North Macedonia expressed bemusement after Venezuela’s regime claimed hackers from the Balkan country tried to manipulate the results of Sunday’s disputed election.
A woman holds a flag during a protest against the results of the presidential elections in Caracas,Venezuela, 29 July 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE/Henry Chirinos
North Macedonia says it has not received any evidence that hackers from the country were involved in meddling in Venezuela’s hotly disputed election.
Digital Society Minister Stefan Andonovski on Tuesday said that, apart from Venezuelan allegations, the “authoritarian regime” in Caracas had not produced any proof. “We are carefully monitoring the process,” Andonovski said.
“The ministry is not an investigative body but we will make sure that no one is accused in our country without having adequate evidence for it, and that we are not involved in internal political battles between an authoritarian regime that has existed for years in that country and the opposition there,” Andonovski added.
After presidential elections on Sunday, which the regime in Venezuela claimed to win, its Chief Prosecutor, Tarek William Saab, said on Monday that an inquiry had been launched against opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and several of her associates for alleged involvement in a hacking attack against the National Electoral Council’s data transmission system.
“The hacker attack came from North Macedonia,” Saab added, without showing any evidence, adding that this attack, allegedly coordinated by Venezuelan opposition leaders, had “the intention of manipulating data that was being received by the National Electoral Council.”
North Macedonia’s Foreign Ministry and interior Ministry have not reacted to the claims.
However, a former high-ranking Foreign Ministry official told BIRN on Tuesday under condition of anonymity that, “knowing the source of these allegations, I would not be surprised if our country is just being used by the Venezuelan authorities as convenient alibi for what is happening there.”
Apart from Cuba and Russia, most countries have greeted the official results of the Venezuelan election with scepticism, mainly because the authorities did not allow independent election observers.
According to the official results, President Nicolas Maduro won 51.2 per cent of the vote against the opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia’s 44.2 per cent.
The opposition has disputed the results, accusing Maduro of fraud. Machado said they had evidence that their candidate won 70 per cent of the votes, not 44 per cent.
On Tuesday, protests and violent clashes erupted in many Venezuelan towns and cities. Meanwhile, neighboring Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic and Uruguay expressed serious doubt about the transparency of the election process and requested an urgent meeting of the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States, OAS, to safeguard “the will of the people”.
In response, Saab, a close ally to Maduro, downplayed these concerns as “attempts at interference and reckless statements made by a few Latin American governments.”
The EU and US also expressed strong doubt about the election results. The EU’s High Representative, Josep Borrell, on Monday said the results “have not been verified and cannot be considered as representative of the will of the people of Venezuela until all the official records from polling stations are published and verified.” He called on the Venezuelan Electoral Council to “exercise maximum transparency.”
North Macedonia is better known as a target of hackers, rather than an exporter. However, in 2016, spammers from the little North Macedonian town of Veles gained cash and notoriety for promoting fake news about Donald Trump on social networks.