From Brussels, after a two-day working visit and meetings with EU institution representatives and the European Parliament, DUI vice president Bujar Osmani came out with a message in two layers - both of them heavy. „The European path is blocked" and „the Ohrid Framework Agreement is being eroded".

The claim about a blocked European path is no news to anyone following Macedonia's accession. Bulgaria, then the constitutional clause about Bulgarians as part of the people, then the constant push and pull between „now" and „when it's ready." But when Osmani says aloud that the dismantling of the Ohrid agreement is „organised and by plan", that's a message in a different category. It means that someone - the name isn't mentioned, but it's understood - is deliberately attacking the institutional structures that secure the rights of Albanians in Macedonia.

This isn't a simple statement. The Ohrid agreement isn't just a text from 2001 - it's the political compromise that pulled the country out of a civil war and which secured quotas, language rights, and representation in administration and police. If Osmani claims that someone is „eroding" it - then someone must be named. And that's where his speech stops.

For a reader who doesn't follow daily politics, this question may look like an Albanian-Macedonian tension. But really - this is a question of state stability. Without the Ohrid agreement, the identity of the state isn't „Macedonian" - it's a hybrid compromise that is rarely understood as such. When one political actor backs out of this compromise, then it isn't only Albanians who lose - everyone loses, because the balance that holds the country together collapses.

The question we at Metla put is this. When DUI - which has been part of the Ohrid process from the start - claims the agreement is „being eroded," what was the party itself doing during the 15 years it was in power? These written words in Brussels are important - but the reality is that the unraveling of the Ohrid process didn't start yesterday. It started gradually, with compromises, with breaches, with instrumentalisation. And all the so-far-governing parties - both Albanian and Macedonian - bear their share of responsibility.