Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska

Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska (1971 – 10 February 2010) was a Macedonian lawyer, journalist and politician who served as deputy prime minister for European integration of the Republic of Macedonia. She took the portfolio from Radmila Šekerinska on 26 August 2006, after the centre-right VMRO-DPMNE of Nikola Gruevski defeated the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia in the July election. She died in Skopje on 10 February 2010, aged 38, after a long and serious illness. The government held a commemorative service the following day, and she was buried at the city's Butel cemetery.

She was born in 1971, graduated in law in Skopje in 1994 and received a master's degree in law there in 1999. Her early jobs were at Macedonian Television in 1993–94, in a Skopje law office from 1995 to 1997, and on customs work at the Ministry of Finance from 1997 to 2000. From 2000 she worked in Bucharest, first as director of the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative's regional centre against trans-border crime and then, until the end of 2004, as head of the Stability Pact initiative on fighting crime. In 2005 she was personal political adviser in Vienna to Erhard Busek, special coordinator of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe. A January 2007 cable from the United States embassy in Skopje listed her among five influential women in the country and described her as fluent in English, French and Romanian, with a basic knowledge of German and Greek.

In March 2006 she became president of Transparency Macedonia, the national chapter of Transparency International. The European Union had granted Macedonia candidate status in December 2005, while Šekerinska still held the integration post. Konevska-Trajkovska was not a party politician in the ordinary sense, and she began the deputy premiership a few days after giving birth. In October 2006 she said she expected accession negotiations to open in 2007 and national law to be aligned with EU legislation by 2010, a timetable the EU special representative in Skopje, Erwan Fouéré, called realistic. By March 2007 she told Radio Free Europe that the practical aim was a positive opinion from the Council by the end of the year and the opening of talks in 2008, during Slovenia's EU presidency, and that only about a third of the EU-related laws planned for 2006 had been passed. She named EU membership, NATO accession, and the fight against organised crime and corruption as the government's main priorities.

Outside Skopje's small political circle her name was little known when she was appointed. Opposition parties then accused the new government of nepotism after her husband, Goran Trajkovski, was appointed director of the Public Revenue Office; she said she had not appointed him and that he had held the post the previous time VMRO-DPMNE was in government. While still president of Transparency Macedonia she had appeared in a VMRO-DPMNE election film criticising the Social Democrats, an appearance for which she apologised. The same embassy cable described her as the government's main coordinator both of the EU effort and of foreign assistance. By December 2008 the European-integration deputy prime minister was Ivica Bocevski, who took an action plan to Brussels after the European Commission that November declined to recommend a date for opening accession negotiations.

Early life and education

Birth and upbringing

Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska was born in 1971 in Skopje. A curriculum vitae printed with an October 2006 profile recorded only “1971: Born in Macedonia,” and a short obituary in February 2010 likewise gave the year without a day or month. The Skopje notice of her death used both Коневска-Трајковска and Конеска-Трајковска; English-language reporting used Konevska-Trajkovska.

She was born in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, the name United Nations papers used for the Yugoslav republic whose recognition was under discussion in 1993, and Skopje was where the republic’s president received international envoys. The same file shows that the Arbitration Commission of the European Community conference on the former Yugoslavia had before it the results of a referendum held on 8 September 1991, a declaration by the Assembly on 17 September 1991, and a constitution dated 17 November 1991, after which the state was the Republic of Macedonia. Born in 1971, she was nineteen or twenty at that referendum. The U.S. Department of State later described the 1991 separation as part of the peaceful breakup of Yugoslavia, and noted that Greece’s objection to the name “Macedonia” produced provisional recognition as the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The Department records that the United States used the constitutional name Republic of Macedonia from 2004 until February 2019, when the state became the Republic of North Macedonia.

The notices and profiles that give her birth year do not name her parents or describe any schooling before university. The 2006 profile reported that acquaintances in Skopje recalled almost no personal detail beyond a long relationship with Goran Trajkovski, later her husband.

Law studies

She studied at the Faculty of Law in Skopje of the University “Kiril i Metodij,” the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje. The 2006 curriculum vitae dates a law degree in Skopje to 1994 and a master’s degree in law, also in Skopje, to 1999; the 2010 notice said she had completed postgraduate studies at that faculty. The same vita lists her as a journalist at Macedonian Television in 1993–94, so the first degree coincided with the start of paid work.

The faculty dates its foundation to a decree of 3 November 1951 creating it as a department of a combined faculty of law and economics at the University of Skopje, and treats 1 July 1956 as the start of an independent law school. The faculty’s own chronology, in Macedonian, attributes that 1951 decree to the government of the People’s Republic of Macedonia. During her studies the school was still the Faculty of Law. On 9 September 2001, for its fiftieth anniversary, it was renamed the Iustinianus Primus Faculty of Law, with the Latin style Facultas Iuridica Iustinianus Primus.

The 2010 notice added that she had specialized in European Union law and in the international law of the United Nations, without naming a school or a year. A U.S. Embassy biography written after she entered government said that, for one year before her 2006 appointment as president of Transparency International–Macedonia, she was on the faculty of the University of New York in Skopje, which the embassy distinguished from New York University, and lectured there on European Union law. The Skopje death notice also called her a lecturer in European Union law at that institution. The embassy biography listed further professional courses rather than another degree: training with the U.S. Secret Service and the FBI, a Europol course, and training at the ILEA Academy in Budapest.

Journalism, legal practice and the customs service

Macedonian Television

From 1993 to 1994 Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska worked as a journalist at Macedonian Television in Skopje. The only detailed public chronology is the curriculum vitae Tim Judah printed in an 18 October 2006 Politico profile: the employer and the years, not a programme, desk or story. A January 2007 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Skopje, listing her among five influential women, called her a former journalist and lawyer and then turned to her work abroad after 2000.

The station was the national broadcaster being separated from the Yugoslav system. At the end of 1991 parliament converted Makedonska radio-televizija (MRTV) into a public broadcaster, and the European Broadcasting Union lists MKRTV, its abbreviation for Macedonian Radio Television, as a member since 1993. A 2000 report by Mark Thompson for the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media judged that conversion largely rhetorical: the network stayed overstaffed, under-resourced, indebted and politically manipulated, and the cash shortage made it easier for successive governments to treat it as an instrument of state power. On figures the broadcaster supplied, 59 percent of households were not paying the licence fee by 1996.

She left before the Law on Broadcasting Activity of 1997, drafted with the Council of Europe, the European Institute for the Media and Article 19. Until that law, Thompson wrote, private stations had multiplied with little regulation — an estimated 90 percent showed only music, commercials, light entertainment or pornography — while MRTV still dominated news. The Institute found coverage of the 1994 parliamentary and presidential campaigns, at the end of her time there, reasonably objective. Four years later, after she had gone, research reported in the same study found that about 64 percent of interviewees still used MRTV for election information, but the Broadcasting Council, the Institute and the OSCE’s election office found the main coverage tilted toward the governing party.

Law practice

She graduated in law in Skopje in 1994 and worked in a law office there from 1995 to 1997. Neither Judah’s profile nor the embassy cable names the office or any matter she handled; the cable says only that she was “a former journalist and lawyer.” The same CV records a master’s degree in law in Skopje in 1999, when she was already listed as working on customs.

The office years overlapped a programme the government had run since the start of 1994. In a 1998–2000 policy framework drawn up with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that programme was described as a drive to restore price stability and to create market institutions, widen private ownership and reduce the cost of doing business. Nothing in the published record says what kind of law she practised.

Ministry of Finance

From 1997 to 2000 she worked on customs at the Ministry of Finance. Judah’s article shortens the early career to “a journalist, in a law practice and with the Macedonian customs office,” and gives no title, unit or draft. The dates match a reorganization the IMF framework reported as already in hand: the customs administration had been placed under the ministry and, with technical help from the Fund and the World Bank, was well advanced with ASYCUDA, the electronic customs-data system. The timetable set 1998 for a revised customs code and a trade-policy unit in a central economic ministry, alongside further cuts in tariffs and surcharges.

Monitors writing about that administration did not mention her. The 1999 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, commissioned by the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, was quoted by the International Crisis Group in 2002 as finding that Macedonia and Albania showed higher levels of administrative corruption, linked there to extremely underdeveloped public administrations and a lack of control and accountability inside the state. The same report cited a Transparency International survey, as carried by the Skopje daily Dnevnik on 15 February 2002, finding that four in ten investors had to bribe customs inspectors or other officials to avoid hold-ups. She had by then left the ministry for a regional anti-crime post in Bucharest.

Regional work against organized crime

The SECI Center in Bucharest

The Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI) began as an economic framework. In December 1996 the Austrian politician Erhard Busek was appointed its coordinator, to encourage cross-border cooperation among Balkan states. A separate policing agreement followed on 26 May 1999, when twelve countries—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, the then Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro, and Turkey—signed in Bucharest an Agreement on Cooperation to Prevent and Combat Trans-border Crime. It created the SECI Regional Center for Combating Trans-border Crime, whose successor, the Southeast European Law Enforcement Center, still sits on the tenth floor of the Palace of the Parliament.

The center was a joint institution. Member states sent liaison officers, and task forces covered drugs, human trafficking, fraud, stolen vehicles, financial and computer crime, and, after 11 September 2001, terrorism-related inquiries. A chapter from the Austrian defence ministry dates operations from January 2001, with 15 police and customs officers from nine countries in place by March 2002. Adevărul, on the annual presentation at the Palace of the Parliament on 25 February 2002, described a center about a year old and 11 participating states. It reported 3,112 information exchanges the previous year, including more than 400 on trafficking in human beings, and put the budget at $400,000 from members, plus more than $3 million from Romania and $500,000 from the United States. The report listed cooperation with Interpol, the International Organization for Migration, Europol, the OSCE, the United Nations, and the Stability Pact, and an agreement signed that day to connect the center to Interpol’s communications system.

Contemporary reporting names Gabriela Konevska, as she was then styled, as director of this early center, not as its founder. Adevărul quoted “SECI director Gabriela Konevska,” who said governments of 11 countries had decided four years earlier to create it—a looser date than the May 1999 signature. Romanian officials ran the session: Interior Minister Ioan Rus conveyed a message from Prime Minister Adrian Năstase, State Secretary Alexandru Farcaș presided, and General Alexandru Ionas, a director within SECI, said the results belonged to national police forces. Tim Judah’s October 2006 Politico profile, using her curriculum vitae, states that she directed the center from 2000 to 2002 during four years in Bucharest on organized crime. A January 2007 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Skopje used a wider span, writing that from 2000 to 2004 she was director of the Bucharest “Regional Center for Fighting against Organized Crime” and “chief of the international mission in Romania” under SECI, and that she spoke English, French, and Romanian.

Stability Pact initiative on crime

The Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe was a wider arrangement, launched in Cologne and Sarajevo in the summer of 1999, weeks after the Kosovo war. RFE/RL described the summit as a meeting of regional leaders with the United States, the European Union, the OSCE, and financial institutions, meant to replace crisis management with a longer strategy and divided into working tables on human rights, economic development, and security. Bodo Hombach, the first special coordinator, finished on 31 December 2001. Busek succeeded him and in January 2002 said he wanted the pact’s organized-crime center in Bucharest, so regional ownership would be visible.

Under the security table the pact set up the Initiative to Fight Organised Crime (SPOC), aimed at legislation, inter-agency coordination, specialized units, and cross-border cooperation to recognized international standards. A London conference in late 2002 adopted a Statement on Defeating Organised Crime in South Eastern Europe, treated by Sebastian von Muenchow, in that Austrian defence-ministry chapter, as politically linked to European integration though not a treaty. The pact then opened a secretariat inside the SECI Center. He writes that from the beginning of 2003 it had a head, a judicial expert, and an assistant—support for the SPOC Board and the special coordinator, not an investigative agency—and that its early work included legal analysis, a Transcrime needs assessment, data protection, and witness protection. In May 2003 an Austrian Interior Ministry official was elected board chair. In December 2002 Busek told the European Parliament’s foreign-affairs committee that the next year’s crime agenda should join the Bucharest center to the SPOC secretariat, and that the United States was then supplying more staff than the EU.

Judah’s article is the main published source for her own post. It says that after the SECI directorship she headed the pact’s crime-fighting initiative until the end of 2004; the printed CV lists 2003–04 as “Head of Stability Pact secretariat for organised crime, Bucharest.” That matches the secretariat’s dates and small staff. It does not make her board chair or the author of the center’s operational record. The embassy cable does not separate this secretariat role from its 2000–2004 description.

Adviser to Erhard Busek

The same CV places her in 2005 in Vienna as Busek’s personal political adviser at the Stability Pact. Balkan Insight, reporting her death in 2010, used the same description, tied to his post as special coordinator. The embassy wrote instead that she had been “personal political advisor to the SECI coordinator,” the office Busek had held since 1996, and gave no year. Published accounts do not attach a distinct program to the Vienna year. Busek’s stated priorities remained regional cooperation, projects visible in the region, trade liberalization, support for eventual EU accession, and the crime work shared by the Bucharest center and the SPOC secretariat. The 2005 posting is the last role that CV records before she left the regional institutions.

Transparency Macedonia

Appointment and mandate

In March 2006 Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska was appointed president of Transparency Macedonia, the local branch of Transparency International, which Tim Judah described as a German-based anti-corruption organization. The Skopje office was not the secretariat. Freedom House treated it as a local office holding a license to use the Transparency International name, a license that could be withdrawn in Berlin. Judah wrote that, in a country long associated with a poor reputation for corruption, the organization had a prominent critical role in the media.

The 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index, built from expert surveys of 163 countries and scored from 0 (perceived as highly corrupt) to 10 (perceived as very clean), gave Macedonia 2.7 and rank 105. The secretariat said scores below 3 meant corruption was perceived as rampant. Freedom House, reviewing 2006, wrote that official corruption remained widespread and that the public had come to treat it as normal.

As president she argued that results depended on political will. On 23 July 2006, after the parliamentary election of 5 July, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still identified her as head of Transparency Macedonia. She said the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, winner in 2002, had promised a serious fight and produced little beyond a few proceedings, including the imprisonment of Amdi Bajram, which she called minor beside indications already public. She blamed cases chosen for party advantage and bargaining over justice, and said that if the government did not commit the interior and justice ministries and the public prosecutor’s office, punishment would soon reach it as well. Transparency Macedonia, she said, had followed the campaign, including through regional offices reporting local spending, so that the parties’ required financial reports could be compared with what had been observed.

The 2006 election video and the chapter dispute

The presidency overlapped the campaign. Judah reported in Politico on 18 October 2006 that alarm followed when Konevska-Trajkovska appeared in an election video for VMRO-DPMNE, then in opposition, criticizing the Social Democrats still in office. She apologized. He wrote that she was not a direct party to the quarrel that then broke over the organization, though she was tied to the Skopje circles involved. By then she was deputy prime minister for European integration, a post she had taken on 26 August, and the journalist Sašo Ordanoski had succeeded her.

The dispute was between executive director Sladjana Taseva and Ordanoski, the new board president. Freedom House described a September–October conflict of “ideas and procedures” in which they exchanged accusations of corruption. Judah added that the accounts from before Konevska-Trajkovska’s presidency were said to be in chaos, and that the pro-government press attacked Ordanoski as a “Sorosoid,” a reference to money associated with George Soros. Regional director Miklos Marshall investigated in Macedonia and found no settlement. On 16 October the daily Utrinski vesnik quoted him as saying he had had to end “the soap opera in Transparency,” and reported that Berlin had withdrawn the accreditation. Freedom House recorded the loss of the license to use the Transparency International name. A later Skopje group kept the name; its own site dates Transparency International Macedonia to 2006, the year that accreditation ended, a claim about the chapter rather than about the Berlin secretariat.

Deputy Prime Minister for European integration

The 2006 government

In the parliamentary elections of 5 July 2006 in the Republic of Macedonia (now North Macedonia), the VMRO-DPMNE-led coalition “For a Better Macedonia” won 45 of 120 seats and formed a government with the Democratic Party of Albanians, the New Social Democratic Party and smaller parties. The European Commission recorded that parliament approved the cabinet presented by Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski on 26 August 2006, including those parties together with the Socialist Party, the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party of Turks. The Belgrade agency Beta reported that 68 of the 120 deputies voted for the government. The Democratic Union for Integration, which the Commission described as the main ethnic Albanian parliamentary group, was not brought into the coalition and boycotted the Assembly from its first sitting.

Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska was named deputy prime minister for European integration in that cabinet, succeeding Radmila Šekerinska, who had held European integration and the coordination of foreign assistance in the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia government from 2002 to 2006. On 14 August VMRO-DPMNE’s executive committee adopted a proposed ministerial list that assigned her the European-integration brief; she was then president of Transparency International in Macedonia. Beta listed her among figures drawn from outside a previous ministry. She took over on 26 August, a few days after giving birth. She was 35, had not lived in the country since 2000, and was not a career politician. Tim Judah wrote in Politico that, outside Skopje’s small political circle, the appointment prompted the question “Gabriela who?”, and that those who knew her thought of an efficient bureaucrat rather than a front-rank party figure.

Portfolio and the Secretariat for European Affairs

The office was the government’s centre for preparations to join the European Union. In January 2007 the United States embassy in Skopje described Konevska-Trajkovska as responsible for coordinating those efforts and as the government’s primary foreign-assistance coordinator. Croatian foreign-ministry statements used the title deputy prime minister for European integration and foreign assistance. The Commission’s November 2006 progress report said that the Secretariat for European Affairs had assumed a central role in coordinating work on EU-integration objectives, and that the Assembly’s Committee on EU Affairs discussed the Stabilisation and Association Process on the basis of reports from the deputy prime minister in charge of EU integration. In September 2006 the new government said it would revise a draft national programme for adopting the EU acquis that had been adopted the previous March.

Staffing was reported in two stages. Within weeks of the coalition taking office, Judah wrote, hundreds of senior civil servants had been replaced by party loyalists, including officials the EU had paid to train, while Konevska-Trajkovska’s was the only major department to have kept every employee. On policy she told him: “No changes – nothing!” The Commission’s report of 6 November 2007 recorded a later change: in April the Secretariat for European Affairs demoted 40 employees, two-thirds of its permanent staff, because they had not been lawfully appointed. The Civil Service Agency upheld that finding. The Commission said the method and the timing affected the secretariat’s work, and that it lacked the staff and money to carry out the Stabilisation and Association Agreement and the national programme for the acquis.

Foreign assistance sat in the same portfolio. On 1 January 2007 EU funding moved from the CARDS programme, under which national allocations since 2002 totalled €195.5 million, to the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance. The 2007 national programme was €58 million, with further regional and cross-border funds. On 8 September 2006, at a conference in Zagreb, she met Croatian Foreign Minister Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, described the trip as her first visit to Croatia in the post, and said regional cooperation was among the new government’s priorities. Grabar-Kitarović met her again in Skopje on 24 January 2007; the Croatian ministry said that conversation concerned European integration and the economic changes involved in joining the EU.

European Commission and the EU mission

Her principal EU interlocutor in Skopje was Erwan Fouéré. On 17 October 2005 the Council of the European Union appointed him special representative, from 1 November 2005, in the country the EU then called the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and he served at the same time as head of the Commission delegation. The mandate was to support a peaceful political process and implementation of the Ohrid Framework Agreement, and thereby progress through the stabilisation and association process. In October 2006 Fouéré told Politico that, on EU integration, Konevska-Trajkovska “knows her stuff,” and he described as realistic her expectation that accession negotiations could open in 2007 and that legislation could be aligned with EU law by 2010.

European Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn with Deputy Prime Minister Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska.

Other Commission contacts followed in the first months of the government. On 15 and 16 November 2006 Janez Potočnik, the commissioner for science and research, made his first official visit to the country and met Gruevski, Konevska-Trajkovska and Education and Science Minister Sulejman Rushiti, in a series of visits to candidate countries on research and integration into the EU. On 29 and 30 January 2007 the third meeting of the EU–former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia Joint Parliamentary Committee, in Skopje, took an exchange of views with Konevska-Trajkovska, with Fouéré, and with Elisabeth Anna Müller for the German presidency of the Council. The agenda covered the post-election political situation, economic and administrative reform, regional cooperation, visa facilitation, and the shift from CARDS to pre-accession assistance.

The accession agenda, 2006–2008

Negotiating date and legislative alignment

Parliament approved Nikola Gruevski’s government, with Konevska-Trajkovska responsible for European integration, on 26 August 2006. The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia — later renamed North Macedonia — already held candidate status for the European Union, granted by the European Council of 17 December 2005, but accession negotiations had not been opened. The European Commission’s November 2006 progress report noted a draft National Programme for the Adoption of the Acquis from March 2006, a central coordinating role for the Secretariat for European Affairs, and the new government’s plan to revise the draft.

She subsequently moved the date she had tied to the opening of talks. On 18 March 2007 she told Radio Free Europe that, against the draft programme, only about one third of the EU-related laws planned for 2006 had been adopted, with the rest carried into 2007, and that the slowdown followed the elections and domestic politics. She called Commissioner Olli Rehn’s criticism of that stall fair, said a negotiating date depended above all on the political criteria, and added that an opening at the start of 2007 would have required a positive Commission proposal and a Council opinion in 2006. The aim she restated was a positive opinion from the Council of the European Union by the end of 2007, and talks in 2008 during Slovenia’s presidency. The government approved the National Programme on 22 March 2007; the Assembly’s Committee for European Affairs supported it on 13 April.

Its 2007 progress report, for October 2006 to early October 2007, found a backlog of EU-related laws from late 2006 and only a partial catch-up, not always attentive to quality and enforceability. In April 2007 the Secretariat demoted about two thirds of its permanent staff, and the Commission found resources lacking for the Stabilisation and Association Agreement and the national programme. In an interview published on 13 July 2007 she still hoped for a recommendation by the end of 2007 or early 2008 and said the country was “definitely ready” for negotiations under the Slovenian presidency. The Commission’s strategy of 6 November 2007 said reforms in key areas still had to accelerate and did not recommend opening talks. The Accession Partnership adopted in February 2008 still set pre-negotiation priorities, and negotiations were not opened during her tenure.

Political criteria, the name dispute and NATO

The Commission treated the Copenhagen criteria as the condition for any further step. In November 2007 it reported continued implementation of the Ohrid Framework Agreement, some judicial reform and some anti-corruption results, with human rights, minority protection and inter-ethnic relations judged improved overall. The same findings said political tensions were delaying reforms, parliamentary dialogue had to be constructive, and corruption remained widespread. The progress report recorded a four-month boycott by the Democratic Union for Integration, bills held up as a result, and violence in parliament on 25 September 2007. Difficult cohabitation with the opposition president and large-scale dismissals after the 2006 change of government were described as politicising the administration. The strategy paper concluded that tension and weak dialogue had slowed reforms and that the European Partnership’s short-term priorities were only partly met.

The name dispute with Greece ran through those reports and through the NATO track the government had paired with EU membership. In 2006 the Commission found cooperation with Greece developing but no progress on the name, which it said still required a mutually acceptable solution under UN Security Council Resolutions 817/93 and 845/93. In 2007 it again found no progress and noted that Greece had taken the renaming of Skopje airport after Alexander the Great as a provocation contrary to the 1995 interim agreement. Council Decision 2008/212/EC of 18 February 2008, which turned the European Partnership into an Accession Partnership, made intensified efforts toward a solution a short-term priority. The Bucharest Summit Declaration of 3 April 2008 recognised the country’s contribution to Alliance operations and a multi-ethnic society, but agreed an invitation would follow only once the name issue was mutually settled. Albania and Croatia were invited; neither the dispute nor a NATO invitation was resolved during her tenure.

Visas and foreign assistance

Visa rules and pre-accession money moved separately from membership talks. In July 2006 the Commission proposed mandates for visa-facilitation and readmission agreements. On 18 September 2007 in Brussels, Vice-President Franco Frattini and the Portuguese interior minister signed the agreements with the Western Balkan partners, including the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Facilitation cut the short-stay fee from €60 to €35, with exemptions for defined categories of travellers, and did not apply to the United Kingdom or Ireland; readmission covered nationals and certain third-country nationals and stateless persons. Frattini and Rehn said implementation, with justice and home-affairs reforms, could lead to a dialogue on a visa-free regime. The agreements entered into force on 1 January 2008.

On 20 February 2008 Frattini opened that dialogue in Skopje. The Commission described it as guidance, to be tracked by roadmaps and benchmarks, on measures still required for visa-free travel; the Council had welcomed such dialogues on 28 January. It did not itself lift the visa requirement. From 1 January 2007 assistance came through the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance. The 2007 report put that year’s national programme at €58 million; the Commission’s key-findings memo listed €58.5 million, €70.2 million, €81.8 million, €92.3 million and €98.7 million for 2007–2011, €401.5 million in total. The Skopje delegation implemented the funds, and ministries received units for the acquis and for IPA programming. The 2008 Accession Partnership set the priorities for that assistance and carried no financial allocation of its own.

Controversies and political position

The Public Revenue Office appointment

On 6 September 2006 Radio Free Europe’s Macedonian service reported that the government of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski had, the day before, named Goran Trajkovski director of the Public Revenue Office (Uprava za javni prihodi). The report identified him as the husband of Deputy Prime Minister Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska, who had taken the European-integration post on 26 August after VMRO-DPMNE’s victory in the July election.

Opposition parties called the appointment nepotism and the second such case in the new cabinet, after Gruevski’s cousin Sašo Mijalkov was made director of the Service for State Security and Counterintelligence. Andrej Žernovski of the Liberal Democratic Party said the government was starting badly and asked whether talk of appointing experts had been only a promise, since posts seemed to remain inside a narrow party or family circle. Emilijan Stanković, spokesperson of the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, called on the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption, and on Slagjana Taseva in particular, to review the decisions and to act as it had in earlier cases of relatives in public posts. He cited the mother of Radmila Šekerinska, whom he said had been engaged at the state power company ESM, among other examples.

Commission member Dragan Malinovski said the body was following the government’s choices of directors. Competence, he said, came first, but nepotism should be avoided. Konevska-Trajkovska denied the charge. She told Politico that she had not appointed her husband and that he had held the same job the last time VMRO-DPMNE was in power.

Party alignment

Before the cabinet she was not a party politician. Outside Skopje’s small political elite, Politico reported, her appointment prompted “Gabriela who?”: she was 35, had not lived in the Republic of Macedonia since 2000, and was known as an efficient bureaucrat rather than as a front-rank political figure. In March 2006 she became president of the Macedonian chapter of Transparency International. During the campaign she appeared in a VMRO-DPMNE election video criticizing the Social Democrats, then in office. That appearance raised concern about the chapter’s independence, and she apologized. After she joined the government, a quarrel over the chapter’s accounts for the period before her presidency, and over the leadership that succeeded her, played out in the pro-government press. Politico reported that she was not directly involved in that infighting, while counting her among people connected to it.

In office she described European-integration policy as unchanged from the previous government—“No changes – nothing!” The European Union special representative, Erwan Fouéré, said she knew the file. Politico also reported that, within weeks of the change of government, hundreds of senior civil servants were replaced by party loyalists, irritating EU officials who had funded their training, and that her department was then the only major one to have kept every employee.

Leaving office in 2008

The Assembly dissolved itself on 12 April 2008, and the speaker called early parliamentary elections for 1 June. The Democratic Union for Integration, then in opposition, had proposed dissolution to break a stalemate after the Democratic Party of Albanians left the coalition, leaving the government short of the majority required for Ohrid Framework Agreement laws cited as a condition for opening EU accession talks. An unsuccessful April bid to join NATO was a further factor. VMRO-DPMNE and the Democratic Party of Albanians backed the early vote; SDSM and the Liberal Democratic Party opposed it, arguing with smaller coalition partners that it would delay EU reform benchmarks. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe later reported that, after re-runs on 15 and 29 June where violence and irregularities had disrupted voting, the VMRO-DPMNE-led coalition held 63 of 120 seats, and that a government with the Democratic Union for Integration and the Party for European Future was formed in late July.

Parliament approved the cabinet on 26 July 2008 with the main opposition parties absent. A U.S. embassy account recorded 77 votes in favour and none against; Balkan Insight reported 78 in favour and none against. Gruevski remained prime minister. The embassy’s lineup named Ivica Bocevski—government spokesperson since March 2007, and a VMRO-DPMNE appointee who had earlier worked with SDSM—as deputy prime minister for European integration. Konevska-Trajkovska was not included. The cable described much of the cabinet as continuing in office and did not state why the European-integration post changed hands.

Illness, death and commemoration

Illness and death

Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska died on Wednesday, 10 February 2010. The Skopje magazine Forum reported the death the same afternoon, and Balkan Insight reported it the next morning from Skopje. Neither dispatch named a disease, and neither stated a place of death apart from fixing the funeral in the capital.

Katerina Neshkova’s Forum article, timestamped 16:49 on 10 February, said she had died that day after a long and difficult illness („После долго и тешко боледување“). Sinisa Jakov Marusic, writing in Balkan Insight at 10:45 on 11 February, reported that the former deputy prime minister for European affairs had “died Wednesday after battling a long and serious illness.” He attributed the arrangements to a government press release. The archived copy is datelined “Skopje | 11 February 2010.”

Both notices gave 1971 as the year of birth and did not give a day or an age. Forum added that she was born in Skopje; Balkan Insight did not give a birthplace. Forum identified her as deputy to the president of the government of the Republic of Macedonia responsible for European affairs from 2006 to 2008. Balkan Insight used the title deputy prime minister in charge of European affairs and wrote that in 2006 she had taken charge of the bid to join the European Union.

The English obituary recalled that, before that office, she had been president of the anti-corruption NGO Transparency Macedonia and personal political adviser to Erhard Busek, special coordinator of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe. Forum repeated those posts and added that she had graduated in law, and taken postgraduate study, at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, with further specialization in European Union law and in international law of the United Nations; that she had lectured on EU law at New York University in Skopje; and that she had headed a Stability Pact mission in Bucharest against organized crime and directed the SECI regional centre there. It said the United States Department of State, the United States Secret Service, Interpol and the police of Romania had honoured her, and that she was married with one child, naming neither.

Funeral and public response

The two reports that give the arrangements were both filed before the ceremony. They agree on the day and the cemetery and differ on the hour of burial, and neither describes the service after it began.

On the day of the death, Forum wrote that the government would hold a commemorative session the next day at 11:00, that a commemoration would be held in the chapel of the Butel city cemetery, and that the funeral ceremony would be at 13:00. Balkan Insight, citing the government press service on the morning of 11 February, said the government would hold a commemorative service on Thursday at 11:00 a.m. and that funeral services were scheduled for noon at Skopje’s main Butel city cemetery. Noon in the English report and 13:00 in the Macedonian report were therefore both advance notices, an hour apart, not descriptions of a burial already under way.

Neither article named mourners, quoted a eulogy, or reported which hour was kept. The press release was not printed with either story. Balkan Insight summarized it; Forum specified the chapel and a 13:00 funeral without presenting those details as a quotation.

Personal life

Marriage and family

Gabriela Konevska-Trajkovska was married to Goran Trajkovski. Interviewed in Skopje in 2006, she told the journalist Tim Judah that she and her husband liked to visit places on his motorcycle. He wrote that people he asked remembered the couple as having been together for as long as anyone could recall, and that he found no colourful gossip about her private life.

They had one daughter, who was not named in contemporary accounts. Judah reported that she began as deputy prime minister a few days after giving birth; she took up the post on 26 August 2006. The Skopje magazine Forum, recording her death on 10 February 2010, described her as married and the mother of one child. A daughter born in the days before 26 August 2006 was three years old in February 2010.

On 5 September 2006 the government of Nikola Gruevski appointed Trajkovski director of the Public Revenue Office. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported the next day that opposition parties had asked the anti-corruption commission to review the choice as nepotism, because he was the husband of the deputy prime minister for European integration. She told Judah she had not appointed him and that he had held the same post the last time VMRO-DPMNE was in power; that dispute is treated with the other controversies of her term.

She had not lived in Macedonia since 2000. For four years she was based in Bucharest, from 2000 to 2002 as director of the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative regional centre against trans-border crime and from 2003 through 2004 as head of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe’s crime-fighting secretariat. In 2005 she was personal political adviser to Erhard Busek at the Stability Pact in Vienna. Judah dated her return to Skopje from March 2006, when she became president of the Macedonian chapter of Transparency International.

Languages

A cable from the U.S. Embassy in Skopje on 10 January 2007 stated that she was fluent in English, French and Romanian, and had a basic knowledge of German and Greek. An embassy biography of 17 August 2006, written as she was proposed for office, had listed fluent English together with French and Romanian, and did not mention German or Greek. The Romanian matched her years in Romania; the cables did not say where she had learned the other languages.

Assessments and legacy

Contemporary judgments

Konevska-Trajkovska was little known outside Skopje when she became deputy prime minister for European integration. In a profile published on 18 October 2006, Tim Judah wrote that, beyond the city's small political elite, the reaction was "Gabriela who?": she was 35, not a politician, and had lived abroad since 2000. Those who knew her, he reported, regarded her as an intelligent, honest, workaholic and efficient bureaucrat rather than a front-rank political figure, and he called the post a hard act to follow Radmila Šekerinska, closely associated with the December 2005 grant of candidate status. Erwan Fouéré, the European Union representative in Skopje, told Judah that on integration "she knows her stuff," and called realistic her hope that negotiations would open in 2007 and that legislation would be harmonised by 2010. She said she was not worried by enlargement fatigue, and that policy would be unchanged: "No changes – nothing!"

A narrower judgment came from diplomats. On 10 January 2007 the United States Embassy in Skopje answered a State Department request for five influential women of different ethnic backgrounds. The unclassified cable, later published by WikiLeaks as 07SKOPJE16, is a list drawn up for Washington, not a published ranking. It put Konevska-Trajkovska first, as coordinator of the EU bid and the government's main foreign-assistance coordinator, alongside Šekerinska, then leader of the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia, Teuta Arifi, the broadcaster Olivera Trajkovska and the singer Esma Redžepova.

After she died on 10 February 2010, the notices were brief and biographical rather than evaluative. Balkan Insight reported a long and serious illness, a government commemorative service and burial at Butel cemetery, and recalled the 2006 portfolio, the presidency of Transparency Macedonia and her advice to Erhard Busek at the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe.

Place in the European-integration record

She held one portfolio in an accession process that neither began nor concluded with her. The European Council granted candidate status on 17 December 2005, before Nikola Gruevski's VMRO-DPMNE government took office, and negotiations were not opened while she was in post. The European Commission progress reports for 2007 (1 October 2006 to early October 2007) and 2008 (through early October 2008) do not name her. They judge the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia — the EU's designation for the state now called North Macedonia — on the Copenhagen criteria, the stabilisation and association agreement and the acquis.

The 2007 report's comments on the administration she supervised are institutional, not personal. It notes progress on the association agreement and an April national programme for the acquis, and also that the Secretariat for European Affairs demoted 40 employees, two-thirds of its permanent staff, affecting its work, with resources still short. The 2008 report, which runs past her departure, points to wider constraints: elections on 1 June did not meet key standards according to observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and a mutually acceptable settlement of the name issue with Greece, under the United Nations, remained essential.

Parliament approved a new cabinet on 26 July 2008. A U.S. embassy account names Ivica Bocevski, spokesperson since March 2007, as deputy prime minister for Euro-integration and omits Konevska-Trajkovska; EU and NATO integration, including the name dispute, appear as priorities of the government as a whole. Visa facilitation and readmission were in force from January 2008, with a liberalisation dialogue in February and a roadmap in May, still during her tenure. Visa-free travel in the Schengen Area for holders of biometric passports, decided by the member states on 30 November 2009 and effective from 19 December, came more than a year after she left. The Commission described it as the product of justice and home-affairs reforms by the countries concerned.