Last year, as a nation, we went through the greatest Golgotha that even our oldest citizens do not remember. We paid a huge price, over 2,100 of our fellow citizens lost their lives, many families are left in sorrow forever, President Stevo Pendarovski said in his annual address to the Parliament on Wednesday.
He expressed his condolences to the families of all those who lost their lives as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic and asked all present in the hall to pay one minute’s silence in respect for our 2,169 fellow citizens who, unfortunately, died of the virus.
He also extended his gratitude to the doctors, the medical staff and all the citizens who were and still are on the front line in the fight against the pandemic.
“They are the real heroes of this 2020 which has unexpectedly turned into one of the most difficult years since our independence; they, on a daily basis show in action that humanity and solidarity are not forgotten categories and that the decades of hard living and years of difficult transition have not dehumanized us to forget the sufferings of others” he said.
The pandemic, he said, was supposed to be a moment of sobriety for everyone in the country and lead to unification of the nation that is facing an unknown adversary, regardless of the perfectly legitimate political, ethnic and human differences between us.
“In one part it has achieved this, but in the other, it has unfortunately strengthened the existing antagonisms, widened the divisions in society and exposed institutional weaknesses, which, in addition to the health and political crisis, have undermined the economy which, at the end of the year, officially entered a recession,” Pendarovski added.
In his address Pendarovski said that the country was left without a functioning Assembly for almost nine months and for the first time since our independence, a state of emergency had to be declared to enable the system to function, the economy to survive, and the Government to have wider legal space to help citizens and businesses that were hardest hit.
“We all remember the painful scenes, even in some of the most powerful countries in the world, where people were waiting at the doors of hospitals in which there was no free bed. The pandemic has put enormous pressure on our health care system, but any objective analysis will show that the country, in general, has managed the situation with the pandemic in a rational way by systematically distributing the limited resources available to us, thus avoiding a collapse that would probably mean greater number of victims and infected persons,” he noted.
During the pandemic, he said, we managed to organize parliamentary elections, in which about 940,000 people exercised their right to vote, but the massive number of voters was not the reason for the spread of the virus.
“The elections, which during the pandemic were one of the first organized in the world, were assessed by the OSCE/ODIHR mission as democratic and it showed that we have a capacity to organize elections and establish democratic institutions in extremely complex conditions,” Pendarovski noted.
He said that he has convened the Security Council several times to agree on better coordination between the institutions and implementation of the necessary measures, and that he has deployed the Army in support of the health sector and the police, both during the state of emergency and during the crisis situation declared at municipal and state level.
“I know that such assessments will mean nothing to the families who have lost their loved ones, but the structural, decades-long decay of the health system could easily have contributed to even worse results had it not been for the day-to-day efforts of health care workers, army, police and thousands of volunteers,” Pendarovski underlined.
He stressed that the first and most important task for us as a state, immediately after putting the pandemic under control is to make an in-depth analysis of the functioning of our legal, political and economic order in the past year, adding, and “to learn lessons and put on a sound footing all parts of the system that failed, because no one knows whether a new pandemic is awaiting us on the next curve of history.”
President Pendarovski said that at the outset of the next year he will initiate a public debate that should contribute to the drafting of laws on the state of war and emergency and a legal framework for reform of the entire crisis management system.
“At the same time, our only goal should be to further define the legal basis for better coordination between institutions in times of crisis, greater transparency in their work and better control mechanisms as a barrier against possible abuses by the government,” he said.
However, he added, there is something that cannot be regulated by any law and no decree or rulebook helps.
“The restriction of human rights and freedoms, and especially the restriction of movement and social contacts between people, which was a coercive measure, had a significant negative psychological effect on citizens. I have a feeling that in such conditions, when our primary task was to fight the virus, not only here and not only we, we paid insufficient attention to the vulnerability of citizens to propaganda, misinformation and false news in this special social situation,” he stressed.
He pointed out that dealing with the health crisis is a serious challenge, but avoiding the long-term negative consequences of citizens’ distrust of institutions, but also of science and profession, which intensified during the pandemic, is not a smaller challenge.
“What surely awaits us is a new wave of negative campaigns that will discourage people from getting vaccinated by spreading conspiracy theories on social media. Therefore, the vaccination campaign, which will of course be on a voluntary basis, will have to be run through personal examples. We must not allow, in the 21st century, for such serious issues, semi-literate charlatans and quack doctors to dominate the biggest scientific names and institutes that in the past two centuries, from the appearance of the first vaccines, have saved millions of lives,” Pendarovski said.
“Congratulating you all on the upcoming holidays, I want, not only as President, but as one of you, to ask you to celebrate them at home with your loved ones in order to preserve the most precious thing we have – health and life,” he said.
“Since we have endured a whole year, with masks, quarantine, isolation and limited movement, please, may we endure another month or so before we begin to return to normal! There will be time for going and hanging out and chatting with friends and comrades. But, we have lost too many people to afford new human and family tragedies,” he added.
“I wish you and your loved ones good health in 2021. If we keep the most valuable thing – health, for all other problems and hard times that life always brings along, we will look for solutions and help each other,” President Stevo Pendarovski said in his address to the Parliament.
Opposition VMRO-DPMNE MPs at the beginning of Pendarovski’s address came out in front of the podium holding banners against the President, after which they left the parliament hall.
