Boris Trajkovski
Boris Trajkovski GCMG (Macedonian: Борис Трајковски [ˈbɔris ˈtrajkɔfski] ( listen); 25 June 1956 – 26 February 2004) was the president and Supreme Commander of the Republic of Macedonia from 1999 to 2004. Trajkovski was born into a Methodist family. His father, Kiro, who died in September 2008, was a landworker who had served in the Bulgarian Army and had been imprisoned for two years for feeding prisoners of war. Trajkovski graduated in 1980 with a degree in law from the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje. He subsequently specialized in commercial and employment law and made several visits to the United States, where he studied theology to become a Methodist lay minister. After he finished his studies, the communist government confined him for a time to a remote village because of his religious activities. There he took care of Kočani, an impoverished partly Romani congregation of the Evangelical Methodist Church of Macedonia, connected to the United Methodist Church of the USA. Following political liberalisation in the 1980s, he went on to head the legal department of the Sloboda construction company in Skopje. He served as Methodist youth secretary in the former Yugoslavia for over 12 years. Later he was President of the Church Council of the Macedonian Evangelical Methodist Church. From 1988 he took part in the ongoing Youth Exchange programme between the Methodist Church of Macedonia and the Berkhamsted and Hemel Hempstead Methodist Circuit in England. In 1991 he studied English at a Christian Language College in Bournemouth, England.