Another Macedonian organisation has accused Tirana and Sofia of falsifying the population census in Albania, BGNES reports.
"When we do a real census, we will find out how many Macedonians there are, but the Macedonian community in Albania is over 100,000 on the territory of the entire republic," Vasil Sterjovski, leader of the Macedonian Alliance for European Integration, told Albanian MCN television.
"The Macedonian community officially lives in the regions of Gora, Golo Brdo, Prespa, Vrbnik, the region of Devol on the Albanian-Macedonian border, but the migration process has taken a large part of them to other cities in the country," he added.
"Today we have members of the Macedonian community in every major Albanian city. I would like to stress that unfortunately today the communist policy continues and Macedonians are only recognised in the area of Prespa, Pustec municipality, but not in the area of Gora and Golo Brdo. In recent years they have been pressured not to declare their belonging to the Macedonian identity," Sterjovski added.
BGNES recalls that the last official census in Albania caused severe turmoil in neighbouring North Macedonia. The existence of a significant Bulgarian minority of over 7,000 people has angered the new government headed by Christian Mitkoski and given fuel to the propaganda machine against Bulgaria.
"These figures are manipulated and are not real," Sterjovski said.
"We, as a party in Albania, immediately after the announcement of the census results, were the first to reject them and announce that the figures for the Macedonian minority were manipulated. We have many facts about this. During the census, we publicly reacted to the pressure from Bulgaria on the Macedonian minority to declare itself Bulgarian. The Albanian authorities did not take any measures to guarantee us a free declaration and even helped the Bulgarian authorities to manipulate the census," the politician added. I BGNES
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