VMRO-DPMNE official Dragan Kovacki warns about a growing practice that ethnic Albanians who want to get jobs in the military to change their stated ethnicity to Macedonian.

The Defense Ministry has a new invention that hasn’t been seen so far. After Defense Minister Slavjanka Petrovska said that she will invest in the human resources, we see that her innovation is reduced to changing of ethnicity. Ethnic Albanians are applying as Macedonians and are received in the Macedonian quota of professional soldiers. This is all part of a partisan scheme to hire more DUI activists before the elections. Petrovska should know that defense is a serious matter and does not allow for such improvisations. She is directly responsible for this partisan haggling between SDS and DUI, Kovacki said.

The usual abuse of the ethnic quotas in public sector hiring includes Macedonians applying as Albanians or members of other favored ethnic groups. But in the Defense Ministry apparently there are open places for more Macedonians than Albanians, leading to abuse in the opposite direction.