Skopje, 19 December 2023 (MIA) – President Stevo Pendarovski in his annual address to the Parliament on Tuesday referred to the case that deeply shocked the Macedonian public – murder of a 14-year-old girl Vanja Gjorchevska, and noted that the state must systematically and timely marginalize those who propagate anti-civilization values and contaminate the collective conscience.

“In other words, the state must systematically and timely marginalize those who propagate anti-civilization values in order to prevent some future killers who, apart from our citizens, children, adults or the elderly, can kill our collective dirty conscience again,” he said.

“The end of 2023 brought us the greatest sadness in the last decade. Through the personal tragedy of young Vanja and her family, we could see clearly the entire pathology of the Macedonian transition, the environment that all of us, more or less, created in the past 32 years. An environment in which, in the public space, we tolerated non-humans who propagated inter-ethnic hatred and intolerance, aggressive ideologies, hate speech, publicly made threats to lynch individuals and liquidate political opponents,” Pendarovski noted.

Each of us, he noted, and especially the politicians, should speak much more often and louder against these phenomena, instead of believing in the power of our democratic system that it will be able to tolerate and absorb such extremes.

“Unfortunately, the entire social system also failed because, in the name of some misunderstood democratic pluralism, it did not prevent these individuals from further polluting the public space. The mechanisms of the legal state simply must in time sanction all those who use hate speech against political opponents, insult or threaten people of another faith or nation, political parties and non-governmental organizations that work contrary to what is declared in the founding documents and, in essence, abuse democracy as indisputable value of the modern world,” Pendarovski said.