What happened: The employees in the regional department of the Pension and Disability Fund in
Ohrid noticed that the information board at the entrance to the facility, written in two languages,
had been broken. According to the information reported in the media, the spokesperson for SIA
Ohrid said that they have information about the possible perpetrator and that they were taking
measures to solve the case in collaboration with the Public Prosecutor.
Date, time and location of the incident: 28 March, around 13:40, Pension and Disability Fund, regional
department, Ohrid.
Source of information: Electronic media outlet Meta.mk
Victim(s) involved: Apart from material damage, there were no victims in this incident.
Type of crime(s): Damage of Objects of Others (Article 243, CC), Inciting Hatred, Discord or Intolerance
on National, Racial, Religious and other Discriminatory Grounds (Article 319, CC)
Perpetrator(s): Unknown perpetrator(s).
Brief description of the event with bias indicators: In this incident, the bias motive is ethnicity,
nationality or language, while the bias indicators are:
1. The object that was the target of the attack – the broken information board contained information
in both Macedonian and Albanian;
Status of the case: A written notification was sent to the Basic Public Prosecution in Ohrid identifying
and including data on the possible perpetrators.
Response of the local authorities: The MoI’s response to the MHC request for public information
regarding this incident stated that SIA Ohrid had immediately taken measures to detect the
perpetrator, for which a written notification was sent to the Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office in Ohrid
identifying and including data on the possible perpetrators. The public prosecutor had said that the
suspects would be summoned for an interview in the Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office in Ohrid, but
by the time this report was written, there was no information as to whether the persons had been
summoned and whether measures had been taken, and the Basic Public Prosecutor’s Office Ohrid
did not provide guidelines and tasks for further action.
Impact on the victim(s) and the community: This incident calls into question the ethnic co-existence
of the two major ethnic communities in the country.
