Hours after several short audio tapes were leaked showing Zoran Zaev brag about his control over civic organizations, the Special Prosecutor’s Office, cussing at voters who don’t support his party and threatening a businessman, he responded with a cryptic, difficult to understand message.
On his official Facebook page Zaev posted a comment that appears to be an attempt to laugh out the tapes. He says that he believes the tapes were leaked by two of his PR advsiers, Aleksandar Popovski and Marjan Zabrcanec. “They’re in charge of promoting our policies and positions”, Zaev wrote, adding a smiling face emoji.
This did little to clarify his position on the tapes, and even Zaev’s supporters were confused by the response. Some took it at face value and began the process of defenstrating Zabrcanec and Popovski in the Facebook page comments, accusing them earnestly of betraying their party leader. Others said that they suffered a period of serious anguish at the betrayal before realizing that Zaev is probably joking.
The tapes were posted on an anonymous Youtube account on Saturday and their publication was announced on the Infomax news site. They show Zaev talking in a restaurant with an unidentified male companion, and were probably made on different occassions. In one of them, Zaev’s friend tells him that the voters will reject SDSM party and that he’s fooling himself if he thinks Macedonians will support him, at which Zaev swears at the voters. The tape may have been recorded ahead of the December 2016 elections, which Zaev lost despite running an unprecedented campaign of destabilization and propaganda using illegally recorded wiretaps of his political opponents, but was able to form a Government owing to the help of international diplomats and ethnic Albanian voters and parties.
In another tape he brags how the numerous and well funded NGO groups, which he refers to as “those funded by (George) Soros” were all under him. Zaev’s SDSM party coordinated its Colored Revolution campaign centered around the publication of the wiretaps with dozens of these left wing groups, many of whom are funded by Soros and foreign governments through their “democracy promotion” programs. Some of the Colored Revolution activists responded with dismay that Zaev would talk about their protests like that. Vladimir Milcin, the long time head of the George Soros funded Open Society Foundation in Macedonia posted Zaev’s comments on his Facebook page.
You just walked all over the protests, the civic initiatives. You had no right to do so!! No matter how much you thought you control these processes, the student plenum, the Colored Revolution, the protests in support of the Special Prosecutor, there were thousands of young people there, and older ones, civic activists, who believed that it is their duty to protest so that the evil doesn’t happen ever again. Unfortunately, we will not see citizens demanding freedom and democracy in the streets for a long time to come. Guess why that will be the case?, wrote activist Zaneta Trajkoska, in an angry comment aimed at Zaev after the publication of his tape.
Zaev also brags about his control over the Special Prosecutor’s Office, which was used to arrest and intimidate his political opponents. His interlocutor at one point objects that the SPO is going after businessman Jordan Orce Kamcev, to which Zaev curses Kamcev’s mother. Kamcev eventually got the upper hand as Special Prosecutor Katica Janeva used her case against him to extract money – which Kamcev recorded. The evidence Kamcev presented against Janeva led to her arrest, the abolition of her office and created a major racketeering scandal with links leading straight to Zaev.
Zaev also confirms that he gave some of the wiretaps he was using to spark the Colored Revolution to a small time Albanian gangster from Skopje, who served as his translator from Albanian. The man was later arrested for creating forgeries that Zaev was planning on using against the VMRO-DPMNE party, during which tens of thousands of illegal wiretaps were also found in his possession. The tapes were all supposed to be given to Janeva for safe keeping and responsible investigation and prosecution, but Zaev confirms that he shared them with the underworld where they were apparently used for blackmail.
Comments are closed for this post.