The fire on Kitka has been burning for days, and the Protection and Rescue Directorate says the problem is neither the wind nor the heat. The problem is people who come back to the same spot every day and set light again to what firefighters spent hours putting out.

The Directorate's head, Stojance Angelov, said it plainly: there are indications that at the foot of Kitka, past Dracevo, in the municipality of Studenicani, a particular group is deliberately restarting the fire day after day. Not once. Every day.

"We are doing everything we can to bring this enormous fire, spread over a huge area, under control. I am optimistic that it will be partially contained today or tomorrow," Angelov said.

Working the ground are the Directorate's fire tractors, a police helicopter, Skopje's firefighters, Directorate teams and National Forests crews. There are Pinzgauer vehicles too, ready to move in once the flames leave the dense woodland for open grass. All that machinery is being burned through on something that someone sets alight again the same evening.

The numbers that tell the real story

In a single day, at least 31 open-air fires were registered across the country. The next day, by 1pm, 14 fires - five active, three contained, six extinguished. Active hotspots remained at Morane, Vrtekica and Ramni Gaber, the arm running towards Paligrad, above Vrazale in the municipalities of Studenicani and Zelenikovo, then Trnovo in the Gostivar area spreading towards Bitovo, plus Zagrad and Strajane in Makedonski Brod.

Manastirec near Rosoman is burning too, taking vineyards and orchards with it. Tisovica is burning. So is the ground above Nezilovo, at the place called Svatovi. The large fire between Dolno and Gorno Cicevo, rated exceptionally complex because of its size, was finally contained late at night and then fully put out.

The Kavadarci landfill and a word we rarely hear

The Melci municipal landfill in Kavadarci is on fire, and mayor Mitko Jancev made no attempt to wrap that in diplomatic language. Based on what they know and on how the fire started, there are serious indications it was set deliberately.

"This is not just an attack on the landfill - this is an attack on the city, on its residents and on the environment," Jancev said, demanding that institutions investigate the case to the end.

Angelov added something few people are willing to say out loud: "There are many irresponsible people who cause fires unintentionally. What is far worse, there are malicious people who start fires deliberately out of self-interest or revenge, knowing full well they could kill someone in the process."

Knowing they could kill someone. That is the phrasing of the man running the state's protection and rescue directorate, not of some campaigning activist.

The appeal that means the system has hit the limit of what it can do

The Directorate's appeal goes to citizens: report any suspicious behaviour, especially those of you living at the foot of Kitka. That is a reasonable request. It is also an admission that the state, with all its helicopters and aircraft, depends on whether a neighbour glances out of the window in the evening and picks up the phone.

So the question is not how many aircraft we have. The question is how many of these arsonists will end up in court, and after how many years. Every summer the same story goes round in circles - it burns, they put it out, they appeal - and the list of people convicted of burning forests stays embarrassingly short. If the group near Kitka is known well enough for the Directorate's own head to speak publicly about indications, why has nobody been brought in yet?