By Xhabir Deralla
Is the first more serious shift in the government of Hristijan Mickoski about to take place, just 100 days after he established it? Unofficial sources in the government, who have requested to remain anonymous, reveal that already in November, the first reconstruction in Mickoski’s government has been planned, including a change at the top in the Ministry of Defense.
According to the sources, Dragan Kovacki is mentioned as the most serious candidate for the new Minister of Defense, who in November fulfills the legal condition to hold an executive position in the Government. This raises an alarming question – is a militarization of this ministry in the offing, having in consideration that Kovacki, before becoming an MP, was an active army officer with the rank of colonel.
If it does happen, the appointment of Kovacki to the highest position in the Ministry of Defense would mean abandoning of the democratic practice of civil control of the armed forces, which is unusual, regardless of the fact that the legal limitation no longer applies. It will be a precedent in a member country of NATO, a military political alliance where the highest function of the Secretary General is carried out by a civilian, while military personnel are the ones who command the armed forces.
What would happen with current Minister Vlado Misajlovski? According to currently unconfirmed information from our sources, current Minister Misajlovski will be appointed ambassador to the UN in the place of Prof. Ljubomir Frckoski. It turns out he was only warming the ministerial chair of his party colleague, until the legal deadline has expired on the ban on uniformed persons from performing government functions. If you remember, Kovacki was offered as Minister of Interior in the transitional (Przino) government before the parliamentary elections in May, which at the end didn’t happen, among other things, also because of legal obstacles, so Mickoski’s lawyer, Pance Toskovski, was appointed.
It’s not known whether it’s only about calculations in regards to new personnel solutions and when exactly those changes will be made. It’s also not known which parties are in combination and what will come out from the intense inter-party communication taking place behind the scenes. In any case, changes at the top of an extremely significant department such as the defense are unusual, at the very beginning of a government’s term, and even more if a senior army officer is in that combination.
But that’s not the only “curiosity” being connected to the name of Dragan Kovacki. Let’s recall just a few of Kovacki’s “famous” episodes on the public and political scene in the country. The public remembers that colonel Kovacki, even while wearing a military uniform was an extremely zealous soldier, but not of the Army, but of VMRO-DPMNE. Following the intense party involvement during his service as a senior officer in the Army, at the end he had no choice, so he took off his military uniform and replaced it with a party-political function.
During his service in the Army, Kovacki “stood out” several times with his rude attacks and public discrediting of the top people of the Ministry of Defense, former Ministers of Defense Radmila Shekerinska and Slavjanka Petrovska. He didn’t refrain neither from attacks against his colleagues in uniform – he also made threats to the Chief of General Staff, General Vasko Gjurchinovski, in which, among else, he also wrote “VMRO’s hand is long”. As to the threats against Gen. Gjurchinovski, he was publically reprimanded and punished by Minister Shekerinska. It shouldn’t be left out that Kovacki lost a legal dispute with Petrovska after the series of insults and slanders against her in public.
On several occasions, Kovacki also appeared in the reports of CIVIL’s Monitoring Team, for spreading disinformation. On one occasion, he nervously snapped back at CIVIL, calling them “Xhabirs”, but only after he deleted the photo and fake news about the OSCE Ministerial Council that took place in Skopje last year. At one time, A1on published a letter from NATO according to which Kovacki had been denied a security clearance, something that has remained unclear to the public, even though he claimed it was not true.
At the time, SDSM, through a press conference, publically asked what role Kovacki had in the violent anti-European protests in July 2022, in which a strong influence of Russian installations in the country was identified.
Kovacki distressed the public by spreading speculations on social media about an alleged illegal presence of police officers from Kosovo, who actually had come to assist in the search for the vehicle from Kosovo that fell into the river of Lepenec, in which three people were killed, a cooperation previously regulated by a memorandum of cooperation.
But most importantly of all in this story is the unofficially announced possibility of a senior army officer leading a ministry. This in essence is contrary to democratic principle. The “legalistic” approach in this case is manipulative and can be described with the expression undemocratic proceduralism with which Prof. Frckoski described the practices of Gruevski’s regime in the ”Pastrijada” column in the Libertas portal.
It should be taken into consideration that the anonymous sources can reveal only a part of the maneuvers that are being prepared in the government. The real intentions and consequences of these changes, especially in the Ministry of Defense, will become clear over time, but Kovacki’s history leaves doubt – whether these changes really are for the good of the country or will they remain just a continuation of the political calculations, well-known from the past and characteristic of the party now in power.
Translated by: N. Cvetkovska
The text relies on information revealed by government sources who requested the journalist to remain anonymous. The remaining information and links are from already published content. The views expressed in the text are those of the Author.
