If the investigative and security services of the EU were to dig deeper into the business relations of the officials in the member states and those aspiring for membership in the most complex union in the history of mankind, they would probably discover such a thick and poisonous residue that they themselves would be scared. Just take a look at the list of affairs and scandals that have been revealed in the past twenty years in which the highest officials in the country have been implicated, but also at those in our surrounding.

Unexplained assassinations, murders and accidents, robbing of banks and postal items, drugs, evidence, missing documents and people, lustrations and all sorts of stuff…In many of those scandals, regional and international elites are involved in a direct or indirect way.

Cooperation with the criminal regime

In the time of media darkness and the iron hand of the party in power that entirely captured the state, deals of inconceivable amounts were made, money was shifted from one place to another, and then returned in the country as “foreign” investments. The question to which we will probably never receive an entire answer is how many political elites in the region have cooperated with Gruevski’s criminal regime.

Gruevski’s escape shows how much those elites allow for the borders of their countries to be porous and to provide a smooth passing for a convict of such a caliber. The Albanian President Ilir Meta, equilibrates between the assessments “political prosecution” and “admitting guilt”, in a manner that even the couriers can interpret as support of their masters and the wider public as support for the cowardly escape.

In the labyrinths of money and power

Prime Minister Zaev’s question as to whether Gruevski may have entered a diplomatic (ex-territorial) vehicle against his own will and passed through four countries of which three are NATO members, in order to reach his companion, a Prime Minister of an EU member country, is not at all naïve. Gruevski knows too much, for all of them to allow for him to go to prison.

It won’t be by far surprising if Gruevski end up also in a totally different country (Russia, for example), or some other one in which money, influence and power are hidden in labyrinths difficult to figure out. And for years to pass before he is brought to justice. Or, even better for all of us, for them to deliver him as a package on our border, after they previously assure themselves that he will not start singing, or if he does start singing, that no one should believe him.

Liquidation of Gruevski?

Or, the worst of all possibilities is for him to be liquidated by the structures he cooperated with until yesterday! Let’s get things straight, there’s no doubt that Gruevski is not just a friend with the statesmen across the region, but he cooperated, laundered money and made deals both with the underground in Macedonia and around the world. And they function according to completely different rules from those that, more or less, the political elites support in the countries he passed through in order to escape from Macedonia. Yes, that would be the worst, regardless of how many wish precisely for that, because the need for justice does not imply a need for revenge. Liquidation is not justice, but opening space for countless injustices and violence. It’s better to have political liquidation than a physical one, right?

That’s why the wisest thing for Gruevski is to come back home, where a “Hague room” is waiting for him in Shutka, medical care and regular visits from his family and the believers he created throughout the years of his poor ruling and even worse behavior. If he is allowed to.