With personal insults and accusations as to what party had or has more informers, the MPs of SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE started Thursday the debate concerning the modifications to the law on determining an additional condition for filling a public office proposed by ruling VMRO-DPMNE and BDI, Dnevnik reports.

Considering how the debate went, it is hardly likely, the paper comments, that the government and the opposition are going to reach a consensus over the modifications, which is an indispensable condition for such an important law, although SDSM produced no concrete remarks Thursday. What the opposition finds disputable is the lustration scope, the extension of the period subject to lustration to 2019 and the provision stipulating that only original documents should be filed to the lustration commission.

Vlado Buckovski from SDSM said the modifications aimed to complicate the lustration process further in order to conceal that a few functionaries of VMRO-DPMNE cooperated with the secret services. He underlined that modifications were needed but not in the way the government suggested.

“By extending the scope, instead of lustration there will be additional chaos and you are going to take revenge on your political rivals. VMRO-DPMNE is afraid of the lustration and uses the lustration to deal with its frustration. You should lustrate Mihajlo Manevski who does not have a file of being a collaborator but worked for the secret services and took part in political executions. You are persecuting only the collaborators of the secret services of former Yugoslavia and not the other foreign services because it will be determined that VMRO-DPMNE and BDI collaborated with them. You fear that it will be revealed that your husband collaborated with the Bulgarian services,” Buckovski said to Silvana Boneva from VMRO-DPMNE.

He said VMRO-DPMNE was to blame that BDI was a collateral damage considering that it was members of VMRO-DPMNE who planted files against them. According to Buckovski, the government has all instruments to fabricate and, if necessary, to make original files. He assessed that it was impossible to reach consensus over such modifications.

Boneva replied in the same measure.

“If you are a man, say that out of the Parliament so I can sue you. In the lawsuit for the same slander, you admitted before the judge to have had contact with both home and foreign secret services, which is unprecedented for a former prime minister.  SDSM has no idea what to do with the law. You either want or do not want lustration. And the accusation that VMRO-DPMNE faked the files against BDI officials is your cowardly attempt to set VMRO-DPMNE and BDI against one another but you failed,” Boneva said.

Rafiz Aliti rejected the accusations that BDI was a collateral damage of the lustration process. In his view, Albanians are a collateral damage, but not because of the law but because of the repression they suffered in the previous regime.