Seventy days of blockades. That is how long activists on Kožuf held out last year to defend the Došnica river from two small hydro plants, Barov Dol and Paprad. In September the company pulled out all its machinery. Now activists from the Green People's Guard are sounding the alarm that the government has passed a decision extending the construction deadlines - and that machinery is being readied to move back in, under security escort.

"While many countries are removing small hydro plants because of the damage they do to nature, here we get fresh attempts to destroy the Došnica river. After 70 days of blockades and a clear position that nobody here wants small hydro plants, someone is trying again to trample the will of the people," the initiative says.

The same week the state dismantled hydro plants on Šar Planina

The activists' reaction comes just days after work began on dismantling two unfinished mini hydro plants on the Pena river. Those projects were halted because they sat inside the protected area of Šar Planina National Park.

The difference between the two cases is one single administrative decision: Šar Planina has national park status. Kožuf does not. Activists have been raising that point for years - why is the mountain still waiting for its status, when its natural wealth is the very reason anyone wants to build there in the first place?

The paperwork that is missing

Levica said it had received unofficial information about the extended deadlines and that its councillors in the municipality of Kavadarci had filed a formal question demanding full access to the documentation. The list they are asking for is worth reading: building permit applications, basic designs and their revisions, concession contracts, geodetic surveys, proof of paid fees and administrative charges, issued building permits.

That is not the list of a party trying to block a project. That is a list of things that in a normal procedure should already be public. The activists make the same demand in their own words: "Every document connected to this contract should be public. Every meeting with investors should be documented and published."

Concessions for hydro plants on Macedonia's rivers were handed out more than ten years ago. In ten years not one project has been cancelled on the institutions' own initiative - only projects stopped after people went out into the field. The Došnica is now the third such case after the Pena.

"People from all over Macedonia stood together at the blockades and defended the Došnica once. We will defend it again," the activists said. If that is the only functioning form of environmental protection in this country, then the question for the responsible institutions is a simple one: what exactly are they being paid for?