ANKARA
Two senior ministers and an intelligence chief in Macedonia have resigned Tuesday night, amid a political crisis, a wiretapping scandal and ethnic tensions in the small Balkan country.
Interior Minister Gordana Jankulovska, Transport and Communications Minister Mile Janakievski and the chief of Macedonian Security and Intelligence Agency, Saso Mijalkov - all considered close associates of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski - resigned Tuesday.
The three officials, which occupied posts since Gruevski came to power in 2006, were involved in alleged wiretapping scandals made public by the Macedonian opposition.
The head of the Social Democrat Party, the main opposition party in Macedonia, Zoran Zaev has divulged since February scores of recordings, claiming that the prime minister Gruevski and the intelligence chief Mijalkov had ordered the illegal surveillance of up to 20,000 people, including ministers and journalists.
During the past week, opposition parties have staged several protests in the capital Skopje, calling for the prime minister to resign.
The government of Macedonia said in a statement that the Prime Minister Gruevski had proposed the Public Security Bureau Chief Mitko Cavkov for Interior Minister and the Director of Highways and Public Enterprises Vlado Misaylovski for the post of Transport and Communications minister.
The Macedonian parliament is expected to vote on Wednesday to confirm the proposed ministers.
The resignations came after 22 people, including eight police officers, were killed during last weekend’s severe clashes between security forces and an armed group in the city of Kumanovo, near the Kosovo border, mainly inhabited by ethnic Albanians.
Ethnic tensions are regular in the multi-ethnic country, where about a quarter of the population of 2.1 million is ethnic Albanian.
In 2001, Macedonians and Albanians fought an armed conflict, which came to an end after the signing of the Ohrid Agreement, which gave Albanians more political rights. But, Albanians have claimed that the agreement had not been implemented.
Macedonia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.
