Macedonia's Govt Coalition Shaking, PM Gruevski Admits

An ethnic Albanian woman wearing a burqa, with her children, pass a giant commercial poster of Ali Ahmeti, the leader of the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), in the capital Skopje,The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on 03 June 2011. EPA/BGNES

Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski has confirmed that there is a crisis in the country's governing coalition consisting of his rightist party VMRO-DPMNE, and the ethnic Albanian Democratic Union for Integration.

According to Gruevski, the crisis is the result of a change in the "behavior" of DUI leader Ali Ahmeti and the DUI itself, which is "no longer honest, as it was in the past", the BGNES news agency reported.

In his words, the reason for the shift in DUI's attitudes is the result of the fact that VMRO-DMPNE did not use to have a majority in the Macedonian Parliament, which allowed for a greater role of its coalition partner.

"I spoke to the chairman of this party several times in the past few months. I have noted that certain persons are behaving inadequately, and that is the tip of the iceberg of such a dishonest behavior which does not help DUI achieve its goals that are important for the Albanians in Macedonia, and is only creating tensions. So the answer to the question whether there is a crisis is: of course, there is a crisis," Gruevski explained.

The BGNES news agency points out that the real reason for the political crisis in Macedonia are the actions of Macedonian Defense Minister Fatmir Besimi, an ethnic Albanian from the DUI, who several days ago honored a memorial in the village of Slupcani of the ethnic Albanian guerrilla separatists who died in the brief civil war in Macedonia in 2001.

The official stand of the Macedonian government in Skopje is that the Albanian separatists killed in 2001 were extremists rebelling against Macedonia's sovereignty.

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