This project's aim is to raise the awareness of the yang people that we (all ethical groups in Macedonia) have to live together in Macedonia. To remind them that for all of us Macedonia is the only home we have and have to learn hove to share that home whit the other persons that are living there too, regardless of the ethnical, cultural and other differences.
The project goal is to tackle the young people's perception through the approach that we offer and to influence their opinion of the multicultural Macedonia in a very positive way.
The general conclusion of the project is that we succeeded in introducing the idea of multi-ethnical tolerance and co-existence among the young people in Macedonia. We definitely got the full attention of all the young people that got in touch whit the coaster, which was our goal in the first place. A great number of discussions took place in the cafe bars, so our main goal was accomplished. The message was generally accepted by the youth. We'll give a brief evaluation on a certain aspects:
Distribution: we distributed the coasters in almost 100 cafe. The fact that we have to mention is that the all of the Albanians cafe bars that were offered the coasters, accepted them and we had very good co-operation whit them. Some of the Macedonian cafe bars refuse to have the coasters, but that number is less then 20% of the total number of bars that were offered to have the coasters. The explanations were different:
- Some of the "high-class" bars in Skopje took the coasters message as a political issue and didn't want to be a part of it;
- The employees in some of the bars in Kumanovo and Tetovo refuse to accept the coasters explaining that they need a confirmation from the bar owners for that king of decisions (to accept or not to accept the coasters). We gave up after several attempts to get the permission from the owners. We understood that as an alibi of not accepting the coasters at all. Hopefully those were just a number of 'isolated" cases that can not be generalized, but they were present.
- The rest of the bars accepted the coasters and took the responsibility to distribute them among the young people.
Attention: we can say that we got the full attention of the youth that saw the coasters, what was our main goal. Discussions: when we summarized the discussions, we got the following result: half of the youth (more or less) had positive, and the other half had a negative attitude towards the coasters. We group the reactions in the following groups:
- The feed-beck from the Albanian bars is that the Albanian youth approved the appearance of the Albanian language together whit the Macedonia.
- The comments on the idea were different, as follows: In Tetovo, and most of the bars in Kumanovo the idea of co-existence was accepted, but in a ethnically clean regions, whit less centralization as possible. The bars in Skopje had more relaxed comments, but we can still feel the effect from the previous inter-ethnical conflict from 2001.
- The Macedonian bars had a variety of comments, but the general one is that the inter-ethnical problems in Macedonia are imported from abroad (referring to the USA and the EC). The explanation of that comment is that before the crisis in 2001, Macedonia never had inter-ethnical problems before. The optimistic comments are going in direction that we can still manage to live together as we were living before, and that we have to work intensively on the relations between the Macedonians and Albanians, because there are no problems between the other ethnical groups. Other discussions were that the Macedonians are becoming a second-class citizens because USA and the EC are supporting the Albanians by breaking the basic human rights of the Macedonians.
- The secondary expectation (to get the Macedonians use to the Albanian language) didn't went very well. Unfortunately a great number of the young Macedonian population denied the presents of the Albanian language. That is because the latest informal results from the census 2002 are that the Albanians are less then 19% of the population. The Ohrid Framework agreement and the Constitution, provides an opportunity of using the languages that are spoken by more then 20% of the population in Macedonia.
