President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova addressed the 14th plenary session of the International Parliament for Tolerance and Peace, held in the Assembly, with a message that sounds good on paper: "Tolerance is not passivity, peace is not silence. Tolerance is active respect. Peace is daily work."

She warned that the world faces the highest number of interstate conflicts since 1946 and spoke out against "the denial of identities, historical revisionism and the use of history as a tool to block the future of states." She presented Macedonia as a multicultural example where tolerance is lived experience, not imported rhetoric.

The words are right. The question, as always, is how many of them stay just words. It's easy to say that peace is daily work in a ceremonial hall full of international delegates; it's harder to see it in the daily lives of people living among those very same denied identities and historical disputes.

So the line "peace is not silence" is worth handing back to the president herself - as a question, not a criticism: if silence is not peace, then which are the topics the institutions stay silent on most often? Because active respect isn't proven at tolerance conferences, but precisely where it's most uncomfortable to speak up.