Last Friday white foam ran through the Lepenec near Zlokukjani. From there it carried on into the Vardar. The videos and photos spread within hours. Five days later - nobody knows who released it.

The state environmental inspector announced that wastewater samples had been taken at several locations in Gjorce Petrov and handed to an accredited laboratory. The water management authority confirmed the samples are still being analysed. There are no results.

The drone that found nothing

The City of Skopje sent inspection services and a drone. It then officially stated that it has no authority to identify the culprit - that is the job of the Environment Ministry and the State Inspectorate, which promised to publish everything as soon as the lab findings arrive.

The opposition SDSM used the silence: „Four days since the white foam flowed from the Lepenec into the Vardar... what has Orce discovered after four days?” The party recalled that the mayor promised the drone footage would quickly lead to a culprit, and that there is no result. „Citizens deserve an answer. Not a drone. Not another promise - an answer.”

A political point? Certainly. But the question stands regardless of who is asking it.

„This is ecocide”

The „Green Humane City” initiative is demanding the closure of the industrial facility that released the foam. They called the case „another act of ecocide against the environment” and said it is merely the latest in a long line of incidents stemming from the absence of effective control over large industrial facilities, which evidently can pollute without fear of sanction.

They want a full analysis with publicly released findings, identification and accountability of those responsible, closure of polluters, tougher fines calculated on a company's annual revenue, and an end to settlements with offenders.

The initiative rejected the explanation that the foam came from a car wash - such a source, they say, cannot pollute an entire river system on that scale.

By the weekend the foam was gone

And that is the part that stings most. By the end of the week the white foam stopped appearing in the river. The river cleaned itself. The pollution moved downstream, towards somebody else, and the case was left without a culprit, without a chemical composition and without a deadline for an answer.

If the laboratory establishes what was in the water, the second question remains - where it came from. Until then, the only certain thing is that somebody released something into a river in the middle of a city, and on the fifth day nothing had happened to them.