by: XHABIR DERALLA

It was a “night of the long knives”, in the cold December night following the early parliamentary elections in 2016. With this evil sentence at the protest in front of the State Election Commission, the President of the Parliamentary Commission for Relations with Religious Communities, actress and MP Valentina Bozinovska, marked the start of the transition of the government in power. Daily protests followed with radical and nationalist messages. “Baily, go home”, “Traitors”, “Stop Soros”… With messages like from the dark Middle Ages…

Although not numerous, the radical, supporters of VMRO-DPMNE, were loud and violent. With the well-known dark iconography, nationalism, beating of journalists on the streets, false accusations for high treason, with the “Tirana Platform” as an excuse… with the blackest campaign that can be imagined, the criminal regime was not surrendering. For months after the elections, nothing functioned, the process of establishing a government was blocked, while the institutions functioned as if nothing had changed, as if the Family was still in power. Every day. The enthusiasm and optimism were slowly starting to fade away, and fear, scepticism and uncertainty were instilled in their place.

Still, hardly anyone could have imagined that during the protests following the elections in 2016 – from which violence, from which primitivism, evilness and despicable lies, every normal person’s stomach turns upside down – that something far darker was being planned. On April 27, 2017 – the tele-orchestrated crowd, among which there were criminals, fighters, masked policemen, spies, radicals, “water carriers” and irresponsible artists and public figures with a darker mind, attacked the Parliament.

In the planning of the bloody attack – board “heroes”. Figures of the highest political echelons of Gruevski’s regime and he himself personally, the president of the state who was a marionette of that regime, the political and security underground, intelligence services of at least two countries, of which one from the region…Their target was the opposition and their leaders, but they didn’t spare neither media teams.

They attacked with the purpose to kill. Blood and chaos that lasted for hours. In the cabinet of the dark president-marionette a state of emergency was being conspired, even the hideaways where the main executioners of democracy were supposed to hide were known.

Three years later, some in prison, some pardoned, and some revived and impudent, full of black money from the Moscow-Budapest-Skopje axis and some other centers, continue to attack the fragile democracy.

Could it have been different? As a society, nevertheless, I think we made the most of it. With a fragile coalition in power, in which there are political predators in every stitch of the silk suit, with a nationalist opposition orchestrated from Budapest, which not only does not give

up the crime and violence, but calls it “heroism”, with a Swarovski judiciary and endless compromises that often seem unnecessary and exaggerated… We really do have a good outcome.

And those who think that amnesty also means forgiving, are wrong. They are bitterly wrong. Justice is (too) slow, but it always comes. That black April 27, like many other black days before and after, perhaps is put aside due to one or another “big picture”, but cannot be erased. The world was also able to see them, and we experienced them, we survived them and we will remember them. So that they do not happen to anyone ever again.