Journalists' Park Cleared for the Umpteenth Time: The Municipality Has a Digger, the Ministry Has the Mandate

The Centar municipality has once again cleared the area opposite the "Nova Makedonija" building - the spot people in Skopje know as Journalists' Park. Inspection services, the municipal parking company and the Centar police station worked together. Improvised tents, mattresses, furniture and piles of rubbish were removed.

This is the second such operation at the same location within a year.

The mayor stated the problem himself

Goran Gerasimovski did not pretend this was a solution. "We are responding at this site for the umpteenth time, always at the request of citizens," he said, adding that the location gets cleared several times over but homeless people keep coming back.

And then he said the sentence that is the actual news: he is appealing to the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy to get involved in resolving these people's status and housing them.

The municipality has a digger. The ministry has the mandate

There is the whole story in one sentence. The municipality can clear. That is all it can do. It cannot house anyone, cannot provide accommodation, cannot resolve a social status - those are competences of the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy.

That is why the operation repeats. It gets cleared once, a few months later it gets cleared again, and between the two operations nothing essential changes, because the people living there have nowhere to go.

Residents of the surrounding buildings were right to report disturbances of public order, accumulated rubbish and physical altercations in that space. Their right to safe public space is real and is not in dispute. But that right is delivered by a solution, not by a digger that shows up twice a year.

How many times does the same operation have to be repeated?

The municipality says that once the work is finished, the space will be completely cleared and returned to residents as safe public space. It probably will be - for a while.

The question for the Labour Ministry is whether it has a plan for housing homeless people in Skopje, what its capacity is, and how many people use it. If the answer to those three questions is not publicly available, the next operation in Journalists' Park is only a matter of months away.