r/mkd • u/maverica15 • 9h ago
❔Question/Прашање Airport Police Costums Mafia Extortion
Hello Macedonian neighbours. I had a really poor / criminal experience passing through the airport in Skopje last week and wanted to ask locals for some advice.
I was flying from an EU city into Skopje and as I was waiting in line for passport control, the border guard indicated me to come and skip the line for passport check. I had a crying kid so I figured he is being helpful. When I went there the guy saw my Kosovo passport and talked to me in Albanian, brief and pretty cold. I am KS-Albanian. Then he kept changing pages on my passport like without reason back and forth as waiting for something (I understood this in retrospective). He then saw a message on his phone and then he let me pas.
As I was passing the customs I went to "Nothing to Declare" endpoint and lo and behold I was stopped for a "random check". Long story short, the head of the customs operation (Macedonian guy) and another Albanian took some jewerly of mine, nothing TOO expensive and started interrogating me in a room - what am I planning to do with this, why didn't I declare it, how much cash I have, yada yada. Another one was doing "research" on the computer to see whats the real value of my jewerly was. I have passed like 50 countries with this jewerly- nobody gave a shit.
So far I thought they were following the law and felt like damn, I might have screwed up but this is just a personal jewerly, I'm not doing anything illegal.
The Alb policeman acting like he wants to help (Good cop) says things like "Yeah our boss is tight he confiscated similar item last week - he can be a pain in thr ass". Then they start telling me that because of this I can get detained for 12 hours!!!!
I am tired, I have my kid with me.
At some point I thought this was getting out of hand so I told them to confiscate it, let me have a paper what they took and I will follow up with my embassy and lawyer.
Thats when the "boss" said ok listen we decided to let you go .. but we would appreciate if you can leave us a donation and pointed me to a corner that has no camera at the office. This was the main customs office in the airport with computers, people working there and all that.
I was fucking SHOCKED. Like what the hell? This was like a scene from ex USSR films.
In that shock as in autopilot I went there and left them the only EUR banknote that I had and I walked out. The "boss" said please keep quiet about this.
I walked out of there feeling like a whore. Two uniformed policemen just used their power to de rail my trip, scare me shitless so they could extract sub $100?
I honestly have no idea what to do about this, personally I thought MKD was ahead of us in EU style integrations. Now I think this is a well organized operation between these crooks.
As locals, what do you say I should do? Anywhere I can report that would trust me? Next time I plan to wear secret recording because this is just abysmal. I think this makes MKD look really bad if they are really using the power of the state to extract BS from passangers. I would love to do something about this - something that would work. Thanks / Hvala