West Nile, fires, data centres and honours for Mladic: the week the response kept arriving after the damage

The spraying started after the raven died

The West Nile numbers moved faster this week than any institutional response. First 43 cases and four dead, the highest rate in Europe, nearly four times Italy's per capita. Then 50 cases, against two last year, and a new map showing which municipalities never carried out emergency spraying. Aerodrom is under a declared epidemic with four infected, and it did not spray. The map is a useful thing. It just arrived after the epidemic was already here.

In Resen the story is even more exact. Mosquito spraying began after the infected raven in the park died, not before. Six dead in a single season, against five across fourteen years. And in Gazi Baba they spray until 3:30 in the morning across twenty-four neighbourhoods - the emergency measure has become a weekly timetable. The coordination meeting was held on 19 August. The spraying has been running since May.

Every summer the same report, only the village names change

This week the fire left little room for analysis. 33 fires in twenty-four hours and a beech forest burning in Kicevo, then 21 fires in a single day around Skopje. At Zheden firefighters depended on hunters to reach the fire line - not on equipment, not on a road, but on people who happen to know the terrain.

The two most persistent hotspots are not even natural. For Kitka, the head of the crisis agency says someone is deliberately setting it alight, day after day. In Pelister the fire broke out in at least three separate places and pushed into the national park. The Kicevo report says four fires are still active, twenty-five put out. The numbers change every summer. The sentence does not.

Pehcevo said no because nobody would say what

The most interesting decision of the week came from a municipality smaller than one Skopje neighbourhood. Pehcevo unanimously rejected the data centres, with VMRO and SDSM voting the same way. Nine councillors, not one in favour - and the reason was not ideological. Nobody told them who the investor was, how many megawatts it would draw, or how many litres of water.

At state level the picture is identical, only larger. The government is negotiating with five or six investors, and not one name or one condition has been published. The electricity and water figures appear in no announcement at all, and the law is still being drafted. Pehcevo did not say no to a data centre. It said no to a blank space where the contract should be.

The number for the billboard and the number right next to it

When the number is good, it reaches a press release the same day. Unemployment fell to 11.3 percent - a figure fit for a billboard. In the same quarter, 101,022 people work with no registration at all, against 90,020 officially unemployed. The grey number overtook the official one, and it goes nowhere.

The same arithmetic runs through the rest. Pensions rise from September, 607 denars for some, 2,830 for others - while the pension fund's outgoings already exceed contribution income by 19 billion denars. 693 million euros in unpaid invoices do not count toward the public debt figure, even though the railway alone owes 175 million. And one man from Negotino worked eight months unpaid and got threats when he asked for his money. He is in none of the percentages.

Died convicted of genocide, and gets military honours

Ratko Mladic died in The Hague as a man convicted of genocide, and the region split immediately over how to write the news. While Sarajevo lit candles, Zvornik lit torches. Serbia is preparing him a military funeral.

Here it did not stay outside the institutions. The head of a state agency placed Mladic among the generals of the heavenly army, and the Helsinki Committee wants him prosecuted under article 407-a. The government did not remove him - it asked him to consider for himself whether to stay. The party of minister Stoilkovic glorifies the convicted man, and from VMRO-DPMNE came nothing.

The week did not show that institutions do not work. It showed when they work: after the damage is visible, after somebody else opens the subject, after the number can no longer be left unsaid. The spraying map, the fire report, the demand for the megawatt figures - all of it exists. The question is why it reliably arrives after the event and never before it.