As Macedonia’s Special Prosecution, SJO, launches a criminal investigation into the heavily politicized and failed 2011 census – suspecting the country’s then leaders deliberately squandered millions of euros before scrapping it – the new head of the State Statistical Office, Apostol Simovski, feels the full weight of this topic on his shoulders.
Announcing Macedonia’s long overdue headcount will take place in 2020, Simovski insists that he will not allow any repetition of past mistakes, when political pressures and ethnic feuds between Macedonians and Albanians marred the statistical operation, which resulted in its failure.
Simovski, who has spent his professional career of 27 years in the State Statistical Office and whose specialty is headcounts, says the failed census was a political operation in which his office played only a subordinate role.
He hopes that the results of the Special Prosecution’s investigation will “somewhat wash away the shame” that the botched operation undeservedly brought on his institution.
