Ohrid Agreement was signed on August 13, 2001, as the result of interethnic armed
conflict in Macedonia which lasted from January to August 2001. This document is a
compromise between the warring parties – Macedonians as the majority people and Albanians
as the largest national minority in Macedonia. Other minorities were not involved in the
conflict.
Ohrid Agreement was signed by the then President of the Republic of Macedonia, Boris
Trajkovski, and by leaders of four biggest political parties in Macedonia: Ljubco Georgievski,
Branko Crvenkovski, Imer Imeri and Arben Xhaferi. The composition of signatories itself
leads to the conclusion that this was an ethnic conflict between two parties and that Ohrid
Agreement is a document on pacification of that conflict.
In 2001 Ljubco Georgievski was the Prime Minister of the Republic of Macedonia and
the leader of the ruling Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party
of National Unity of Macedonia (VMRO-DPMNE). At present he is a deputy in the Assembly
of the Republic of Macedonia and the leader of a new political party: VMRO-People’s. At the
time of the conflict he was more deeply involved with the Macedonian party than the
President of the Republic. He unreservedly criticized the international community that it had
openly sided with the Albanian party. He claimed that an aggression against Macedonia had
taken place in 2001 by Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) as a United Nations agency.1
At that time Branko Crvenkovski was the leader of Social Democratic Alliance of
Macedonia (SDSM), the then biggest opposition party in Macedonia. Now he is the President
of the Republic of Macedonia elected in early presidential elections in April 2004. He
replaced at that post former president Boris Trajkovski, who was tragically killed in the plane
accident that took place in the end of February 2004 in the vicinity of Mostar airport in
Bosnia & Herzegovina. At the time of the conflict, as a leader of an opposition party, he
played a reconciliatory role, having believed that the cause of the conflict was in fact 1991
Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia.