“There is no way backwards. I mean, we've started our way to Europe. So it's a unique chance. And that is something really big, isn't it? ” — Gordana Jankuloska, Cabinet Minister
A Child of the Wall:
Macedonia's Interior Minister, Gordana Jankuloska
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Sandy Tolan
In November 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, dramatic images streamed out of gray, repressive East Germany and into living rooms around the world. Delirious East Berliners scrambled over and through the wall, toward freedom and commerce in the West, loading up (with what money? I wondered) on goods only dreamt of in the decades behind the wall. "Behind me," thundered one American trench-coated anchor after another, pointing to the unknown, "history is being made."
Watching on my TV in Tucson, Arizona, just an hour north of another border fence, it didn't occur to me that that history would soon be made by people with little memory of the decades of Soviet-era rule, when now-quaint terms like "Warsaw Pact" and acronyms like "SALT" and "START" and "ICBM" dominated the tense Cold War landscape. But soon, the children of communism would begin to take over.
Gordana Jankuloska was just a schoolgirl in Macedonia when the wall came down; later, working on her degree in international commercial law in the United Kingdom, she watched as countries like Poland, and later even Romania and neighboring Bulgaria, transformed their economies and, like the East Berliners of 1989, marched into the West, through membership in the European Union.
But back home, as tensions erupted into firefights along the borders with Kosovo and Serbia, Macedonia was having enough trouble just staying out of the Balkan wars. There seemed little room for a young commercial lawyer with dreams of carving a new path for her country.
That changed suddenly in 2006. As Macedonia's border tensions eased, and a new, center-right government came to power, then 30-year-old Jankuloska got an offer from the incoming prime minister, himself just 35: How would she like to be the country's new Minister of Internal Affairs, and help steer Macedonia along the path to EU and NATO membership?
She knew she could make a lot more money in commercial law in the UK than the comparatively meager 1000 Euros a month (now about $1,400) this government job would pay. But for Jankuloska, the choice was easy. "How many generations can participate in building the institutions of a new democratic country?" she asked me a year and a half into the job, still marveling at the chance she'd been given. "A single one. And that's the great advantage that we're facing now."
A young woman, all 5 feet and a hundred pounds of her, running the security services in a Balkan country known for its underworld-style corruption? I asked her if being the boss of 8,000 cops, many twice her size and age, was just slightly daunting. She acknowledged that at first, a lot of people said she was too young and lacked any police experience. She admitted to occasional annoyance with the critics. Then she gazed right at me with a confidence that belied her years: "It makes me more determined."
It's one thing to use your critics' words as fuel, but quite another to actually confront a police culture of indifference to (and collusion in) gunrunning and transborder trafficking of women, drugs, and stolen cars. When she took office, Transparency International rated Macedonia near the bottom third of the world's most corrupt countries. Yet for Gordana to have any chance of success — and for the country's central goal of EU admission to come to fruition — she knew she had to reform the police.
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