“Years of silence lead to a minute of silence.” It was one of the most frequently shared phrases on social media, the day after fifty-nine people died in Kočani, a small town in the east of North Macedonia, in a fire at what looks like an improvised nightclub. Some 162 others were injured, with twenty-two of them in a critical condition.

As I write this — and struggle to fact-check an avalanche of unverified information — the first thing I wonder is how at a venue in which around five hundred people attended a party, the Interior Ministry did not conduct a risk assessment, when it is its obligation to do just that.

For this is a story of a tragedy. But it is also a story about the culture of turning a blind eye — and institutional negligence.