President Trajkovski

‘Controlled flight into terrain’ the air crash investigators term it.

Inside the polished and elegant coffin how much was there – and how much of it was actually him? Some meat from the slopes of the ragged, winter hills of Bosnia Herzegovina. But, on his gravestone the words: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God’.

At the head of the grave they erected a bust though it failed to capture the radiance of his face; the boyish grin; the charm; the holy light; the broad shoulders of his giant frame that had made him look, in his dark suit, rather more imposing that his own dark-glassed bodyguards.

Quiz:

Name two famous Macedonians.

The obvious first answer – Alexander the Great.

Alternative history:

What if the childhood tutor of Alexander the Great, the famous Macedonian, had not been Aristotle (as it was) but had been – John Wesley. How different would the world be now? Instead of a maker of endless war – what if the world had had to contend with a peacemaker?

John Wesley:

And surely all our declamations on the strength of human reason, and the eminence of our virtues, are no more than the cant and jargon of pride and ignorance, so long as there is such a thing as war in the world. Men in general can never be allowed to be reasonable creatures, till they know not war any more. So long as this monster stalks uncontrolled, where is reason, virtue, humanity? They are utterly excluded; they have no place; they are a name, and nothing more.

(And yes, the obvious second famous Macedonian is Mother Teresa.)

But – Boris Trajkovski, second president of the Republic of Macedonia from 1999 to 2004, was tutored by John Wesley.

The Methodist Youth Group led him to training as a lay minister and being a lay minister to being exiled by the communist government to the distant hills where he tended a tattered congregation of poor gypsies in the Evangelical Methodist Church of Macedonia.

War in Kosovo: a dirty street fight between the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Albanian army, the illegal air forces of NATO, the army of Serbia and Montenegro, 13,000 dead or missing, rape, arson, terror, two million ethnically cleansed – a ‘humanitarian war’.

And next? Macedonia.

It is not called a war, ‘the 2001 Macedonian insurgency’ – platoons of tanks and artillery, torture, war crimes, burning mosques, people’s skin cut off with knives – for less than 200 people were killed and only 170,000 people were displaced.

How much would it have taken to make it the next sorry Balkan civil war? How much did it take to avoid that? One man. One president.

As the countless drops of the boundless ocean
Or the myriad leaves of a huge banyan tree
Peacefully remain side by side,
Even so, all human beings will someday live side by side
In a perfect oneness-world.

‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God’.

Dhiraja