An Interview with 2023 Raymond Milefsky Award winner: Mile Milenkoski

In 2023, IBRU awarded the sixth annual Raymond Milefsky award to Mile Milenkoski, to honour his distinguished career in boundary delimitation and border management in the Balkan region. IBRU’s Philip Steinberg interviewed Mr Milenkoski.

You have a background in geodetic engineering and boundary delimitation, but your career has also taken you to diplomacy and the design and implementation of border management policies. How has the technical training that enables you to locate borders assisted you in organising and negotiating their management?

Delimitation itself is by nature complex and multidisciplinary. Diplomacy, international law, geodesy, cartography, history, geography and other sciences and skills need to be involved in order to achieve the desired results. History indicates that the consequences of a mistake made during the delimitation process can be permanent, and sometimes, unfortunately, tragic. Considering my origins are from the Balkans, I don't believe I need to explain the validity of the former statement.

When one moves beyond delimitation to longer-term work on borders, these other bodies of knowledge, beyond cadastre and geodesy, become even more central. The concept of Integrated Border Management (IBM) was established in the Macedonian pearl city of Ohrid, back in 2003. Since then, with the endorsement of the EU, the countries of the Western Balkan region have implemented IBM. In addition to improving cooperation between participating countries, both bilaterally and multilaterally, it has improved interdepartmental cooperation within each country. The goal is to improve border controls, but at the same time to facilitate the flow of people and goods that cross borders legally. IBM has reduced cross-border crime and stabilized border regions.

Much of your work has concerned the role of clearly delimited and managed borders within Europe. Why is the status of borders important to European institutions like the EU and the OSCE?

The approaches to borders that the EU and the OSCE have are essentially different.

The EU is a complicated and carefully constructed structure with a complex policy regarding internal and external borders. There are members that have borders with Turkey, others with Russia, and there are countries that have no external borders. In general, each country has its own priorities and interests in all aspects, including in relation to borders. The cooperation that started modestly and cautiously with the Schengen agreements has led to improved cooperation between the police, customs and consular services. Relinquishing control of one’s own borders to partner countries, in the beginning, raised many questions and concerns, but now we have a unique world phenomenon where internal borders throughout the Schengen area are crossed without control, which is one of the greatest achievements of the EU.

The OSCE, on the other hand, prioritises the inviolability of borders and the territorial integrity of states. In a technical sense, within the framework of the Organization, the focus is on assisting the countries that require support in the area of ​​border management. I will mention one example from my OSCE experience. I moderated a Workshop Session on Delimitation and Demarcation Practices for the OSCE region, 1-3 November 2016, Vienna, Austria. There was great interest from the attendees, including many questions. In fact, I was surprised by the level of interest from representatives of the Central Asian countries, particularly in the details of delimitation and demarcation, as some of them were at the first stage of such processes and some were planning to initiate them. The conclusion was that it is necessary to organize more similar conferences and workshops, due to the lack of modern examples from which positive practice could be learned and applied. Here I would like to offer my personal experience and expertise, where help is needed, especially in the delimitation and demarcation processes, as well as to highlight the role of IBRU, whose workshops have been so helpful to myself and other border practitioners.

As the EU increasingly is challenged at its borders, do you see Europe’s borders regime getting stronger or weaker?

The EU is constantly attempting to strengthen the system of external border control to reduce illegal entry and, in recent years, the influx of migrants. More funds are constantly being sought to help solve the essential reasons why people leave their homes and migrate to Europe, and additional funds are sought for countries such as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to help them take care of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Border security cannot be observed separately from other security areas. Cross-border organized crime, smuggling, human trafficking and terrorism are all correlated with external border control policies, but it seems that the activities of FRONTEX in cooperation with other actors in the Border Management system are aimed in the direction of constant strengthening of border control.

And finally, in addition to being an engineer and a diplomat, you’re also a published poet. Has your career as a boundary professional influenced your approach to poetry? Has your avocation as a poet influenced your approach to borders?

To be a successful boundary professional, one must be a multidisciplinary person. Ray Milefsky, my teacher and friend, diplomat, polyglot, with great knowledge of cultures and geographies, was such a person. At one of the meetings in Durham we talked extensively about the delimitation of the northern border of North Macedonia, and at our last meeting in Washington DC, about the successfully completed demarcation with Serbia and Kosovo. He knew the details because he was delighted with how the border was made, and he was the author of a "fly-through" visualization of the boundary, which he presented in Skopje.

In 2005, I published a book: The State Borders of the Republic of Macedonia and Association in the European Union. I also have two books of poetry in the Macedonian language, one of which was translated into Bulgarian and published in Bulgaria. The third collection of poetry will be published at the beginning of 2024 in Serbia in Serbian language.

Poetry is an imaginary territory without borders, in the essence of which are peace and love in all their forms. Of course, my poetry is not immune to the phenomenon of borders. In my last book, one of the poems is called The Paradox of Borders. It expresses that borders separate countries, but there they connect at the same place. At the borders we stop, but at the same time, we continue further from there.

There is a dose of art in making borders and when a Delimitation Agreement is signed, there is a sublime feeling such as when a work of art is born, like beautiful poetry. Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić said: "The purpose of art is to connect the past, present and future, to connect the opposite shores of life, in space, in time and in spirit." Doesn't this remind us of making borders?