Macedonia's ethnic Albanian opposition party said Tuesday it would walk out of the parliament after a brawl between one its deputies and an MP from a rival Albanian party. A brawl between a deputy of the Democratic Party of Albanians (DPA) and his rival from the junior ruling party, the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI), erupted at a committee session discussing the government's budget.
Rexhail Ismaili of the DUI was slightly injured in a fist fight with DPA's Orhan Ibrahimi, while several other MPs joined the brawl, parliamentary officials said. Representatives of both parties blamed each other for the incident that followed verbal insults between them over alleged failure to protect interests of ethnic Albanian minority, which makes up to a quarter of Macedonia's 2.2 million population.
"We demand criminal investigation into the DUI MPs and we will not attend future sessions of the parliament," Imer Aliu of the DPA told reporters. The DPA holds seven of the 123 parliamentary seats, while the DUI has 19 deputies after snap elections in April. In December 2012, another brawl erupted at a parliamentary session which ended with the police forcibly expelling the opposition deputies from the assembly.
Macedonia was granted EU candidate status in 2005, but has yet to obtain a date for a start of accession talks. It must first resolve a 23-year-old dispute with neighbouring Greece, which has blocked its accession to both the EU and Nato, arguing that the name Macedonia implies a claim on the northern Greek region of the same name.
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