SKOPJE -- Five years after the resolution of a contentious diplomatic dispute with Greece over its name, bureaucratic dithering has left nearly one-quarter of North Macedonia's population without passports.
Thanks to a bungled rollout, the country's Interior Ministry says that just 1.3 million new North Macedonia passports had been issued by February, making international travel virtually impossible for hundreds of thousands of citizens.
In addition to those who routinely need to go abroad for their work, the logjam has affected thousands of families hoping to vacation outside the country, patients seeking medical treatment abroad, and young people who want to travel with their sports teams or participate in student exchanges.
Just ask Branko M., one of an estimated 16,000 licensed truck drivers in North Macedonia, as he sits at home in the capital, Skopje, awaiting a photo appointment for his new passport instead of being behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer.
"My job literally depends on when I get my passport," said Branko, who asked that RFE/RL's Balkan Service avoid publishing his last name. Even with official promises to accelerate the process, his phone call in mid-February asking to be fast-tracked under emergency procedures announced by Transportation Minister Blagoj Bochvarski only yielded an appointment for a new passport photo in April. "If I miss the tours that have already been arranged," Branko said, "I'll be without pay for months, and maybe even without a job."
In 2019, to distinguish it from the neighboring region of Greece and to calm fears of irredentism, the country that had chafed since independence at being named "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" would henceforth be called "North Macedonia" and its people and institutions "Macedonian." Athens, in turn, would drop its objections on Skopje's path toward the European Union, NATO, and other multilateral institutions.
The Prespa Agreement gave the newly renamed North Macedonia five years from its implementation on February 12, 2019, to make the relevant changes to passports, ID cards, and driver's licenses.
Things didn't go smoothly from then on. Faced with constant criticism from the nationalist opposition VMRO-DPMNE party, which sees the country's rebranding as a humiliation that undermines Macedonian identity and heritage, the government was reluctant to champion the cause. The rollout of the new North Macedonia documents didn't begin until mid-2021.
Neighboring Albania, Kosovo, and Serbia are still allowing Macedonians to enter with their old ID cards on an informal basis, but they have not announced any official exemptions, and such cross-border travel could be blocked anytime.
The VMRO-DPMNE has accused the government of "mistreating" citizens "out of sheer spite" and tried to introduce legislation in parliament that would amend the law on travel documents.
But the governing coalition has pushed back, rejecting the opposition's amendments, and saying that such a legal move would be unconstitutional and would abrogate Skopje's commitments in the Prespa Agreement.
The new caretaker prime minister, Talat Xhaferi, has avoided commenting directly on the problem and said the Interior Ministry under Panche Toshkovski is trying to deal with it. Toshkovski has said about 2 million personal documents still need to be replaced, and he has extended the validity of the old ID cards and driver's licenses. He added that his goal is to increase the processing and issuance of passports to "around 75,000 passports per month," above the authorities' previous output.
With long lines forming outside police and other registration venues in January, Foreign Minister Bujar Osmani warned that the February deadline was part of an international agreement and citizens should brace for problems. "I'm striving to be brutally honest," Osmani said, "however, it's more appropriate to be so now than later," only for citizens to be stuck and "for us, in some way, to be the cause of it."
Deputy Interior Minister Mitko Bojmacaliyev has said the addition this month of 85,000 new passports and some 300,000 new application forms should allow the system to function normally. "You can't travel anywhere with the old passports because you won't be able to get out of the country," he warned in February. He reminded the public that "no one promised that any law to extend the deadline would be passed, so no chaos or confusion would be created" because people had been informed for years that the old travel documents would cease to be valid in February.
But tell that to the thousands of Macedonians who flock every year to nearby countries for seasonal jobs but who appear to have ignored the warnings or acted too late.
Zoran Kochovski, who owns an agency that mediates work opportunities abroad, told RFE/RL that "everyone who received a new travel document by mid-April would make the deadline for seasonal work" and that potential employers would be unlikely to wait for those without. He said some 15,000-18,000 Macedonians work seasonally outside the country, as many as 11,000 of them in Croatia alone. "I can't say how many of them have passport problems, but the complaints are big and we hear them often."
Lawyers and legal experts have encouraged citizens who suffer financial or other damages from the holdups to seek compensation through the courts.
Denis Preshova, an assistant professor of constitutional law at the Iustinianus Primus Faculty of Law at Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, says the problem could effectively deny people one of their constitutional rights. Citizens who are improperly prevented from exercising their right to freedom of movement would have "the full right to file a lawsuit against the state and demand compensation for material and nonmaterial damage," she said.
"I wonder who will be responsible once the state starts compensating all those damages to the citizens -- of course, assuming that there is an independent and impartial judiciary and Constitutional Court to decide on it -- for the desperate political, diplomatic, and administrative mismanagement," Preshova said.
A Macedonian-born former judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, Margarita Tsatsa Nikolovska, says the first task of any plaintiff in such a lawsuit must be to establish the state's responsibility. To do that, she says, a court would have to examine a whole litany of questions. "The state assumed responsibility five years ago and certainly has responsibility" in the case of the Prespa obligations, she said, "at least organizationally."
One Skopje resident, Olgica Trajkovska, filed a criminal complaint in August 2023, accusing former Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, who signed the Prespa Agreement on behalf of North Macedonia, and his former interior minister, Oliver Spasovski, of "abuse of official position and authority." In her filing, she alleged that the politicians had failed to bring administrative documents into line and thus materially harmed the citizenry.
In comments to RFE/RL, she was more blunt, accusing officials of "robbery and torture." She said the Public Prosecutor's Office still had not informed her of any action it had taken on the basis of her complaint.
The expiration of the five-year deadline has also come at a particularly challenging juncture politically for North Macedonia. Ex-Prime Minister Dimitar Kovachevski's center-left government stepped aside in January after two years in office to make way for a caretaker government to organize a presidential election in April and parliamentary elections on May 8.
There are fears that a lack of updated identification cards could affect the upcoming elections, although the Interior Ministry announced in the days following the deadline that such documents would continue to be valid domestically.
And many Macedonians might feel a little shortchanged after their country was pressured to change its name. Despite being hailed by the United Nations in 2019 as having provided "an example to the region, to Europe, and to the world" for its willingness to compromise and strike a deal, North Macedonia still remains outside the European Union.
With accession talks formally opened in July 2022, Skopje's bid for membership has stalled, primarily as a result of Bulgaria's objections over the alleged repression of North Macedonia's Bulgarian minority and the status of the Macedonian language, which Sofia regards as a dialect of Bulgarian.
For youth-basketball coach Srdjan Damjanovski, he just wants his players to be able to travel to tournaments abroad. He says the biggest problem for his MVP-Skopje club amid the current uncertainty is whether they can muster enough kids for camps and tournaments.
"The June [2023] camps in Greece were great for the kids. Now, in April and May, we were supposed to go to tournaments in Serbia," he told RFE/RL's Balkan Service. He said names, reservations, and advance payment are required "just about everywhere."
"At this point," Damjanovski said, "I can't be sure who will have a new passport. Out of 100 children, I can take maybe 20 across the border."
