Ban of waste importing, vetting of all elaborates and permits for building small hydroelectric power stations in protected areas, joint interventions by the police and the environmental inspectors on the territory of the whole of the country. These are the four key requests on part of the representatives of ecology associations that they presented at the session of the Council of National Security that took place at the presidential residence Biljana upon invitation of President Pendarovski.
Unofficially, we managed to find out that during the Council’s session there were heated debates about the subject of import of waste especially the import of dangerous waste among the representatives of civic initiatives and the Deputy Minister of Environment Jani Makraduli who also attended the session. Makraduli has claimed that Macedonia doesn’t import dangerous waste, but the people who attended have told him that the Ministry of Environment’s web site contains information of import of dangerous waste.
“This is the last door that we enter in order to talk about the problems we are facing with in the last 6 years and we shall go no more to negotiate with anyone but we shall remain on the streets until the problems are solved” said Dule Gruevski, an eco-activist from Bitola who along with Arjanit Dzaferi of Eco Guerilla and Tatjana Chakulev of O2 Initiative represented the civic eco-initiatives.
He said that the impression that they had during the two hour meeting with the state leadership was that there isn’t a good coordination between the state organs and the ministries.
When you sit on the same table with the state leadership and when there is an opportunity to discuss a problem for which it cannot be blamed to someone not sitting on the same table, the whole lack of coordination by the institutions can be seen and why it brought us here” said Gruevski. he also said that he expects from this meeting on the highest level solutions to be made on the highest level as well. “There was a diverse discussion for issues that we imposed as those with a priority” said for Meta, Arijanit Dzaferi.
Still, President Pendarovski’s cabinet announced for Meta that there weren’t any conclusions from the Council’s session that would suggest or provide directions for future activities of state organs regarding the plan for solving the air pollution.
