Biljana Vankovska
Professor, Dr, TFF Board member
September 10, 2025
The second of three TFF Appeals
This is an example – for your inspiration – of how you can address your head of state, prime minister and other relevant ministers. To urge them to take action and not just use words.
Instead of just sending it by email, which may not be read, it makes a stronger impression if you send it by snail mail – and millions do it too.
It is urgently important that every citizen does something to stop the genocide on the Palestinian people now. Everybody can write a letter, short or long, and protest the lack of action. See also ideas to what you may constructively suggest in TFF’s first Appeal here.
I address you deliberately in the way you prefer—in the feminine form. I write to you professor to professor, woman to woman, mother to mother, grandmother to grandmother. I believe that when we speak of genocide, of starving children as a weapon of ethnic cleansing, and of the greatest crime against humanity witnessed “live” in history, this open letter carries the voice of the majority of our citizens.
I write to you at this very moment as you speak with poets by the pearl-like Ohrid lake., Today, in this darkest moment of humanity, poetry has become an act of resistance in Gaza. Every day, through social networks, we receive the cries of children dying of hunger, thirst, bombs, and curable diseases—imagine, even these cries have been transformed into verses and artistic expressions. Death itself refuses to be silenced, refuses the quiet, and sends messages to us, the living. Just weeks before he was killed in an Israeli airstrike, Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer shared his poem If I Must Die. In it, he wrote: “If I must die/you must live/to tell my story.” His words admonish us from the grave.
And yet it is strange: a people and a country that often dwell on their own suffering and demand justice for what has been done to Macedonia/Macedonians are silent now. Silent, too, is the government that was chosen by an overwhelming number of votes in the last elections. But one day soon, our – and your – grandchildren will ask, just as children in Germany asked after World War II: “Where were you when the genocide in Gaza happened? What did you do to stop it? Whose side were you on?”
The truth is hard to hide when the suffering is recorded not only by the victims but also by their killers. In Gaza, people are murdered even as they beg for bread, even as they starve to death in tents. Why, then, the silence?
Official Macedonia, to our great shame, remains silent. The Parliament, which during the 2024 electoral campaign you said you would use for public addresses, refused to approve humanitarian aid for the children of Gaza. You assured us that you are subversive, rebellious, that you would be a vocal president. We do not hear your voice now.
But after all, you share responsibility in this urgent issue. You represent the state at home and abroad. You are (or ought to be) the moral authority who can raise her voice and warn, even through the media. A stateswoman at home, but also abroad. It’s good to save the oceans – but the children of Gaza deserve the same effort by you.
Three quarters of all UN member states have recognized Palestine. Even your “second homeland,” as you fondly call Slovenia has set an example: it has recognized Palestine and introduced economic sanctions against Israel. Now Macedonia is the only Balkan state that has not recognized Palestine. Why? Take courage! Even your strategic partners, such as the United Kingdom announce they will recognize Palestine next month at the UN General Assembly. Your friend Macron has the same intention.
You know that Macedonia is a signatory of the Genocide Convention and that we have not only the right but the obligation to act to prevent and punish such acts. Yet we did not even muster the courage to join the collective lawsuit before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. We remain silent. Why?
You speak of a social contract with nature, yet as a government, you do not see that people are dying simply because they are Palestinians. Even ancient centuries-old olive trees are destroyed in Gaza. From where will the olive branch come?
The UN has officially declared famine in Gaza—a famine of unprecedented proportions. For many of the starving, there is no longer salvation, even if aid were to arrive. To make matters worse, this famine is not the result of food shortage, but of a sadistic desire to use food as a weapon, to prevent it from reaching those in need.
If you represent us again this year at the UN General Assembly in New York, I would like to hear the Human Being, the mother, the woman in you speak out – raising her voice in the name of Palestine. If anything remains of it by the end of September. But politics conducted with eyes wide shut will not justify delayed tears or regrets.
Experienced in suffering, we as Macedonians feel an unshakable kinship with the Palestinian people, who face relentless injustice yet hold fast to their dignity and love for their homeland. Stripped of nearly everything, their spirit remains unbroken.
We call upon our political leaders to give voice to our collective conscience – a voice that demands justice for the victims of genocide. Our esteemed colleague from Princeton, 95-year-old Richard Falk, who stood by Macedonia in our darkest hour in 2018, now leads the Tribunal for Gaza, urging the United Nations to take urgent humanitarian action.
Stand with him and spark the moral courage to act.
Respectfully,
Prof. Dr. Biljana Vankovska
