- On Thursday MEP Giorgos Koumoutsakos will be in a working visit to Macedonia as a member of the EU –Macedonia Mixed Parliamentary Committee. As part of the delegation, German MEP of Greek origin Jorgo Chatzimarkakis will visit Macedonia too. According to projections and announcements, the Mixed Committee will chair in Skopje on 18-19 February. MEPs Koumoutsakos and Chatzimarkakis will meet with PM Nikola Gruevski and Deputy PM Vasko Naumovski.

We believe that there are signals for optimism and that further headway in resolving the name issue is possible very soon, said Spanish Ambassador to Macedonia Maria Garcia de Lara in her interview for Radio Free Europe.

- Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski expects UN-appointed name issue mediator Matthew Nimetz to put forward new ideas and possibilities for overcoming the issue with Greece in Skopje on 23 and 24 February. “Mediator Nimetz’s visit to Skopje is expected with optimism and hope that headway will be made in resolving the name issue,” he said.

The Skopje with the present look of its square does not look like a capital and resembles more a little provincial town. However, the government project is going to turn it into a metropolis. Its identity needs to be reinvented. Baroque and Classicism, as styles for the projected buildings, are quite justified. The urban methodology principles impose such a way of building. These were some of the comments of the participants in the Thursday debate Skopje 2014 organized by the recently established Dimitrie Cuposki Institute, whose founders distanced themselves from having any relations with certain political parties.

The European Parliament endorsed Wednesday rapporteur Zoran Thaler’s report on Macedonia with a majority vote. The report recommends that the Council of Ministers of the EU sets a date for starting talks with Macedonia in March.

 

Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski is paying an official visit to the Czech Republic. His Czech counterpart Jan Fischer said the Czech Republic would carry on supporting the expansion of the Union toward the Western Balkans. He believes that the assessments that Macedonia will destabilize unless the name issue is resolved in the next 6 months are too dramatic.

The Macedonian Ambassador to Australia, Pero Stojanovski, is going to call for an official explanation from the Australian authorities of the speech of the prime minister of South Australia, Mike Rann, who blamed Macedonia of stealing Greek history at a Greek festival. Some of the media in Australia warn that Rann could face accusations of stirring hatred among communities in Australia.

The relations between Macedonia and Albania are good, but effort should be made to improve the economic ties, said the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Macedonia and Albania, Antonio Milososki and Ilir Meta in Tirana, Albania, Monday.

Adopting the European principles of dialogue, friendship and mutual understanding, Macedonia and Albania make the most notable contribution to the European future of the region, Minister Milososki said in his address at the diplomatic academy of the Albanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

UN mediator Matthew Nimetz will pay 23 February a visit to Skopje for talks with Macedonian authorities, confirmed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Macedonia.

 

The Macedonia-Greece name issue became for a moment part of this year’s security conference in Munich when Macedonian President Gjorge Ivanov talked in his address Saturday about the Greek blocks of Macedonia’s Euro-Atlantic integration, Utrinski vesnik reports. President Ivanov (officially presented as Macedonian president) dedicated half of his 15-minute address in the panel discussion on the future of the European and global security to the name issue. He said that Athens presented the name dispute as a security issue with absurd arguments and that all Greek governments deluded the international public, arguing that Macedonia had territorial claims.

Greek Ambassador to Berlin Dimitrios Kypreos, a little theatrically, to make a stronger impression, accused President Ivanov of “monopolizing the collective security speech with the name issue in the same way you want to monopolize the name. If someone starts thinking that the fall of the iron curtain upset Greece, then we are entering an irrational mental construction”.

- Deputy Prime Minister Zoran Stavreski said the financial crisis would slow down the growth of Greece, which was not going to be at all positive for Macedonia, considering that Greece was an important trade partner. He does not expect a dramatic change of investments in 2010 and believes that due to smaller costs investors will wish to keep their positions in the Macedonian market.

The center of Skopje is going to have a new look by 2014 with new buildings, some 20 monuments and retouched and decorated facades of the present buildings surrounding the Macedonia Square.

The construction of these buildings and monuments has been planned and is being realized by the Government and the Ministry of Culture, as some of it is being carried out by the Municipality of Centar. The vision of Skopje’s new look was presented Thursday with a 3D computer animation in the attendance of Centar Mayor Vladimir Todorovik, Culture Minister Elizabeta Kanceska-Milevska, architects and other guests.

- Greek PM George Papandreou accepted PM Gruevski’s invitation for new meeting a greater preparation is required but in order the meeting to take place, stated Papandreou’s cabinet. On Thursday, MEP Zoran Thaler asked the European Parliament if there is a possibility the EU to appoint a high EU representative that will work in Athens and Skopje in order to solve the name row.

Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski invited his Greek counterpart George Papandreou to a meeting in Macedonia or some other place. The meeting would aim to promote the bilateral relations and the efforts for resolving the only open issue between the two countries, the name issue. Gruevski’s office said that after sending the written invitation, the Macedonian prime minister also talked to Papandreou on the phone Wednesday in order to propel the process of seeking out a mutually acceptable solution to the name issue.

- Macedonian PM Nikola Gruevski on Wednesday had a brief phone conversation with his Greek counterpart George Papandreou. Both PMs exchanged their thoughts on the economic situation in the two countries and discussed regional and bilateral issues.

 

Finland is fully supporting the setting of a date for starting negotiations for Macedonia’s membership of the EU in March or April at the latest, but I believe that the name issue should be resolved as soon as possible, Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb said in Skopje Tuesday.

“The sooner talks with Macedonia begin, the better for everyone. This will not be an easy path and I will not give any dates today, but the name row must be solved as soon as possible,” Minister Stubb said after meeting his host, Macedonian Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki.

- Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki met with Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb in Skopje Tuesday. Milososki and Stubb discussed Macedonia’s EU integration processes that are still burdened by the bilateral dispute. Macedonia’s Minister requested of Athens to show actions and not only intentions for solving the issue while Stubb stressed that this problem should no longer thwart Macedonia’s accession in the EU and NATO.

- Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, on Tuesday will pay a working visit to Macedonia and meet with his Macedonian counterpart Antonio Milososki.

 

 

 

Eight reform laws pertaining to the financial area have been drafted by the Government and provided to the Parliament for approval. They are modifications to the laws on securities, customs administration, customs tariff, customs operations, fast money transfer, prevention of money laundering and funding terrorism, state audit, and IPA.

Macedonia is not going to face a high deficit, because last year too in the heat of the crisis the country noted the second lowest budget deficit in Europe, said Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski regarding the conclusion of the IMF that the economy was recovering yet a challenge to many countries would still be their high budget deficits.

- At the sidelines of the international conference on Afghanistan in London, Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In their brief meeting, they talked about Macedonia’s contribution to the ISAF mission in Afghanistan and shared views of the talks between Macedonia and Greece regarding the bilateral name dispute.

 

Macedonian Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki and Greek Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Dimitris Droutsas had a first bilateral meeting in London, Thursday. Both Milososki and Droutsas agreed that the visit of mediator Matthew Nimetz at the end of February or beginning of March would be a good opportunity for Macedonia and Greece to elaborate on their positions once again and simultaneously give Nimetz a motivation for his engagement.  

Education Minister Nikola Todorov said Wednesday that he would not change his decision that students of non-Macedonian ethnic groups should learn the Macedonian language from the first grade even though OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Knut Vollebaek said in a letter to Prime Minister Gruevski that this was a sensitive issue and that hasty decisions should not be taken so as not to provoke disturbance.

Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki will meet Greek Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Dimitris Droutsas, Thursday evening in London.

The European Parliament Foreign Policy Committee adopted the amendments to the Macedonia report, demanding that Macedonia be set a date for starting membership negotiations in early March.
The rapporteur on Macedonia, Zoran Thaler, raised concern considering that the setting of a date had already been put off once and added if this happened again it could create ethnic tension and broader destabilization of the region.

 

Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki opened Tuesday new premises of Macedonian embassy in Ljubljana, the Republic of Slovenia. At a press-conference Minister Milososki said that the date for start of negotiations does not only depend from Macedonia, but from Greece as well. It is a good sign for Milososki that Slovenia and few other countries are supporting the EU integration of Western Balkans in the course of the Spanish EU Presidency.

According to unofficial information, UN-appointed mediator Nimetz is going to visit Greece in the second half of February at the invitation of Greek Alternate Foreign Minister Dimitris Droutsas. Nobody in Macedonia has either confirmed or denied that Nimetz would come to Skopje although Macedonian authorities have notified Nimetz a few times over the past two months they were ready for a meeting in any format and in any place.

- On Tuesday, chief of Macedonian diplomacy Antonio Milososki will pay an official visit to Slovenia where he will meet with Slovenian President Danilo Turk and several members of the European Parliament.

 

At the working meeting between representatives of the Federation of Economic Chambers (SSK) and Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski Monday, SSK welcomed the government steps for cutting profit tax, social contributions, and personal income tax and praised the two budget rebalances last year and the credit line from the European Investment Bank.

Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski said the economic crisis in 2009 had a negative effect on the real sector in Macedonia and this caused the economic growth to slow down. According to Gruevski, Macedonia is going to end 2009 with a 0.6 percent decline of the economic activity. However, this is much less compared with other European countries.

Foreign Minister Antonio Milososki sent a letter to his Greek counterpart Dimitris Droutsas for organizing a direct bilateral meeting in London on 28 January at the sidelines of the International Conference on Afghanistan. PM Nikola Gruevski is not optimistic that these meetings will bring something new but says that it is worth the effort.