Series “Non-majority communities” – Description

“Both groups defended their own interests and the Roma people were put in the middle.” – Statement by a narrator.

When I asked him: “Why this, what about what you promised me – a job?”, he used… in plain words he… in plain words he said: “Sorry, you’re from a wrong ethnic group.” – Statement by a narrator.

This series was a big challenge for Peace Action during its entire process. The dilemmas started to arise in the very beginning, with the categorization of those we interviewed. By insisting on the ethnic and/or religious identity, do we contribute towards its dissection, or do we only help strengthen it? By exposing its contradictions, do we contribute to its deconstruction, or we just deepen even more the popular conception of the ethnic quotas that exists since 2001? Is our role in this process only to collect and archive life stories, or should we proceed to their further analysis? We faced all these questions almost on a daily basis. When we say “We”, we mean the project team of Peace Action, together with the interviewers who conducted the fieldwork of collecting life stories and carried the heaviest load and the greatest responsibility during the process.

We often hear that Macedonia became a binational state after 2001. In many aspects, that sure seems to be the case. The process of ethnic homogenization that reached its peak in 2001, still continues today, using the legally regulated ethnic quotas as its fuel. Furthermore, there is a general intolerance within the frames of an ethnic group towards the individuals who belong to that group, but do not share the identity characteristics of the majority. The conflict was largely interethnic, but it had some religious and other elements, too. These lines of separation often did not coincide, but intersected instead. The purpose of this series was, above all, to explore the narratives in the space between.

These interviews were made, above all, with people who did not feel like they belonged to either of the two majority ethnic groups: the Macedonians and the Albanians. Apart from them, our subject of interest were also people from these two communities who had a different religion from the majority. The main focus was on the minority ethnic groups in Macedonia: Roma, Turks, Aromanians and Bosniaks. All these groups are often marginalized, pushed to the wall and forced to pick a side. That was the case during the war and is still the case today. There were cases where the members of a minority ethnic group were divided within their group depending on the side they picked – the Macedonian or the Albanian one.

Their stories about 2001, as well as the way the post-war Macedonian society treats them, were the two aspects of this series that we were interested in. Their sufferings, their traumas, the challenges they had to face during the war – these are all questions the ordinary members of these groups are rarely asked about.

In this series, we managed to collect 30 life stories. The interviews were made at the end of 2012. A book with a selection of these interviews was published in 2014.