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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Visitor sees democracy can happen

Rebecca Nappi The Spokesman-Review

Biljana Marko- zanova wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. She is from Macedonia, a landlocked country, once part of Yugoslavia. In the days before the ugly war in the Balkans broke one large country into smaller and separate pieces, traveling to the Adriatic Sea on Yugoslavia’s coast was easy.

cssvNo more. The fastest route to the sea from Macedonia winds through Kosovo. It’s too dangerous to drive there, so Biljana no longer does. She craves the sound and smell of the ocean.

Biljana (pronounced bill-yanna) has been a guest in our newsroom since April 8. She’s one of eight journalists, most from newly formed republics, who are in the United States for a month studying the ways different ethnic groups get along here. Macedonia adopted its constitution in 1991.

Just this week, a woman representative in the Iraq National Assembly was assassinated in Baghdad. So much hatred exists among the various ethnic groups in Iraq that representative government seems a futile goal. But Biljana opened my eyes to this truth: Democracy takes time.

Biljana is 39, an Orthodox Christian married to a former journalist. They have a 7-year-old son, Viktor. Biljana and I decided to fly to Seattle on Tuesday because it would take eight hours to drive to Westport, the town on the Pacific Ocean we plan to visit.

Drive less than two hours in any direction from Macedonia, and you land in different countries. Drive south and you’re in Greece. Drive north and end up in Serbia and Montenegro.

On the plane to Seattle, looking out the window to the vast land below, I realize that democracy is easier when there is plenty of space to spread out, away from one another. Biljana’s country doesn’t have that kind of space. Iraq doesn’t either.

At Seattle’s airport, we mistakenly stand in the Budget rental car line. The Asian woman behind the counter scolds us over to Hertz. The Hertz employee speaks with a strong Latino accent. (A day later, as we walk through downtown Seattle, Biljana comments on the many ethnic groups represented in the faces we see on the street.)

In the car from the airport to Olympia, Biljana tells me that in Macedonia, population 2 million, the majority Orthodox Christians do not associate at all with minority Albanian Muslims.

On an afternoon tour of the Capitol, Biljana cannot help but stare at the African-American man holding hands with his Caucasian wife. I tell her that in Spokane mixed-race couples can still garner stares. In bigger cities, it is better, but this is a recent phenomenon.

Civil rights activists in the second half of the 20th century died for the right of that couple to nonchalantly hold hands in Olympia in 2005. And women and men from differing ethnic groups have been marrying one another over the past several decades here. In their children’s facial features, you see combined histories and blending of ethnic origins.

It is hard to hate your own blood, but not impossible. I tell Biljana that 30 years ago, I knew a Spokane grandmother who insisted her son’s Amerasian child undergo surgery so the child’s eyelids would be more “American.” It might seem impossible now that a Muslim woman would marry a Christian man in Macedonia, or that the warring religious sects in Iraq will ever work together easily, but maybe 30 years from now it will be commonplace. Maybe …

Wednesday morning, we drive two hours from Olympia to Westport. As we draw near, Biljana says, “I smell the sea.” We walk over a sand dune and finally, we hear it – the Pacific Ocean.

The sea is a brooding gray under overcast skies, but Biljana takes her shoes off anyway and walks along the waves. A merchant ship passes by in the distance. Biljana collects seashells for her son.

“I feel I am at the end of the world,” she says. “I am so far from home.”

Biljana returns home next week. Those of us privileged to get to know her wish Biljana a safe journey – back to Macedonia and into its evolving future.