Before the earthquake, we lived on "Naroden Front" Street, opposite the once infamous "Criminal Police", as they called it. Today it is "Naum Naumovski - Borche" Street. Our house, like hundreds of others, was located on, or rather, was their yard, the current "Partizanski Odredi" Boulevard. When all that was destroyed and people were displaced to new neighborhoods, the most beautiful boulevard in the capital emerged, which the people of Skopje called "Partizanska".
It was a great prestige to live on both sides of the boulevard, much more so than on Vodno. The first beautiful houses and buildings sprang up like mushrooms. Whether because of that, or out of some envy, we jokingly called "Partizanska" "bandit street", with an allusion to how the Germans called the partisans.

Every 10 to 15 minutes a car passed. There was also some serious criticism, of course not public, that we need such a two-way highway in the middle of the city. When will Skopje have so much traffic.
It wasn't long before the boulevard became too narrow and dangerous for life. The first victims fell. The beautiful "Partizanska" became a boulevard of death, an airstrip for nighttime car and motorcycle races. And, from Vlae to the center of Skopje, more than 30 casinos and as many cafes full of young people lined up side by side, who were fueled until late at night with high-octane fuel. Mosquitoes, alcohol and drugs, ideal for madness and midnight riding on a hundred or two hundred horses.

In a few years, the "races" on the wall of death moved to other boulevards and streets. We have all seen this for years, which has become so common that murders and serious injuries with permanent disabilities ended up with routine reports in the black media chronicles as something normal. The news in a row became trivialized like reports from the end of the world: "Last night on the boulevard 'Partizanska', 'Jane Sandanski', 'Srbija', 'Plastičarska'... a serious traffic accident occurred, one person lost his life, two are seriously injured, doctors are fighting for their lives". And that's it. Occasionally, when a young life is extinguished, dust will rise for a few days. And that's it again.

And as is usually the case with us, years pass by before the court reaches a verdict, short memory – our best Olympic discipline, connections, corruption, is reduced to punishment as if you ran over a cat, not a person.
So much for our injustice that we scream about so much when someone else inflicts it on us, hurting our pride and dignity. That is our "stimulative" punitive policy for the murders of traffickers by lunatics.

Even more terrible is the attitude of the competent institutions, which are responsible and exist and we pay for prevention, for traffic control, for the protection of citizens and for respecting the laws, for our education and for us parents and home upbringing. These are our unforgivable sins. There are many other reasons why, not only Skopje, but the entire country has turned into a cartel for drug production, gambling dens, loan sharks, dealers, illegal brothels, racketeers, robbers, arsonists, various violent people…

Has anyone in charge in the state, or ambitious investigative journalists and media, done any research into how many murders, robberies and tragedies occur in Macedonia due to the above-mentioned almost legal criminal gangs that are practically under the protection of the state and the white-collar criminals who earn millions in this way, while the cost of living plummets. And if there is such research, I have not seen how much it has influenced anything to be taken. All competent institutions for the protection of citizens, with their attitude towards this evil, become accomplices in the murders, accepting the connections of criminals and the policy of impunity, most often dictated by high politics and corruption.

The protests over the murder of Frosina Kulakova are the last hope that the partisan institutions of the system will finally start doing their job. The revolt of thousands of people who took to the streets of Skopje is not only about impunity and shortcomings in the judicial system, although politics gives that sign, but much more about a whole series of failed competent institutions, or rather the entire institutional system of Macedonia. There are a million laws in the country that are stamped every day in the Parliament and stand as dead letters on paper. It is time for them to be implemented. If there is any fresh wind coming from the north, it is the students from Serbia. They are not asking for anything other than for the institutions to do their job without pressure from the government. Bloody hands have also appeared in Skopje.

Independent

(The author is a journalist and publicist)

THE LANGUAGE IN WHICH THEY ARE WRITTEN, AS WELL AS THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THE COLUMNS, DO NOT ALWAYS REFLECT THE EDITORIAL POLICY OF "FREE PRESS"