Expat: "waste of government money", "provocation", and "exclusionary attitude"

Another American expat in Skopje blogs as follows (full text here):

"The current conservative government of the party VMRO plans to build a new Orthodox church with public financing in the center of Skopje’s main square. Many Skopjans ... are critical of this project. There are many reasons: it is waste of government money when there are already three churches very close to the area, it is a provocation of the Albanian community centered just on the other side of the square, it reflects an exclusionary attitude toward Macedonia’s Muslisms and other people of non-Orthodox faiths, and it emphasizes symbolism over good urban planning by interrupting a public plaza that has already been crowded in by many new buildings. This last objection has been raised by students ... who organized a protest on the main square against the new church yesterday. The students were strongly discouraged from wearing any party-affiliated articles or carrying signs that referenced the two largest political parties ... so that the focus of the protest would remain on the building of the church itself ... I am not a Macedonian. The violence that happened yesterday on the Ploštad does not directly affect me. But it does affect my colleagues and friends. They deserve better than this from their government."