The state owned Media Information Agency – MIA – (formerly Macedonian Information Agency) decided to shut down its three key foreign correspondent offices – in Washington, Brussels and Athens.

The posts were set up in 2012. After the 2017 powergrab, the SDSM party quickly filled the positions with its loyalists, and now one of them, Brussels correspondent Tanja Milevski, is alleging that the post is being abolished to punish her for her subsequent falling out with the Government. Milevska was an unusually vocal critic of the Government over the so-called French proposal, which imposes serious, EU backed conditions on Macedonia to meet Bulgarian demands in the area of national identity and history. Milevska says that after her Twitter criticism, the Government stopped informing her of visits by its officials to Brussels and MIA management began to ignore her while preparing her ouster.

I’m convinced that, if I was a simple microphone holder for the Government I would have been spared. I was supposed to play the role of a Government spokeswoamn and to copy its press releases. Like the previous Government, this Government also wants to MIA to operate as its press office and not a professional news outlet. It would have been illegal to abolish just my position so they abolished all of them, Milevska told Fokus in an interview.

Milevska comes from the Jovanovski family of journalists who are loudly supportive of the SDSM party and were frequently supported by EU funds to report on the Macedonian glacial paced EU integration. Her mother Svetlana Jovanovska was named press officer in the Macedonian Embassy to the European Union in 2017, and her uncle Borjan Jovanovski is engaged in promoting the SDSM imposed Prespa Treaty, which aims to rename Macedonia into North Macedonia. (Milevska subsequently informed that her mother was also fired, blaming Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani for dismissing her because of her resistance to the French proposal).

But while the other members of the family broadly support the subsequent demands from Bulgaria, that followed after the Prespa Treaty, Milevska came out as its strong opponent. She evoked the family’s communist partisan past, including fighting the Bulgarian soldiers in Macedonia, and called out the Governemnt for initially strongly denouncing the Bulgarian demands, only to accept them in the form of the so-called French Proposal after minor, cosmetic changes. She named SDSM PR opperative Nikola Naumoski, close to the Radmila Sekerinska wing of the party, for putting her on the black list.

My problems started in July, with the French proposal and with Bulgaria. I simply did my job, asked the questions that the Macedonian public wanted to be answered. I asked how come the French Proposal became acceptable, after it was unacceptable. I asked my questions at press conferences where Prime Minister Kovacevski also attended. And while my articles were fully unbiased, I expressed my personal opinion on the social media, and I continue to believe that the French proposal is unacceptable. In July and August I also raised the issue of he status of the Macedonian language in the EU, an issue that remains unresolved but is used by SDSM for its propaganda. This hurt them a lot, they went crazy after I did that, Milevska said.

The Government insists that it secured a guarantee from the EU that the Macedonian language will be made an official EU language despite Bulgarian protests – they cite the recently signed treaty with FRONTEX as precedent that will ensure that all subsequent treaties will be signed in Macedonian – which has not assured many in Macedonia.

I faced perverse, undemocratic tricks from directors such as Dragan Antonovski (MIA director) who tramples workers’ rights even though he himself comes from the journalist union. The only thing that the Government cares about with regard to the EU is to use the process for propaganda purposes. They want someone to report that we began the EU accession talks, even though we haven’t started them, and now they have no-one in Brussels to do their bidding. It’s possible that now they will send another journalist, who will be a Government spokesman, Milevska told Fokus, adding that it such case, they will find the money to fund the position, which is now being abolished allegedly as a cost-cutting measure.