The New Dark Age

Sunday, 24 August 2025 — Savage Minds

Politics conducted with eyes wide shut will not justify delayed tears or regrets

Biljana Vankovska

The President of North Macedonia, Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova, at her inauguration ceremony in Skopje, on 12 May 2025.  Photo credit: Ognen Teofilovski

Dear Madam President,

I address you deliberately in the way you prefer—in the feminine form. In fact, I write to you professor to professor, woman to woman, mother to mother, grandmother to grandmother. I believe that when we speak of genocide, of starving children as a weapon of ethnic cleansing, and of the greatest crime against humanity witnessed “live” in history, this open letter carries the voice of the majority of our citizens. Even though no one asks our opinion or counts us, I am convinced that the majority in Macedonia—regardless of gender, faith, social position, or political belief—can distinguish Good from Evil.

I write to you at this very moment as you speak with poets by the pearl-like Ohrid lake, reflecting on the Word and on poetry presented at the Struga Poetry Evenings. But allow me to remind you of Theodor Adorno’s famous thought: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Even he later realized he was not right. Today, in this darkest moment of humanity, poetry has become an act of resistance in Gaza. Every day, through social networks, we receive the cries of children dying of hunger, thirst, bombs, and curable diseases—imagine, even these cries have been transformed into verses and artistic expressions. Death itself refuses to be silenced, refuses the quiet, and sends messages to us, the living. Just weeks before he was killed in an Israeli airstrike, Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer shared his poem If I Must Die. In it, he wrote: “If I must die/you must live/to tell my story.” His words admonish us from the grave. Poet Mosab Abu Toha, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize, continues to write despite having endured horrific torture before reaching safety. Sometimes his writings are not even poems, but lists of names and photographs of innocent children and civilians he personally knew.

And yet it is strange: a people and a country that often dwell on their own suffering and demand justice for what has been done to Macedonia/Macedonians are silent now. Silent, too, is the government that was chosen by an overwhelming number of votes in the last elections. But one day soon, our—and your—grandchildren will ask, just as children in Germany asked after World War II: “Where were you when the genocide in Gaza happened? What did you do to stop it? Whose side were you on?”

The truth is hard to hide when the suffering is recorded not only by the victims but also by their killers. In Gaza, people are murdered even as they beg for bread, even as they starve to death in tents. I do not believe you are unaware of this, despite your heavy state obligations. It is your duty to know. Why, then, the silence? Or the empty phrases about “peace in the world,” suitable perhaps for some other young women, but not for you: an intellectual, a professor, a humanist, and a president—in the feminine form.

Official Macedonia, to our great shame, remains silent. Worse it is complicit with the crime through inaction. The Parliament, which during the 2024 electoral campaign you said you would use for public addresses, refused to approve humanitarian aid for the children of Gaza. Yes, I know your (limited) constitutional powers, as you know them yourself. But you also assured us that you are subversive, rebellious, that you would be a vocal president. The Government, which has primary responsibility in the sphere of foreign policy, clearly chooses not to see Evil, not to hear Evil, not to speak of Evil. At times, I even believe it has chosen the wrong side of history—the side that would relocate Palestinians to Somalia in order to build a “beautiful” Las Vegaza. It is telling that in your international visits you are often accompanied by your former student, now the young Minister of Foreign Affairs. Although you are not a member of the ruling party, your close ties with it give you the basis to summon consultations on foreign policy—or at least to share a coffee on the terrace overlooking the quiet lake. After all, you share responsibility in this domain. And unlike them, you represent the state at home and abroad. You are (or ought to be) the moral authority who can raise her voice and warn, even through the media. A stateswoman at home, but also abroad. And instead of saving oceans, to try to save children. In Gaza.

Delegates from countries that signed the UN Genocide Convention adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948. Photo credit: United Nations

Do you know that three quarters of UN member states have recognized Palestine? Even your “second homeland,” as you fondly call Slovenia—the country where you achieved your highest educational accomplishments—has set an example: it has recognized Palestine and introduced economic sanctions against Israel. Do you know that Macedonia is the only Balkan state that has not recognized Palestine? Take courage! Even your strategic partners, such as the United Kingdom—with whom we just signed an long-term agreement—announce they will recognize Palestine next month at the UN General Assembly. Your friend Macron, whom you have met several times at multilateral gatherings and took photos with full of smiles, has the same intention. The question arises: in Skopje (and your headquarters in the Ohrid villa), do fear or doubt prevail in the face of genocide? You know that Macedonia is a signatory of the Genocide Convention and that we have not only the right but the obligation to act to prevent and punish such acts. Yet we did not even muster the courage to join the collective lawsuit before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. We remain silent. We pretend the world does not exist (except for its Western part), nor starry heavens above us and the moral law within you (as Kant—whom you often cite—once said). You speak of a social contract with nature, yet as a government, you do not see that people are dying simply because they are Palestinians. Even ancient centuries-old olive trees are destroyed in Gaza. From where will the olive branch come?

The UN has officially declared famine in Gaza—a famine of unprecedented proportions. For many of the starving, there is no longer salvation, even if aid were to arrive. To make matters worse, this famine is not the result of food shortage, but of a sadistic desire to use food as a weapon, to prevent it from reaching those in need. Plainly said, it is part of a “Final Solution” to the Palestinian question.

I write with little hope that this appeal will change anything. But I must write it, so that no one can say I was silent, that I did nothing—even if hopelessly, faced with politicians who turn away from Gaza, which long ago surpassed Hiroshima in its level of destruction. I would wish that if you represent us again this year at the UN General Assembly in New York, you refrain from speaking about European integration, about the injustices inflicted on Macedonia, and least of all, about the “unfinished European symphony.” Dear colleague Professor Siljanovska-Davkova, President of Macedonia, the European symphony has turned into a military march. And you must know it. At the very least, through NATO and the “tax of our poverty”—i.e. five percent for the military-industrial complex of our greatest ally. Militarization has destroyed the EU’s soft power and its values-based policy, the former Venus. I would like to hear the Human Being, the Mother, the Woman in you speak out—raising her voice in the name of Palestine. If anything remains of it by the end of September. But politics conducted with eyes wide shut will not justify delayed tears or regrets.

The Macedonian people know the weight of suffering, having endured our own crucible of hardship. We feel an unshakable kinship with the Palestinian people, who face relentless injustice yet hold fast to their dignity and love for their homeland. Stripped of nearly everything, their spirit remains unbroken. We call upon our political leaders to give voice to our collective conscience—a voice that demands justice for the victims of genocide. Our esteemed colleague from Princeton, 95-year-old Richard Falk, who stood by Macedonia in our darkest hour in 2018, now leads the Tribunal for Gaza, urging the United Nations to take urgent humanitarian action. Stand with him. While those in power wield influence, we have only our words. Let these words, forged in shared empathy, spark the moral courage to act.

Respectfully,

Prof. Dr. Biljana Vankovska