In an open letter directed to the now terminated Minister of Foreign Affairs and Deputy Prime Minister for European Integration, Nikola Dimitrov, the Macedonian Diplomatic Syndicate outlined what they called his ‘rule’ and its after-effects.
We present the translated letter below:
Nikola Dimitrov, the Macedonian Diplomatic Union has already welcomed your departure from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before, and now again, we have the honour and pleasure to welcome the fact that you will never return to the house of Macedonian diplomacy.
The devastation left in your home is unlikely to be remedied in the next few years. We will be very mild when we say that your rule in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (without quotation marks) was in a purely feudal manner, contrary to the much-promised European standards.
In the first days of your rule, you prevented the referral of twenty of our young colleagues who passed all of the legal procedures to be sent to work abroad just because they were not according to your affinities. In a short time, together with a few of your “people”, you managed to divide your colleagues into “ours” and “yours” and to nest the cancer of division in our society, in your former ministry. Your tactic of quarrel and rule had the sole purpose of sowing the seeds of clientelism in order to strengthen your rule and buy support from within the path to higher attainment. What you left behind did not interest you in the slightest.
After preventing the young colleagues from going abroad, he strengthened his rule by firing three colleagues (which, by the way, failed because the court sent them back to work, so the MFA had to pay large court costs). That was not enough, so he started mass mobbing of all those who were not according to those affinities, and initiated more disciplinary proceedings against his former colleagues without any basis, all in order for them to be discredited, punished or fired.
Of course, such fabricated procedures did not succeed as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not lost its awareness of professionalism and justice, and we as a union through solidarity contributed to the legal battle of your unjust system.
You wanted to privatize the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the then-new draft Law on Foreign Affairs, which we also toppled because it was prepared in the interest of a small group of diplomats. He became famous for his unavailability and cooperation with only ten percent of the employees, froze the careers of many young diplomats without promotion according to the merit system, and favoured only his relatives according to loyalty criteria.
There is a long list of your “achievements” and “high” moral values with which you became famous in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and beyond. Our Ministry will not have an easy task of returning from captivity to freedom. But that will not sway us, because it is unacceptable to agree to work in a corrupt, unprofessional and incompetent service. As professionals who have each installed a brick in our common home, we deserve much more than an arrogant, narcissistic and weakest foreign minister to date. That is why we continue to be the eyes, ears and conscience of our colleagues.
Goodbye Nikola.
