’t need”?
Does the latent and insidious hate speech, constantly feeding intolerance towards neighboring Bulgaria and Greece, now sound absurd — formally through discrediting political agreements, but essentially fostering personal and collective phobias? Are all the phrases about maintaining deliberately created prejudices against the “cursed Greeks” and the “Tatars and fascists” now absurd?
It was precisely the neighboring EU member states — our first neighbors and friends — that offered help without hesitation and immediately responded to our request to take in the severely injured, and it is their doctors who are fighting for the lives of our fellow citizens. Because our doctors cannot. Because we don’t have specialized centers for this type of injury in such large numbers. Because they lack capacity and basic conditions. And do we still “not need the EU”?
Do all the shallow slogans about “reforming ourselves at home” now sound meaningless? And who exactly is this “we” that will reform? Those who spent the first 24 hours of the tragedy trying to control “public perception” and deliberately shift the blame for an incident that could and should have been prevented? And in the ongoing “witch hunt,” there’s a frantic effort to measure whose mandate — SDSM’s or VMRO-DPMNE’s — saw laws broken, who was the minister, who was the mayor, and to feverishly find “some Albanian,” preferably from DUI, so that blame can be grotesquely projected. The blame is personal, party-based, and partocratic — and the blame lies with the notion that “we don’t need the EU.”
How will this “captured and dysfunctional system” operate without the EU? Why didn’t that system act over the past 15 years, when no one should have been allowed inside that decrepit, unsuitable, and dangerous building, let alone host events there? Why didn’t that “captured and dysfunctional system” act to treat the victims in our hospitals? Why didn’t it organize and ease the agony of families searching for their children all day long? Does this “captured and dysfunctional system” not need the EU, protecting itself from us with lies and manipulation?
Because it is obvious — not only do we need the EU, but without the EU, we cannot manage. If it weren’t for the EU, whose joint mechanism would we have activated? Who would we rely on? Who would treat our citizens, whose care is the state’s responsibility? Do Bulgaria and Greece still “threaten our identity,” or was that just a smokescreen to prevent EU rules and standards from threatening the “captured and dysfunctional system”? Accountability must be taken, and an investigation must occur, but there must also be a system based on values, rules, and principles — a European system.
And so, before you continue to “weigh” the guilt and complicity, make the constitutional changes — not just as a political, legislative, and constitutional decision to which you are bound, but as a human decision that brutally affects each of our lives. Free this country from the agony of “standing still” — whether with or without awareness and conscience — for personal or others’ interests, which are difficult to control during tragedies of this magnitude.
The truth, which you have been viciously targeting all along, may yet forgive you. The truth about holding back a country that should have already begun a thorough systemic reform during EU negotiations — where such superficiality, amateurism, and negligence should never have happened. The truth may forgive us.
