The action started at 2pm when organizers, the newspapers Dnevnik, Zum, Vest, Nova Makedonija, Fokus, and Vecer and TV stations Sitel, Kanal 5, and A1, placed four collection points in front of the Parliament building. The mission for the disarmament of Macedonian citizens was overseen by two plastic dolls with NATO insignia, named "Nata" and "Nana". Men from the ethnic Macedonian paramilitary formation "OVA" were in charge of the "weapons" collection stations.
The citizens parked a combine on one side of the street, as a symbol of the NATO "harvest" and the media-sponsored action "down the shit creek without a paddle" ["we've reaped watermelons" in Macedonian]. At the other end of the street, there was a parked truck, full of watermelons. The citizens waited in long lines to hand in the weapons that hitherto had been stored in cellars, pantries and kitchens.
The action "down the shit creek without a paddle" concluded as expected. More than two thirds of the weapons were collected. The handed in weaponry included: anti-rocket bed sheets, mobile spoons, short range rolling-pins, cluster-bomb "Ceca" [cassette-bomb in Macedonian; a cassette tape of a popular folk singer], a jar with rotten pickles, high-pressure cookers, land mine of the type "banana", small-caliber forks, cherry-pit cannons, "stinger" squash and other.
None of the representatives in the Parliament responded to the invitation of the organizers to come and control the action of the disarmament of the citizens.
A small number of citizens, however, started to "bomb" the building of the Parliament with the collected weaponry and even managed to break one window. Perhaps, they wanted to demonstrate that their weapons were really "deadly"?
President of Macedonia Boris Trajkovski, received a delegation of the organizers, journalists. The president emphasized in front of the journalists that he has understood the goal of the action and that it had his support. Trajkovski stated that he liked the gathering and that he would work for the peace in the country.
During the meeting, journalists handed to Trajkovski a special letter in which they informed the president that a large number of citizens handed in a huge amount of working-condition weaponry that will later be turned over to NATO for destruction.
The action of voluntary handover of weaponry ended at 3:30pm, when two-thirds of the collected arsenal, handed in by the Macedonian citizens, were off loaded in front of the KFOR headquarters in Skopje. On that occasion the KFOR officer on duty and NATO soldiers were handed over about twenty watermelons, as a symbol of the action "down the shit creek without a paddle" ["We've reaped watermelons" in Macedonian].
"The guard of the mosque, who lives with his family in the adjacent object, where the fire started, even expressed to the commander of our service and the head of the Police in Bitola, Kristo Zdravkovski, sincere gratitude for dedicated and selfless attitude of the ethnic Macedonian neighbors," the firemen confirmed.
The honorary consul of Turkey in Bitola, Mitham Dzemal, also expressed gratitude for the solidarity expressed by ethnic Macedonians. He said the following on the local TV station "Tera":
"I was especially heartened by the fact that ethnic-Macedonians saved an Islamic building. Regardless of who uses it, ethnic Albanians or Turks, this and other mosques in Macedonia were built by Turks during the Ottoman Empire," Dzemal stressed.