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Free Elections: a Non-Negotiable Frconditionee

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Free Elections: a Non-Negotiable Frconditionee FREE FREE ELECTIONS: A NON-NEGOTIABLE FRCONDITIONEE FREE ELECTIONS FOR FREE CITIZENS FRfield report n analysis n project informationEE FREE ELECTIONS: A NON-NEGOTIABLE CONDITION field reportn analysis n project information Project: FREE ELECTIONS FOR FREE CITIZENS Published by CIVIL - Center for Freedom Skopje July, 2016 FREE ELECTIONS: A NON-NEGOTIABLE CONDITION Published by: CIVIL - Center for Freedom Publisher: Xhabir M. Deralla Authors, Experts Team: Xhabir M. Deralla (editor), Sašo Ordanoski, PhD (chief political ana- lyst), Biljana Jordanovska, Goran Naumovski (finance expert), Siniša Stanković (CIVIL Media editor), Petrit Saraçini (PR, media), Aleksandra Jozic-Ilekovic (electoral systems expert), Sandra Gavrilovska (legal expert), Dragan Zelić (elections observation expert), Marija Tegovska, Dehran Muratov, Ermin Klimenta, Heather Roberson Gaston (special advisor) Project staff, Contributors: Sonja Eftovska (head of executive committee), Kreshnik Ajdini, Arbana Qerimi, Atanas Petrovski, Katerina Hristovska, Tomislav Kežarovski, Nikola Ugrinovski, Emrah Rexhepi, Behar Memishi, Hadis Sulejman, Biljana Everette, Agnesa Çavolli, Luleta Klica, Vladimir Perčuklievski, Snežana Milisavljević - Ošakovska, and others Observation teams coordinators and members: Monika Taleska, Elena Ilievska, Lenče Hristo- va, Nadica Veličkovska, Mide Nexhipi, Marijana Gugoski, Frosina Mitruševa, Dimče Velev, Dejan Ristov, Slagjana Angelkovska, Zorica Kostovska, Lumi Beqiri, Nenad Micov, Katerina Petanovs- ka, and others Translation services: Natasha Cvetkovska, Dijana Tahiri, Arsim Jonuzi, Gordana Aceska, MA Layout & Design: Xhabir Deralla, Ermin Klimenta, and others Photographs: CIVIL team Illustrations: Miroslav Stojanović Printed by: TP Dule 99, Skopje This publication is financed by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. Findings and standpoints presented in this publica- www.civil.org.mk tion are solely of CIVIL and its authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the donor. Contacts: www.slobodniizbori.info CIVIL, Maksim Gorky 31/1, 1000 Skopje, Republic of Macedonia 02/5209176 | [email protected] | [email protected] Web: www.civil.org.mk | Facebook: www.facebook.com/civil.mk | Twitter: www.twitter.com/ CivilMacedonia | YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/Civil.Macedonia This publication is made available the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. ISBN-10: 608-4815-00-6 ISBN-13: 978-608-4815-00-6 EAN: 9786084815006 CONTENTS | 5 LEAD-IN: Free elections. We accept no less than that! | 9 Observation and investigation field reports | 31 Political pres- sure on unions and their abuse in the electoral context | 35 Hopes and failures: Voters register, Phantom voters, & the State Election Commis- sion | 37 Phantom voters remain in the Voters Register | 43 State Election Commission... besieged by politics | 51 Unfolding Macedonian Crisis: Rigging elections at an industrial scale | 65 Uncompromising struggle for democracy | 72 Macedonia lives in a twisted reality and illusion! | 77 Preventing election manipulations | 89 Everyone has to be equal before the law! | 92 Fear does not go together with democracy | 101 Unscrupulous abuse and politicization | 107 The public has to know | 109 Free elections: So close, yet so far away | 117 The media after the Przino Agreement - a burining issue that nobody wants to resolve | 133 Media darkness and elec- www.freeelections.info www.zgjedhjetelira.info tions | 137 PROJECT ACTIVITY REPORTS | 139 Public events to make people see | 149 Civic education for active and responsible citizens | 155 Focus groups: Widespread corruption | 165 Measuring the public pulse | 170 Interviews that opened the floor to the “invisible” | 176 A contri- bution that matters LEAD-IN Free elections. We accept no less than that! By Xhabir DERALLA on the expres- sion “free elec- Insisting tions”, the mean- ing of it, sets the diagnosis for the Republic of Macedonia already. Free elections is so obvious and normal for so many European societies, and such a troubling issue for this country, for too long. What is accepted as a value and a fact of life in normal societies, is still an unreachable goal for us, here. 5 that is a goal that our organization is striving to reach, in spite of pres- sure, obstructions, and unpredictable developments in the stormy Yet,political reality of the country. Our determination has also only been strengthened as we have found ourselves in a political environment increasingly hostile to civil society actors and to any who dare to challenge the current government’s mo- nopoly on power. But what do free elections require? For free elections to take place, we need a free so- ciety, free citizens. Liberation of the society is a slow and complex process, and cannot be settled by political agreements between a few powerful individuals, irrespective of the number of people they represent. Our standpoint is that we, as civil society, need to provide information, knowledge and safe space for every individual or a group of citizens to become part of the democratic processes. We need citizens free from fear. We need citizens who are free from unprin- cipled ties to shady and deceitful power structures. We need to actively help liberate those citizens who have become so entwined in the nets of political institutions built on a system of clientelism and loyalty tests. That is how the title of this project was cre- ated: Free Elections for Free Citizens. For the past year, CIVIL – Center for Freedom has devoted its energies and focus as a national pro-democracy NGO operating in the Republic of Macedonia to a goal that has proven attainable by so many European societies, but which has persistently remained outside of our country’s grasp: Free elections. During this time, we have been heartened, and energized, as thousands of Macedonian citizens have taken to the streets, also demanding free elections, an idea whose time has come. The Free Elections for Free Citizens project has taken a multi-faceted approach to the preparations for free elections in the Republic of Macedonia. At its heart is the recogni- tion of the need for citizens to see institutions and political parties as part of a joint ef- fort to create conditions to conduct elections in a democratic atmosphere with respect for human rights and freedoms, and provision of conditions that ensure elections that reflect the free will of voters, above all, as our project was conducted against a back- 6 drop of a massive government wiretapping scandal that revealed government spying on opposition. That our project took place against the backdrop of a wiretapping scan- dal that revealed a legacy of election rigging and punishment of opposition parties, perpetrated at the highest levels of government, served to highlight the importance of this goal, and the many obstacles that lay the way of reaching it. The project, which began in June 2015 amid reports of government wire-tapping and election rigging, introduced unique approaches and methodologies that provided civic education on voting rights, and contributed to awareness-raising on electoral irregu- larities. It was conducted through daily dissemination of information and knowledge, based on long-term monitoring of human rights and political situation in an electoral context and in general. Here we stand at an end of a project implementation, but at a beginning of a long-last- ing process, full of variables and challenges. CIVIL has succeeded, through this project, to provide the basis for long-term monitoring and analysis of the political and societal processes related to the elections, voting rights in particular and human rights and free- doms in general. It is and will remain a resource for civic education, awareness-raising and empowerment of citizens to secure free elections. Finally, here it is, a publication that brings a short selection of reports and analysis, re- sulting from one-year-long diligent work of a great many people who took part in the implementation of Free Elections for Free Citizens project. It is alive and will grow, as the work of CIVIL as a human rights organization continues, not only through projects, but as an organized group of activists, human rights defenders and experts, who con- tinue collecting and publicizing cases of human rights violations, and demanding im- provement of policies and practices at all levels and in all spheres of the society. It’s been an exciting year in which we combined a variety of interconnected and com- plementary methodologies and activities, in order to face challenges imposed by the complicated socio-political reality of Macedonia. Through this project, we contributed to changes in perception of various aspects of electoral processes and political cul- ture, public awareness on elections and voting rights, and we formulated demands for changes of policies, legislation and practices to secure free elections. 7 The project consisted of several components, such as field-based research, which in- cluded surveys, focus groups, interviews - all distributed online to CIVIL’s wide and growing audience; fieldwork across the whole country in nearly sixty municipalities; analysis and recommendations; public awareness campaigns; civic education and mo- bilization on electoral and political culture; voting rights education and advocacy; and formation and administration of five regional monitoring teams and а mobile monitor- ing and reporting teams for long-term monitoring. As always, we continued to monitor the situation of human
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