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WILDLY WRONG: NORTH MACEDONIA’S POPULATION MYSTERY
PROFILE
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North Macedonia’s official population statistics are not just a little off — they are dramatically incorrect. And that has consequences.
TIM JUDAH |BIRN | SKOPJE A ccording to the State Statistical Office, the population of North Macedonia is almost 2.08 million — or to be precise, 2,077,132 as of 31 December 2018.
The problem is this number is plain wrong.
At least that is the view of Apostol Simovski, the State Statistical Office’s own director. “I’m afraid there are no more than 1.5 million in the country, but I can’t prove it.” If Simovski is right — and some think he is too pessimistic — then North Macedonia’s population would have fallen 24.6 per cent since independence in 1991 when the country had a resident population of 1.99 million.
This percentage would be far higher than for any other country in former Yugoslavia — even Bosnia and Herzegovina, which suffered four years of all-out war. It would also be even more dramatic than neighbouring Bulgaria, which has lost almost 21 per cent of its population in the past 30 years.
The problem is that no one knows the true number, and it is rare that the head of a national statistical office will admit that the most basic figure for their country is not just wrong but probably wildly so.
“Believe me,” he said. “I’m frustrated.”
No consensus
There is a good reason why Simovski does not know for sure how many people live in North Macedonia. In 2011, Macedonian and Albanian politicians interfered to such an extent in the holding of that year’s census that the exercise collapsed.
Macedonian nationalists wanted a result that showed that the country’s Albanian minority were less than 20 per cent of the population, he said. That is the threshold that gives ethnic Albanians certain rights under the Ohrid peace agreement of 2001, which pulled the country back from the brink of civil war.
In contrast to the Macedonian nationalists, ethnic Albanians unsurprisingly wanted to increase their share of the population by as much as possible.
Both sides encouraged their supporters to add so many family members living abroad — and hence ineligible to be included — that before the census was over they realised the inflated numbers would be so incredible “that no one would accept them”, so they aborted the process, Simovski said.
A new census due to be held in April this year was postponed until 2021 because a snap general election was called
Illustration: Ewelina Karpowiak/Klawe Rzeczy
Some economists speculate that North Macedonia’s population is actually between 1.6 million and 1.8 million, which would still mean the country had lost between 19.6 per cent and 9.5 per cent of its population since 1991. If it is the latter figure, North Macedonia’s population loss falls within the same range as Serbia and Croatia, which have lost between eight and nine per cent of their populations.
for the same month. That election was then postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
For that reason, North Macedonia still uses the population figure from the 2002 census as a baseline for all other data. Despite attempts at political interference back then, Simovski said the census was conducted well and can be considered reliable.
Thus, to get to today’s official population figure of almost 2.08 million, births and deaths and a very small number of immigrants and officially registered emigrants have been added to the 2002 census population figure of 2.02 million.
The fundamental problem is that hundreds of thousands have emigrated — but are not registered as having done so, and no one knows how many they are.
However, Verica Janeska of Skope’s Saints Cyril and Methodius University’s Economics Institute cautioned against using foreign data for the numbers of Macedonians abroad to try to estimate the total number of people in the country.
The reason, she said, is that these figures often contain “those who have left the country over the last four or five decades as well as second and third generation emigrants”.
Also, while it might be possible to make rough estimates of the population based on various national databases, none of them — by themselves — are fully reliable.
For example, tax data does not capture people in the grey economy. However, six national databases will, for the first time, be used to cross-reference the 2021 census.
Until then, “no one can give a realistic estimation of the total population”, Janeska said.
So, until the 2021 census is completed, not only is North Macedonia’s official population figure wrong but so is the rest of
its data, which is calculated on the basis of how many live in the country such as gross domestic product per capita.
North Macedonia’s fertility rate is another example. Officially it stands at 1.42 children per woman, but if there are fewer than 2.08 million in the country, and hence fewer women of childbearing age, the fertility figure will be higher.
Follow the data
Macedonians have been emigrating since the late 19th Century but no one knows exactly how many live in the diaspora nor how many citizens are abroad. (See box.)
According to a Yugoslav census of 1921, there were almost 809,000 people in what is now North Macedonia. By 1971, according to Janeska, who has subtracted figures for those abroad and who were included in the census total, the country’s population had doubled to 1.64 million.
By 2002, of the 2.02 million in the country, 64 per cent were Macedonian, 25 per cent Albanian and the rest Roma, Turks, Macedonian Muslims and other minorities.
As everywhere else in Yugoslavia, the post-World War II period was one of industrialisation, urbanisation, education and social emancipation, especially for women. Across the world, these factors have always led to dramatic reductions in fertility rates and Yugoslav Macedonia was no exception.
At the same time, more babies survived childbirth and improving healthcare led to people living longer lives. All of this can be followed in the data.
In 1952, the number of live births peaked at just over 51,000 and in 1954 the republic’s natural increase — that is to say, births minus deaths — peaked at almost 34,300.
Ever since, both these numbers have declined. Last year, according to preliminary data, there were 687 more deaths than births, which would make 2019 the first time in history that deaths have exceeded births in the country.
Although there is no separate data for fertility rates for Macedonians, Albanians and other ethnic groups, Simovski and other experts believe that while in the Yugoslav period their demography was radically different, in recent years they have converged.
But he noted that ethnicity is not the key factor in North Macedonia as opposed to religious and hence cultural background.
Thus, Macedonian Christians began having far fewer children much earlier than Muslims, a cultural phenomenon that was paralleled in other parts of former Yugoslavia including Kosovo and Bosnia.
Of course, the largest part of the Muslim population of North Macedonia is ethnic Albanian.
Izet Zeqiri of South East European University in Tetovo said Albanian demographic trends in North Macedonia parallel those of Kosovo Albanians, which is to say a previously high birth rate that has collapsed over the past 30 years.
So while North Macedonia’s official if inaccurate fertility rate is 1.42, for the overwhelmingly Albanian-inhabited Polog region, it was 1.17 in 2018, which is even less than in some solidly Macedonian regions.
This reflects not just a sharp decline in the birth rate but the emigration of women of childbearing age too.
Because so many have left, North Macedonia has begun collating the data of babies born abroad who are registered as citizens. It is a crude statistic because other countries do not share information about babies who have their citizenship too, and not everyone abroad registers their babies with the Macedonian authorities.
Still, the number grows annually. In 2008, there were around 3,700 babies born abroad and in 2018 there were some 5,000. This means that almost one Macedonian baby was born abroad for every four at home.
Like everywhere else in Europe, Macedonians are getting older. Today life expectancy is 75.95 whereas in 1960 it was 60.6.
At the other end of the age scale, declining numbers mean fewer pupils in school every year. In 2018, there were 188,500 school students but in 2009, after upper secondary education had been made compulsory, there were 209,000. That is a decline of almost 10 per cent in less than a decade.
At the same time, almost all regions of the country have lost population apart from Skopje.
But now, according to Nikola Naumoski, the chief of staff of the mayor of Skopje, even the capital’s population is stagnating at around 600,000. While people from the rest of the country are still moving to the city, many of its residents are leaving the country at the same time, he said.
Labour shortages
Declining numbers are beginning to hit the economy.
For decades, North Macedonia has been plagued by unemployment but now the number of those without jobs is declining because there are fewer young people coming onto the labour market and because of emigration.
In the past three years, labour shortages have begun to bite seriously in certain sectors, said Silvana Mojsovska of the Economics Institute.
Services, particularly tourism, have been hard hit. Other sectors that lack labour are IT and retail. Doctors, medical professionals and construction workers are also leaving, or were until the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.
In the last few years, North Macedonia’s GDP has never increased by more than 3.8 per cent in any given year — and that is just not enough, Janeska said.
It would need to be consistently double that to result in an economy growing fast enough to be able to make staying at home more attractive than leaving.
In the wake of the global pandemic, it is unlikely that the economic situation in North Macedonia will improve and the effect on the rest of Europe and the world will also affect emigration, but so far it is too early to predict how things will change.
As elsewhere in the region then, people were leaving until the outbreak of the pandemic and may continue to do so afterwards, and not just because of money, said Janeska, but also for better career opportunities, for education, healthcare and to live in less corrupt and more politically stable environments.
Mojsovska added that worsening pollution was another factor pushing even well-paid professionals to leave. They are taking their children’s health into account, even if their standards of living are worse outside the country.
Going abroad for seasonal work is a deep-seated tradition in North Macedonia. While there is no hard data, it is clear that the phenomenon continues to this day.
Officially, for example, there are almost 1,600 Macedonians with residence permits for Malta. But Edmond Ademi, the Minister of the Diaspora, said that when he visited Malta he was told that in summer that number swells to up to 7,000. However, since many use Bulgarian passports, it is impossible to prove.
“How can you create an economic policy without knowing who is here and who is not?” Janeska said.
People are being “pulled” towards Germany and other countries that are opening their doors to labour from North Macedonia, an EU candidate country, and simultaneously “pushed” by low salaries and poor conditions at home.
One effect, she said, is that foreign investors are complaining.
“They say, ‘You promised us you had a labour force but now there is a lack of labour.’” And this, she added, “is a big economic problem”.
Unlike in richer Balkan countries such as Croatia, no one wants to come from abroad to work for Macedonian wages and conditions. The demographic situation in North Macedonia is clearly dramatic but until there is a census no one will know how bad it is. And it will remain hard to plan properly for the country with no proper statistics. In the meantime, demographers say it is important to remember that the issue concerns real people — not just numbers.
Janeska often visits family and friends in and around the northwestern city of Gostivar. She said that in winter “the city is more or less empty”. It fills up only when the diaspora are home in summer. Most people who live there all year round are old.
INVESTIGATION
Decimated Danube: Sturgeon Revival Efforts Neglect Roots of Poaching
Fishing bans and restocking aim to revive populations of the endangered sturgeon in the Danube River. But in Romania, local experts and fishermen say protection efforts fail to address the causes of continued poaching.
ANA MARIA LUCA, DUMITRITA HOLDIS, MIRA BALAN AND MARCEL GASCÓN BARBERÁC | BIRN | BUCHAREST
Afanase Ivanov caught his first sturshould we feed the tourists? Fish from the sugeon in 1954 in Sfantu Gheorghe, permarket?” a small village in Romania between the Danube Delta and the Black Sea. Dying breed
Romania’s communist rulers at the time According to a study published in August had nationalised fishing in the Danube Delta, 2019 by scientists at the Danube Delta Nationorganising fishermen into specialised ‘brial Institute for Research and Development, gades’ that had to prove their worth by exceedDDNI, there remain 26 species of sturgeon in ing the catch quotas set by the state. The more the world, out of which only six can be found they fished, the bigger the bonuses. in the Danube in dramatically declining num
“We were determined people in our bribers. Of the six native sturgeon species that gade,” Ivanov, now 81, recalled. “We didn’t once used to migrate as far as Regensburg in stay to fish just in one place. We moved around, Germany, only four survive today: the Russian had traps is several areas. Sometimes we sturgeon, the sterlet sturgeon, stellate sturgeon caught even two to three tons of sturgeon at and the beluga sturgeon. once.” “Once we caught a 290 kilo fish, withThe beluga, stellate and Russian sturgeon out caviar. But I know of other teams who are listed as endangered by the International caught sturgeons over 400 kilos which also Union for the Conservation of Nature. The had eggs.” Exported across Europe, Romasterlet sturgeon is listed as vulnerable to exnian caviar was as legendary as it was expentinction. The Atlantic sturgeon, also once pressive. In 1960s Britain, it was known as ‘milent in the region, was declared extinct in the lionaires’ food’, fetching more than £16 per lb Black Sea basin and the ship sturgeon is listed and helping to prop up Romania’s shaky fias “possibly extinct”. Some estimates suggest nances. “The state took everything back then,” just one per cent of the sturgeon that once popIvanov said. Decades later, sturgeon stocks in ulated the Danube now roam in the wild. the Danube have been decimated. In 2006, 17 The DDNI blames the dramatic decline in years after the collapse of communism in Rosturgeon populations on historical overexmania and a year before the country joined the ploitation, habitat reduction and the long lifesEuropean Union, Bucharest banned the fishpan and reproduction cycles of the fish. ing of sturgeon and subsequently extended the The August study cited dam construction, moratorium until 2021. Ukraine and Bulgaria inland navigation development and flood prohave undertaken similar measures. tection as accelerating the decline, as well as
The ban and efforts to restock the Danube the failure to enforce fishery regulations for appear to have arrested the decline of some more than a decade after the fall of commuspecies. Police, however, say poaching renism in 1989. mains widespread, while the causes are more It added, in English: “Poaching was and is complex than the measures taken to stamp it still an existing threat as a lack of law enforceout imply, according to an investigation by the ment still exists within the basin and the wild Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, caviar is still demanded on the black market.” BIRN, and the Center for Media, Data and SoRomania and the EU have spent over 18 ciety at the Central European University. million euros on restocking the Danube with
The persistence of poaching, say local exsturgeon; over 10 million offspring, particuperts and fishermen, has its roots in decades larly beluga and Russian sturgeon, have been of exploitation of fishing communities by state released into the wild, including 20,000 Rusagencies and business interests and a failure sian sturgeon in May by the World Wildlife to find for them alternative means of making Fund, WWF, which leads the restocking effort money since sturgeon fishing was banned. in partnership with Romanian and Bulgarian
“A little help wouldn’t be bad,” said Rares state bodies. Ivanov, a 40-year-old fisherman in Sfantu GheAccording to the DDNI study, the stellate orghe. “If they gave us a break, none of the and beluga sturgeon populations have imfishermen would look for ways to avoid the proved since the fishing ban and restocking law. They want us to turn to tourism? What and scientists say that wild spawning is still oc
Danube Delta in Romania. Photo: Nicu Farcas/Wikimedia commons
curring naturally “at a significant rate”. The Russian sturgeon, however, still does not seem to be spawning in the wild.
“Until now in Romania, 600 000 offspring have been released into the wild. Bulgaria also released 600 000 offspring into the wild.” Cristina Munteanu, Manager of the FreshWater Department at WWF explained. “Restocking did not take place regularly, every year, and not even according to a plan. In the first years, it did happen every year and then it became more fragmented because, just as monitoring, it is very expensive.” She said WWF has been focusing on informing and working stakeholders on conservation efforts. “We did not get involved in research because this implies a certain training that we could achieve, but which would require years,” she added.
Romania’s National Administration of the Danube Delta Biosphere, ARBDD, did not respond to an interview request.
Centuries-old traditions
The first known record of Sfantu Gheorghe dates to 1318, when a Genovese merchant named Pietro Vesconte marked the fishing village on a map as San Georgio.
The villagers say they were originally tribe of Zaporozhye Cossacks specialised in sturgeon fishing and who are thought to have moved from Ukraine to the Danube Delta. Even today, most of the villagers still speak Ukrainian and many fishermen remember a Ukrainian song the villagers traditionally sang on approaching land to let their wives known they were coming home.
Even before the communists took power, the villagers sold the best of their catch – the flesh and caviar – to Greek merchants.
“In fact, they were called chiscane which means offal, because they sold everything and they were left with only the entrails of the sturgeon,” said Nicu Efimov, the head of the village Fishermen Association.
A sturgeon fisherman since the early 1990s, Efimov now makes a living hosting tourists and demonstrating traditional fishing techniques he learnt from his father and grandfather.
The village’s original fishermen used rods anchored at the bottom of the sea, sometimes as deep as 70 metres, he said. “Sturgeon fishing is hard work,” Efimov said. “The fish only moves during storms, when currents are strong. Many fishermen have died at sea because of it.”
“But the rods are now almost history. Few know how to fish that way nowadays.”
Overexploitation
Sturgeon fishing peaked in Romania in 1975, when the country exported roughly five tons of high-quality black caviar bearing Soviet labels.
“Until 1985, we worked with the Russian method: we prepared the caviar with boiled salt water,” said Natalia, a retired lab worker who spent 46 years helping to prepare caviar for export during the communist period and after. “But in 1985 an Iranian businessman who had a contract with Romania’s stateowned Prodexport showed up with a television set and a VCR and showed us how they fished in the Caspian Sea with the Russians. So we started using nets to fish and to use sea salt to prepare the caviar.” Nichita Timofei, a retired zootechnical engineer who headed the stateowned fishing company Piscicola for two years after the fall of communism, said the nets had caused “colossal damage”. With the traditional rods, he said, the sturgeon could sometimes be damaged, “But it is a much more selective tool than the so-called tangle nets, which are basically endless fences in the Black Sea.”
Ivanov, Sfantu Gheorghe’s oldest fisherman, agreed: “It was the tangle nets that destroyed the Black Sea sturgeon,” he said. “The first time we used the tangle nets, we caught the Black Sea sturgeon, then from one year to the next it disappeared. Then we only caught starry [stellate] sturgeon. And then only small fish, three to five kilos.” In 1992, a private company called Romsturio took charge of sturgeon fishing and trade. The system, Natalia said, was the same: the fishery bought the fish from the fishermen and sold it to clients around the world. The main buyer of beluga caviar was the same Iranian businessman who packed it under his own label, “probably Caspian Sea caviar”, Natalia said.
In 2005, Romsturio was accused of poach
ing by environmentalists from the Bucharest-based Save Danube Delta NGO, which spent years lobbying for a fishing ban.
Romsturio went bankrupt in 2012, the same year that its owner, Dan Lucian Rusan, was charged with poaching. Rusan was acquitted, though the court ruled to confiscate some 140 kilos of sturgeon flesh from various species that prosecutors found on his property.
According to court records, the company faced legal disputes over lingering debts to business partners until November 2019. BIRN contacted activists from Save Danube Delta NGO and the owner of Romsturio but received no response from either.
Handsome black market prices
Though official statistics are scarce, police reports and smuggling cases suggest poaching in Romania remains lucrative. Fishermen interviewed for this story gave varying black market prices, but it is believed that a kilo of caviar can cost 1,000 euros, while restaurants pay 100 euros per kilo of fish. Such figures tally with those quoted in police reports.
In a recent case in November 2019, a decomposing 1.7-metre sturgeon weighing some 15 kilos was found on a bank of the Danube near the port of Galati in eastern Romania.
Local police said poachers probably caught the endangered fish in the hope of taking its caviar but realised that, as with most sturgeon released in the wild by the Romanian government in recent years, the fish was fitted with a microchip for monitoring purposes. So they discarded it.
At the end of September 2019, the Danube Delta Police, one of many government agencies tasked with oversight of the fishing ban, announced that they had released a 200-kilogram beluga trapped in rods placed by poachers in the Black Sea south of Sfantu Gheorghe. Its caviar was worth some 20,000 euros, the police said in a press release.
The Danube Delta Police reported that in the past five years it had confiscated some 52 tons of poached fish, of which sturgeon accounted for more than 640 kilos. The Romanian Border Police also said that in the past four years it had seized half a ton of sturgeon
Poached sturgeons. Photo: Romanian border police
The port of the village Sfantu Gheorghe, Tulcea, Romania. Photo: Wikipadia/Nowic
and another half ton of caviar.
In April 2019, the border police launched an internal investigation after a surveillance camera in the Sfantu Gheorghe area was reported broken during a sea storm at the end of March, when a boat carrying Colombian cocaine capsized in the vicinity of the fishing village and dispersed its cargo all along the Romanian stretch of the Black Sea coast.
Then minister of Interior Carmen Dan told journalists in a press conference on April 8 that the system could not be turned off, but could have been functioning at a “reduced capacity”.
Sources in the Border Police, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there were suspicions the camera “malfunctioned on purpose”, to allow poachers to collect the sturgeon during the stormy weather in March.
In October 2019, the Border Police announced a six-million-euro upgrade of the SCOMAR Black Sea video surveillance system. Multiple efforts are underway to protect the sturgeon. In June 2019, the National Administration of the Danube Delta Biosphere announced a 10-million-euro project to reassess management of the Delta.
In coordination with conservation and environmental protection bodies, the agency plans to map the fauna of the Delta, reassess the relationship between local communities and protected areas and come up with a strategy to protect biodiversity for another 10 years.
Between 2006 and 2011, the agency financed a Monitoring Station for Migratory Fish, while since 2018 the DDNI has been running a project called ‘Sturgeonomics’, in which researchers from Romania, France and Germany are working on identifying a gene that determines the gender of fish so that breeders would know which fish is female and which is male.
And at the end of October 2019, over 120 environmentalists and experts in wildlife conservation from across Europe met in Galati, a port town on the Danube in eastern Romania, at the biggest conference on sturgeon conservation the country has ever seen.
Scientists from 17 European countries and North America signed a declaration calling on authorities to step up the fight to protect endangered fish, including the creation of more sturgeon farms, close monitoring of fish in the wild and an extension to the fishing ban beyond 2021.
‘Recipe for poaching’
But in the city of Tulcea, the gateway to the Danube Delta Biosphere, Valentin Moldoveanu, a sociologist who manages Flag Delta Dunarii, a public-private partnership for sustainable fishing, said successive Romanian governments after the fall of communism had failed to pursue a coherent policy to protect the environment and the people who depend on it. “The biggest problem with the ban on sturgeon fishing – which was the main income source for the fishermen in Sfantu Gheorghe who were actually renowned for the quality of the caviar and of the fish – is that they haven’t received anything in return: no subsidies, no damages,” said Moldoveanu. “That was a recipe for poaching to flourish.”
Even so, he said, fewer and fewer fishermen know how to use the rods or tangle nets properly to make real money out of poaching. Most professionals have switched to other fish, such as mackerel, or now work abroad.
Rares Ivanov, one of the few young fishermen left in Sfantu Gheorghe, said those like him who catch mackerel or other small fish are registered as self-employed, pay taxes and make little money. They feel watched, he said, and criminalised by the tight controls they are subjected to by law enforcement agencies that raid their boats in search of illegal catch.
Local corruption and poaching exist, Ivanov said, but they are merely the result of a long history of exploitation. “No fisherman in this village has ever become rich by selling caviar or sturgeon,” he said. “We were always forced to sell the fish at very low prices and other people made the big money.” “The local value of a kilo of caviar was a litre of moonshine, some 10-20 euros. While on the international market, the company selling it earned 1,000 euros.” So some fishermen would keep a few jars of caviar aside, to sell to tourists.
Similarly under communism, Ivanov said, the authorities kept a tight lid on information. The fishermen turned over the fish and took their salaries and bonuses in return. Only when they found out the real value of their catch did they try to profit too.
“The ban came, but poaching goes on,” Ivanov said. “And it’s not people from the village. Despite all the sturgeon farms they’ve set up, wild sturgeon keeps popping up in restaurants in Tulcea. Officially, they say it’s from a farm, but with a hidden camera you find out it was wild sturgeon.” Besides catching mackerel, Ivanov makes ends meet by taking in tourists during the summer and offering them a taste of traditional local cuisine.
In for the long-haul
It’s not only in the Danube that conservation efforts are under way.
In Spain, the Migratoebre project aims to repopulate the Ebro Delta with sturgeon by making it easier for fish to negotiate the Xerta and Asco dams with lifts and ramps.
As yet, there is no sturgeon in the Ebro. Those involved plan to bring some young sturgeon from a breeding centre in France, but they need 15-16 years for reproduction.
“At the pace this species grows I don’t think I’ll live to see it,” said Marc Ordeix, the 53-yearold director of the Mediterranean Rivers Studies Centre, which is taking part in the project.
“Compared to the Danube, the Ebro [project] is nothing,” he said.
And while the scale of the projects differ vastly, so too do the circumstances facing local fishermen. Local communities around the Ebro continue to make a decent living from catching other fish. Some are now involved in eco-tourism, something those involved in the Danube efforts should look to, said Ordeix.
He also identified the importance of regional coordination.
“If all countries don’t apply the same rules, then we have a problem,” Ordeix said.
Clams, tourism and the future
Moldoveanu of Flag Delta Dunarii, the sustainable fishing association in Tulcea, said the efforts of the WWF and the Romanian government were paying off, with strong populations of sturgeon offspring in the Lower Danube.
“I think that in a few years we’ll have beautiful individuals,” he said. “But the Delta is not just sturgeon. It’s over 25 species of fish all endangered to some degree and which need coherent policies to restock.”
But he lamented the effects on local fishermen. Regulations on the equipment they can use had changed so many times that they can barely use any of their tools, he said, and cannot afford to buy modern equipment. What has been lost in Sfantu Gheorghe in terms of heritage, he said, is unlikely to be recovered.
The association Moldoveanu manages is at the start of a two-year study on whether harvesting clams along the seashore would be a viable alternative for the Sfantu Gheorghe community. But the project is in its infancy; scientists will need two years to complete the study and it will take even more time – and an initial 60,000-euro initial investment in equipment – for fishermen for forget sturgeon and turn to clams, he said. In Sfantu Gheorghe, Efimov said that after the ban most villagers turned to agro-tourism or eco-tourism.
“The people didn’t receive much help, but they tried to survive by taking tourists into their homes during the summer and using the fishing boats for trips around the Delta,” he said.
“I think that if we really tried, we could put everything in harmony. We went to all sorts of meetings, strived to find solutions, but, as we have grown accustomed to in Romania, they listen, they take notes and they do nothing. They launch projects, they announce investments, but when it’s time for results…”
FEATURE
The far-right in Europe is seizing on the scourge of COVID-19 as evidence of the folly of open borders and free movement of people.
Europe’s Far-Right has a Cure for COVID-19: Nationalism
MICHAEL COLBORNE AND UNA HAJDARI | BIRN | W hile the world draws the lessons of COVID-19 and imagines a very different future, the Swedish-based right-wing YouTuber ‘Angry Foreigner’ says one thing is already clear: “There is no such thing as EU solidarity.”
And by the look of the comments his videos garner, many of Angry Foreigner’s almost quarter of a million subscribers agree.
Tentatively emerging from lockdowns designed to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, Europe, like much of the world, is coming to terms with an economic implosion that some predict will eclipse the Great Depression of almost a century ago.
And the continent’s far-right forces think they know the cure: more nationalism.
The absence of a pan-European response to the pandemic, leaving the hardest-hit countries like Italy and Spain to do much of the heavy lifting themselves, has only served to reinforce one of the far-right’s key messages – when the going gets tough, it’s every country for itself.
“France stole masks from Sweden, and Italy was furious that no other country helped out in their crisis,” Angry Foreigner, whose real name is Haris, told BIRN. “Countries like Serbia were denied help from the EU and instead received it from Turkey.”
COVID-19, he said, has exposed the “flawed nature of globalism right now, in the sense that since everyone is connected it also means everyone depends too much on each other.”
Haris, who declined to give his surname, does not speak in a vacuum. Some of his videos get hundreds of thousands of views, while his opinions are shared by far-right figures and movements across Europe.
Such opinions, experts warn, threaten to infiltrate the mainstream as Europeans try to find their feet in societies and economies reshaped by a virus unlikely to be vanquished anytime soon. “We have already seen various radical right attempts to make use of [COVID-19] for their own ends,” said Matthew Feldman, a professor at Britain’s Teesside University and director of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. Feldman warns that the far right will seek to exploit the pandemic to push xenophobic messages into mainstream political discourse, hoping that they are adopted by more established political actors.
“This has been the working practice of fascism since 1945,” he told BIRN, “which often boils down to attempting to enter the mainstream on the back of public issues.”
Curse of ‘open borders’
Sporting a slicked-back Mohawk and goatee, Haris has made a name for himself on the YouTuber scene with videos – in English and Swedish – in which he preaches against immigration and “open borders”. One from 2019 was posted under the title Open Borders Spread Disease, a popular far-right slogan.
“You have the voice of reason,” one viewer commented on a March 2020 video in which Haris accused Turkey of wanting to trigger a new migrant crisis in Europe. Another wrote, “It’s interesting that a single YouTuber posts more factual info than the mainstream media.” The irony is that Haris himself is an immigrant, having left his native Bosnia in the 1990s as a refugee during the bloody collapse of federal Yugoslavia.
Haris prefers to characterise himself as “left-libertarian” rather than right-wing and has had links with the Sweden Democrats, a populist party with roots in the neo-Nazi scene in Sweden in the 1990s.
He looks beyond Sweden too, however; in 2017 a video featuring large groups of refugees running across European borders was produced by the interior ministry of Poland under the ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party and subsequently put into limited viewership by YouTube, meaning it would not show up as a recommended video or in searches – Haris shared it himself on his own channel under the title ‘Based Poland.’ The title was no accident. ‘Based’ is a term used widely by far-right outlets such as Daily Stormer and on forums like 8chan for a country or an individual deemed worthy of support. The term was co-opted from American rapper Lil B, who has explained “based” as meaning, “Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do.”
In the far-right universe, a “based” country is a country that is openly proud of its ethnic, religious and national background and, crucially, not being afraid to go up against what the far-right sees as the western liberal order.
‘BasedPoland’ is also the name of a popular far-right Twitter account with more than 121,000 followers and run by Adam Starzynski, an ethnic Pole born and raised in Sweden but who now lives in Poland and received Polish citizenship in 2016.
As COVID-19 swept Europe, Starzynski’s BasedPoland account fired off tweets with videos painting minorities in a negative light, such as accusing Muslim migrants and Roma communities of failing to follow social-distancing requirements. He has also sought to present eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary as better placed to confront the pandemic thanks to their right-wing, anti-mi
grant policies. In western European countries like France, Starzynski said in an April 2020 tweet, multiculturalism has undermined “social cohesion”. More monoethnic, homogeneous societies like those of Poland and Hungary are better able to confront such pandemics, so the argument goes. Starzynski did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. But he is not the only far-right figure in Poland making such arguments.
Szturm magazine, which describes itself as “national radical”, has argued that “ethnic uniformity” is a solution to the crisis.
In a March 2020 article on the magazine’s website, Szturm contributor Jaroslaw Ostrogniew argued that what Europe needs to fight the COVID-19 pandemic is “a return to ethnically uniform nation-states.”
“Ethnic uniformity,” he wrote, “ensures a higher level of social trust as well as better functioning of society, which becomes particularly important in the face of any crisis.”
Mateusz Marzoch, leader of the ‘Młodzież Wszechpolska’ or All-Polish Youth, a self-described ‘nationalist’ youth organisation and descendant of the ultranationalist groups active in Poland the 1930s, said the EU had been unmasked by the pandemic, a ‘union’ undone by the initial national hoarding of medical supplies and refusal of wealthy northern states such as Germany and the Netherlands to consider ‘Coronabonds’ to share the debt burden of harder-hit countries like Italy.
“After COVID-19, disappointment with the European Union and globalisation will increase,” he told BIRN. “I think people will realise that they don’t need the European Union,” said Marzoch. “What they need is a strong national government, a strong country that can protect them when danger comes, when something threatens them.”
“I think after this COVID-19 situation many other countries will start to care more about their own safety, their own circumstances, not the problems of other countries.”
Influence on political culture
With more than 120,000 lives lost so far in Europe, the continent is living a new normal – one in which once-fluid borders are heavily monitored, where minorities such as refugees and Roma face being stigmatised even more and where countries cooperate less and look inward for answers. Criticism of the apparent lack of solidarity among EU member states went beyond the bloc’s own borders to countries hoping to one day join.
In Serbia, a candidate for EU membership, conservative President Aleksandar Vucic seized on a March 2020 EU decision to block exports of key medical equipment to countries on the bloc’s periphery as evidence of a lack of care, while rolling out the red carpet for aid and assistance arriving from China.
“The crisis caused by the coronavirus epidemic shows once again that the EU is unable to function and that the values on which it is based are absent in practice,” said Dragana Trifkovic, chair of the foreign affairs committee of the far-right opposition party Dveri.
Dveri, a fiercely anti-western, pro-Russian party, believes the pandemic proves the wisdom of its policy against Serbia’s eventual EU membership. “Crises in the EU have been catching up with each other in recent years, from economic, political, migrant and now epidemiological, and European institutions can’t find a solution,” Trifkovic told BIRN. “It turns out there is no common policy, just a growing divide between EU countries.”
But while Dveri may be banking on a pandemic-related bounce in support, poll numbers have sunk for a number of far-right parties in the likes of Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden since COVID-19 began coursing through the continent. It may not be felt directly at the ballot box, but analysts say the message of ‘more nationalism’ may grow in influence within the political mainstream, as already witnessed in Italy. With more than 30,000 coronavirus-related deaths to date, Italy is the hardest-hit country in the EU.
The neo-fascist movement CasaPound Italia has been working overtime to promote its own brand of nationalist as a cure for the country’s ills, from online and print propaganda to grocery deliveries in CasaPound-branded bags.
But its efforts have not yet translated into greater popularity, said political scientist Giorgia Bulli, a professor at the University of Florence and co-author ofCasaPound Italia: Contemporary Extreme-Right Politics, published in February 2020. Self-proclaimed “third-millennium fascists” have yet to see any discernible rise in support since the pandemic struck Italy earlier this year, Bulli told BIRN, but this does not mean the efforts of CasaPound and their like across Europe should be dismissed.
The movement’s attention-grabbing demonstrations and grassroots mobilisation has generated headline after headline in Italian media and there is talk of a post-pandemic meeting of minds between CasaPound and the likes of the nationalist Lega Nord of former interior minister Matteo Salvini or the national-conservative Fratelli d’Italia in a more insular, EU-sceptic Italy.
“They have had more impact on political culture than on policy-making,” Bulli said.
As the party’s official mouthpiece, Il Primato Nazionale, wrote in March, “If the virus is global, the reality is that all the answers have been national.”
INTERVIEW
Anti-vaxxers are proving particularly hostile to the work of Croatian fact-checker Faktograf, says the site’s editor-in-chief.
A graffiti in Croatia’s capital that reads “Stop 5G”. Photo: BIRN
Facebook-Partnered Croatian Fact - -Checkers Face “Huge Amount of Hatred”
ANJA VLADISAVLJEVIC |BIRN | ZAGREB A leading Croatian fact-checking site, which has partnered with Facebook to weed out misinformation on the platform, says it is facing “a huge amount of hatred” for the work it does, work that the site says has increased dramatically since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Croatian politicians, websites and users of social media have all taken aim at Faktograf in recent months, accusing it of censorship.
A member of the International Fact-Checking Network, IFCN, since 2017 and the only Croatian media specialised in verifying the accuracy of claims made in public, Faktograf says anti-vaccination groups are particularly sensitive to the debunking of fake news.
Since the onset of COVID-19, “The amount of misinforming content circulating on the internet has drastically increased as people spend more time on the internet, looking for answers to questions that bother them and trying to understand the sudden changes they see in the world around them,” said Faktograf editor-in-chief Petar Vidov. “It’s mentally stressful to watch all day long how many people spread such misinformation, how fast such things are spreading, and then after all that, you get… a huge amount of hatred, threats, directed against Faktograf because of the work we do.” “More or less, it is going well, but the problem is that there is that certain number of people you will never reach because they are simply grounded in their own beliefs for a long time, they reject argumented dialogue,” Vidov told BIRN in an interview.
So-called ‘anti-vaxxers’ perceive the debunking of fake news “as a threat to their agenda,” he said.
Falsely accused of ‘spying’ and deleting content
Founded in 2015 by the Croatian Journalists’ Association and democracy advocates GONG, Faktograf last year became one of more than 20 organisations in 14 European Union countries partnering with Facebook in reviewing and rating the accuracy of articles posted on the social networking giant.
Social media users, online platforms and websites in Croatia say Faktograf is effectively censoring their opinions, a claim Vidov said was the result of a “misunderstanding of Facebook’s partnership with independent fact-checkers.”
Vidov stressed, however, that Faktograf had nothing to do with Facebook’s own removal of a wave of inaccurate content since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus at the start of the year.
“However, people have developed this assumption that it is Faktograf that spies on their profiles and deletes their content from it.” Such assumptions are fuelling “unfounded” hostility towards Faktograf, he said.
Anti-vaxxers promoting conspiracy theories
That has not stopped the likes of 34-year-old Croatian MP Ivan Pernar, who opposes vaccination, from taking to Facebook and YouTube on April 26 to criticise Faktograf, saying the site “determines what is true and censors those who think differently.”
In May, there were a number of small protests in Croatia calling for the suspension of all measures taken by the government to tackle the spread of COVID-19, to halt “violations of free speech” and a halt to the installation of a 5G wireless network “until it is proven not harmful.” 5G has become the focus of a widely-shared conspiracy theory linking the technology to the spread of the coronavirus. Faktograf has written extensively about the conspiracy theory and on Sunday, when another small protest was held in Zagreb against 5G one of those present held a banner describing those working for the site as “mercenaries.”
“At the very beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of information about fake drugs [for coronavirus], theories about how you can test yourself for coronavirus and so on – misinformation that spread primarily out of ignorance, out of the people’s need to get some orientation in all this,” Vidov said.
“What we now mostly see is misinformation directed against vaccines,” he said, describing the anti-vaxxer movement in Croatia and the Balkan region as “quite strong”.
Fact-checkers playing catch-up
Vidov, who previously worked at online news site Index.hr, said those who spread misinformation are usually motivated by money.
“People simply make money from it because they generate traffic which they then monetize through advertising services like Google Ad Sense and the like,” he said. They themselves are rarely the originators of such narratives, but simply pick them up “most often from propagandists trying to achieve something.”
Those who end up believing the misinformation are not “actors” but “victims” in the process, he said. “Our education systems have not educated people well enough to be consumers and readers of media content, which is why we have a problem with the fact that unfortunately, a large number of people are not able to spot the difference between a credible and a non-credible source of information”.
The low level of public trust in domestic as well as international bodies is another major factor, Vidov argued.
Fact-checkers, he said, have a tough task in front of them.
