Rudie van Meurs (1939) is a journalist from Holland who works a lifetime for newspapers, radio en television. Recently the Dutch organization Press Now asks him to take part in a training on journalism at the summer school of the University of Skopje. The contribution hereunder, he wrote for Forum-magazine.

Since Holland turns into a banana republic, it has lost his custom to judge the others

Normally I would have start with critical observations. I would have mentioned the car drivers who seemed to be so full of aggression against pedestrians, that they fight a constant battle to prevent them crossing the roundabouts. Once it happened that a car stopped for a pedestrian crossing. I waved my hand to thank him for that unusual behavior, but than I discovered that he only stopped to dump his dirt on the Boulevard Koco Racin. He suddenly stepped on the gas and by hurriedly shrink back I could survive.
Normally I would have shared my experiences in the morning on my way to the university, where I walk almost invisible in a cloud of black smoke, poured out by old, noisy busses. After some days I started to understand why everone in this town is still smoking. At the end it does not matter if you have been biten by the dog or by the cat.
I would also have expressed my astonishment, seeing these thousands of plastic bottles in the Vardar, the glassplinters and dirt on the bank of the river and the dump of old cars near the stone bridge – a place potentially to turn in the most bountiful and shadowy place of te town.
And I would have shown my abhorrence about the millennium-cross that as a burning altar rises up in the mountains. I have asked several people after the intention of the cross. Nobody knew. They even did not know for which God the cross was erected. Or that the cross was part of black magic to drive away the devils of discrimination, fraud and corruption who conquered Macadonia.

I am from Holland, a country of clergymen. Where we used to put up our finger when something goes wrong in the world. We always thought we knew better and every time again we warned the world for the last time.
But then, the first time for ages, a politician named Pim Fortuyn was shot by a disturbed man in front of the radio- en televisionstudio’s in Hilversum. And then, his heirs – brought in parliament on the waves of Fortuyns posthumous energy – turned the country into a banana republic. Since then almost every day something outrageous happens – a vice-minister leaves after staying six hours in power. Another withdraw because she thinks she could not make it. A third expresses such stupid remarks that the prime minister and the rest of the government are embarassed. And continuously members of parliament withdraw because they were involved in lies and fraud.
And that’s why I feel we have forfeit our custom to judge the other. Yesterday the organization Transparency explained me that Macedonia occupies the fifteenth place in the index of the most corrupted countries in the world. But I decided that I would not show my reluctance anymore.

In stead I promise to hail the progress made in the great Macedonian Republic. So in a friendly, cosy cafe, close to the parliamentary building I was invited to meet president Ivan Andreevski from the Association of Journalists of Macedonia. He preached a new history in journalism, to begin with the new elections. His fresh Bible is a handy sized manual in which the code of honor and ethical rules for journalists are explained. ‘Every journalist should respect these rules. If you ever end up in a dilemma read it’, he exhorted. And he made himself very clear: ‘Whenever a Macedonian or an Albanian or a Roman reporter will be refused admittance to a press conference of meeting – the others will rise and leave together with their colleague.’
The other night I went to a debate in the professor’s club in the university. Two representatives of Transparancy Macedonia accused their country for dishonesty, corruption, bribes and fraud. But then I listened for almost two hours how thirty young journalists and students discussed ‘ how to stop the circle of corruption’. They were so serious that I felt the power of white raven circling above Macedonia.
Another day I sat down in the canteen of the university. Opposite me was Dimitar Baljalgiev, dean of the faculty of law. He got so touched by the idea of the Summer School for young journalists that he delegated his most promising assistant Dobrinka to organise. Next to him Aslan Bilali, a mild smiling senior professor and dean from the SEE-university in Tetovo -alias the Stoel- university since former Dutch foreign-minister Max van der Stoel did much work in the resurrection. Both universities are involved and both sent their students. And it seemed that both deans are more than collegues – sitting there, softly speeking, friendly toasting, scientists in their mid-career but still significant for the reunification of a stumbling state.
And then I met Goca. If you have ever have met Goca, you know who I mean. One day she is coloured in red. Then you will see her dressed in pastel tints with lila lipstick, refined and hardly visible. Or she is the lady in blue. Wherever she goes, she seemed to be surrounded by happiness. She runs the kitchen of the canteen of the university in Skopje and she succeeded to pass on her smiles to her five employees. She is good, man she is really good. I can tell. I have been in dozens of canteens and restaurants in the Russian federation, in Kazachstan, in Romania, in Bulgaria and a bunch of other former communist and stalinist countries. How did they punish me, these brute, disinterested, straight faced waiters who dumped their food on my plate, as if they wanted to chastise me for their own misery.
But then I met Goca. She radiates mystery. She offered me the best vegetarian meals I ever eat. She made impossible things possible: I even like Macedonia more than before.

(FORUM, bi-weekly in Skopje (Macedonië), september 2002