The Macedonians-paper written by the Greek Helsinki Committee

8/8/2019 The Macedonians-paper written by the Greek Helsinki Committee

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THE MACEDONIANS

Introduction

On 4 December 1991, the Greek Council of Ministers defined the terms for the international

recognition as independent state of the (until then federal Yugoslav) Socialist Republic ofMacedonia (SGPI, 1992:6):

It should not use the name Macedonia which has a purely geographic and not anethnic meaning. It should recognize that it has no territorial claims on our country. It

should recognize that, in Greece, there is no Macedonian minority.

On 16 December 1991, the Greek foreign minister, Antonis Samaras, persuaded his EPC

(European Political Cooperation) colleagues to include these conditions, albeit in a modified

version, in their Declaration on Yugoslavia, which inter alia defined the conditions for therecognition of Yugoslav Republics. The latters last paragraph stated (ELIAMEP, 1992:305-

6):

The Community and its member States also require a Yugoslav Republic to commititself, prior to recognition, to adopt constitutional and political guarantees ensuring

that it has no territorial claims toward a neighboring Community State, including theuse of a denomination which implies territorial claims.

As a result, it took almost two years before the Republic of Macedonia (as she would like to

be called) was fully recognized by most countries in the world -and in most cases by the

provisional name agreed upon to facilitate its entrance in the UN (Former Yugoslav Republic

of Macedonia - FYROM). Even the EC countries delayed the recognition despite the fact that

the EECs Arbitration Commission (the Badinter Commission), in its advice no. 6 of 11

January 1992, had stipulated that (ELIAMEP, 1993a: 327):

the Republic of Macedonia fulfilled the conditions laid out by the Guidelines on the

Recognition of New States in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union as well as bythe Declaration on Yugoslavia adopted by the Council of Ministers of the European

Community on 16 December 1991.

Although the stumbling block for the recognition is the name of the new country, with Greece

refusing any Macedonian name and the Republic of Macedonia refusing any non-

Macedonian name, Greece continues to be adamant in its refusal of the existence of a Slav,or a Slavomacedonian or, even worse, a Macedonian minority in its territory. In the words

of then Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis, in an interview to Economicos Tachydromos

(19/8/1993):

I have revolutionized Greeces policy on the matter. PASOK [the Greek socialist

party] had tolerated such a debate, that is to present us with a minority problem,whereas C. Karamanlis [former Greek president and prime minister before PASOK]

had not tolerated it. When I went [to Yugoslavia], as the Official Opposition Leader

in 1989, I almost engaged in a fist fight: I called it phantom minority. When the USDepartment of State, three years ago, mentioned a minority, I told them this is a

casus belli for us. Show me where this minority is. There are bilingual Greeks; maybe

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some very few [among them] do not have a Greek national consciousness. [But] no

one speaks any more officially about a Macedonian minority.

Later on, Mr. Mitsotakis admitted even more explicitly that the real problem with the

recognition of the Republic of Macedonia was the implicit admission that a respective

minority existed in Greece (Mitsotakis, 1995:3):

I understood the Skopje issue from the very beginning in its real dimension. What

had concerned me from the very beginning was not the countrys name, which isrelated with the historical dimension of the problem and has mostly psychological

and sentimental value. The problem for me was to avoid the emergence of a second

minority problem in Western Macedonia. (...) For me, the aim had always been thatthat Republic should clearly state that there is no Slavomacedonian minority in

Greece and to commit itself through international treaties to stop all irredentistpropaganda against Greece. That was the key in the Greek-Skopjan dispute.

It is therefore obvious that, for the Greek authorities, the issue of the existence of aMacedonian minority, let alone claims about its repression, is so extremely sensitive that they

attempt to officially eliminate it by imposing on the Republic of Macedonia their view as a

sine qua no for its recognition. Had that new country ever signed an international officialdocument explicitly including the third term of the Greek Council of Ministers, it would have

been used by Greece in perpetuity to claim that there is no Macedonian minority in its

territory, just as it uses the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 to argue that the minority in Thrace can

call itself only Muslim (the term used in the Treaty) and not Turkish, the CSCE- and Council-

of-Europe-adopted principle of self-determination not withstanding. On the basis of that

official attitude, Greek courts can issue prison sentences for whoever calls him(her)self a Turk

and they have already done so; likewise for those who say they are Macedonians or argue that

there is a Macedonian minority in Greece.

Such an attitude, which has been giving the impression abroad that democracy takes a back

seat in Greece (The Times leader, 20/8/1993), reflects the existence of a nationalistic near-

consensus among Greek political parties, media and, notably, intellectuals and academics;

hence, dissenters have little influence and can be easily and quietly persecuted. The adoption,

in 1991-2, by the European Union (EU) of Greeces terms for the recognition of the Republic

of Macedonia has only helped the intransigence of Greek nationalism and made life more

difficult for the minorities and the rare dissenting voices.

On the other hand, the authorities argument that there are only very few in the Macedonian

minority who claim to have a non-Greek national consciousness is to a large extent the result

of half a century of systematic persecution of that minority which has led to the expulsion of

one part, the assimilation of another, and the sheer fear of a third part to come out of the

closet and publicly state their different identity. This situation may shock Western publics,

but it has been common among the various Balkan nations in the 20th century.

In this document, we will explain the historical reasons for the current situation, describe

current repression, present and explain the attitude of the Greek state and society on the

matter, alert to the lack of appropriate documentation and international concern on the issue,

and offer some suggestions for ways to remedy this and the, unfortunately, many similar

state-minority conflicts in the Balkans.

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A significant part of the factual information presented therein was collected during a fact-

finding mission which Minority Rights Group-Greece coordinated in Greek Western

Macedonia and the Bitola area in the Republic of Macedonia between 19-26 July 1993, with

the participation of two other NGOs, Helsinki Watch (USA) and the Danish Helsinki

Committee. The mission received no assistance nor any briefing from the Greek foreign

ministry, contrary to its obligations under the Moscow CSCE declarations to which Greece isa party; in fact, it was even sometimes harassed by Greek state officials, in ways similar to the

ones experienced by two of its members in the past (see Appendix I).

A note on the terms Slav, Slavomacedonian, Macedonian

As it has already become evident, the very name of Macedonia is a very sensitive issue for

Greece. When trying to define the respective minority, we are faced with an equally sensitive

issue. International linguists and human rights researchers tend to use the term Macedonian

for both the language and the minority. Within the minority, though, there are three groups.

Those who have a Macedonian national identity, meaning that they feel they belong to thesame nation with that constituting the majority in the Republic of Macedonia: they call

themselves Macedonians and they perceive their identity as incompatible with the Greek

national identity, although hardly anyone has a problem with being a Greek citizen. Then,

another group has an ethnic identity, which is incompatible with both the Greek and the

Macedonian national identities and seeks the recognition of their cultural specificities: most of

the latter seem to prefer to call themselves Slavomacedonians. Finally, a third group, the

largest one, is made up of people who have a full Greek ethnic and national identity, whether

because they descend from Graecoman Slavs who opted to fight for the Greek national

cause or because their families were the subject of successful, though oppressive,

assimilation: they are a simple linguistic minority which would be hostile to the use of the

Macedonian term for them (in fact some may object even to the use of the Slavomacedonianterm). To further complicate the matter, the ethnic Greeks who live in Greek Macedonia have

a Macedonian regional identity and strongly object to the -monopolizing for them- use of the

term Macedonia and Macedonian by the (Slav)Macedonians of Greece and, especially, of the

Republic of Macedonia (Karakasidou, 1993:11-4 & 1994:63).

To overcome this confusion, towards the end of the interwar period and during World War II

and the ensuing Civil War, it seems that the term Slavomacedonian was introduced and was

accepted by the community itself, which at the time had a much more widespread non-Greek

Macedonian ethnic consciousness. Unfortunately, according to members of the community,

this term was later used by the Greek authorities in a pejorative, discriminatory way; hence

the reluctance if not hostility of modern-day Macedonians of Greece (i.e. people with a

Macedonian national identity) to accept it, especially at a time when the name issue has been

elevated to a source of major conflict between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia.

In this document -and unlike in its first version (MRG-G, 1994)-, we have resolved to use the

term Macedonian to refer to the whole Macedonian-speaking community in Greece. The first

reason is that naming the minority after its language is the practice often used in this field, just

as we have done for the Arvanites, the Aromanians and Meglenoromanians, and the Pomaks.

Secondly, the hostility of todays Macedonian activists towards a name (Slavomacedonian)

which has acquired such a loaded value, just like the name Kutzovlachs for the Aromanians,

is another strong reason to avoid its use: after all, most of the human rights-related problemswe will discuss here have had as victims those who have never had a Greek consciousness

and have identified themselves as Macedonians (or, in the early interwar years and for some,

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Bulgarians). Thirdly, as we said above, the majority of Macedonian speakers in Greece are

unhappy with the Slavomacedonian term as well. Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority

Rights Group - Greece have been the first Greek Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

to publicly use the term Macedonian minority in Greece, to be followed, in 1995, by some

other groups or individuals, too few though. In conclusion, we should stress that we will not

make any changes to excerpts of texts of other authors who have used the termsSlavomacedonians or Slavophones.

The legacy of the past

The specificities of Balkan nationalisms

A comprehensive understanding of ethnic conflict and, therefore, of the plight of nearly all

minorities in the Balkans requires a reference to the, usually overlooked, particular

characteristics of Balkan nationalisms. They certainly belonged to the second wave of

nationalisms, the romantic and linguistic, mostly nineteenth century European, nationalisms.At the heart of each such nationalism was the elevation of a usually vernacular to the status of

a literary language-of-(actual or potential) state by (Anderson, 1991:79):

a coalition of lesser gentries, academics, professionals, and businessmen, in which

the first often provided leaders of standing, the second and third myths, poetry,newspapers, and ideological formulations, and the last money and marketing

facilities.

So, from the multitude of -nevertheless linguistically similar- Southern Slavic dialects and the

archaic Church Slavonic emerged the (internationally but not locally considered today)

common Serbo-Croat literary language, based on the neostokavian (ijekavian or ekavian)dialects; Slovenian, based on the Ljubljana dialect; Bulgarian based on the Northern

Bulgarian dialect; and Macedonian, based on the Bitola dialect. It should be mentioned that

the differences among the various Southern Slav languages are smaller than among the

various Italian dialects or those between French and the Occitan dialects (Garde, 1992:125-

141).

In the same period, emerged the other Balkan literary languages-of-state: purified Greek,

based mainly on the Alexandrian ancient Greek; Romanian, based on the Daco-Romanian

dialects but with the replacement of the Cyrillic by the Latin alphabet to distance Romanians

from Slavs; Albanian, based on the spoken dialects in modern times Albanian territories; and,

finally, as was the pattern at the time, modern Turkish, different from the official Ottoman

language, a mixture of Turkish, Persian and Arabic (Anderson, 1991:72-5). Generally

(Anderson, 1991:195):

In Europe, the new nationalisms almost immediately began to imagine themselves

as awakening from sleep, a trope wholly foreign to the Americas.

The founding intellectuals of the various dormant people of Europe will

rediscover -or sometimes fully invent- national epic literatures bearing foundingmyths. One after the other, the nations rediscover heroic and unfortunate ancestors.

(Plasseraud, 1991:49).

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Today, it is considered commonplace that there have therefore been three stages in the

development of that national consciousness (Hroch, 1968:24-5, as summarized in Banac,

1992:28):

In the first stage a group of awakened intellectuals starts studying the language,

culture, and history of a subjugated people. In the second stage, which correspondsto the heyday of national revivals, the scholars ideas are transmitted by a group ofpatriots, that is the carriers of national ideologies, who take it upon themselves to

convey national thought to the wider strata. In the last stage the national movementreaches its mass apogee.

Moreover (Banac, 1992:30):

The ideology of nationalism [...] found its fulfillment in national self-rule andinvariably promoted state independence either through a separation of national

territory from a larger multinational state (secessionism) or through incorporation of

kindred territory within the already established matrix-state (irredentism).

Irredentism is also known as piedmontization after the model of the Italian unification, built

around the Piedmont state.

The first peculiarity of Balkan nationalisms, and the most crucial to understand the historical

evolution of the area to this day, is that, in most cases, national self-rule was the product of

both secessionism and irredentism, unlike in all other non-Balkan countries. If one looks at

the maps of the first, initially autonomous and then independent, Montenegran (respectively

1516 and 1878), Serbian (1829, 1878), Greek (1829, 1830), Bulgarian (1878, 1908) and

Romanian (1861, 1880) states, and compares them to their maps in the 1990s, s/he will

immediately notice that the first states included no more than half the territory these statesrule over today. All of them were the product of secessions from the Ottoman Empire, first in

the form of autonomy then as independent states. From the very beginning, they perceived

themselves as matrix-states with an irredentist mission to conquer all as yet unredeemed

territories (Sellier & Sellier, 1991). No other European state has lived through a similar

experience, as the current external West European frontiers are very similar to the 1815 or

the 1885 ones, while the non-Balkan Central and East European frontiers are very similar to

the post-World War I 1924 ones.

The fact that the early modern Balkan states had to adopt an irredentist attitude would not by

itself have inevitably led to the serious ethnic conflicts which have plagued the region in the

last two centuries: witness the irredentist formation of Italy and Germany. However, in the

Balkans, the unredeemed territories targeted by each new nation-state conflicted with those

targeted by other(s) state(s), because of the mixed populations and, usually, their lack of a

clear national consciousness in these territories. This specific Balkan situation resulted in:

one century of diplomatic and armed conflicts in the area (1810s-1920s), often

accompanied by ethnic cleansing;

official policies of assimilation of the minorities which were not eliminated or expelled, a

characteristic absent from the other romantic or linguistic nationalisms but present in the

third wave of official nationalisms, which were the belated reaction of the native speakers

of the official vernacular of the imperial states (England, Russia, Turkey, etc.) to theemergence of the second wave or romantic nationalisms (Banac, 1992:28; Anderson,

1991:78-111);

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development of historical revisionism in the popular culture and, often, the official policies

of the Balkan states, as in almost all cases the dream of a large state including all irredenta

was materialized for a short period to be shattered soon after: Great Bulgaria (in 1878 and

between 1941-1944), Great Romania (1918-1940), Great Serbia (Yugoslavia between

1918-1941 and 1945-1991), Great Greece (1918-1922), Great Albania (1941-1944), Great

Croatia (1941-1944); as for Great Macedonia, its creation was envisaged during the post-World War I negotiations, but the idea was in the end rejected by a combined British-

French effort (Wilkinson, 1951:233); this led to the emergence of the concept of lost

fatherlands (the frustrated irredenta) which explains why the large majority of the citizens

of the Balkan countries today consider that their countries frontiers are bad, although they

are not ready to fight wars to change them;

repression of the remaining minorities, which survived ethnic cleansing, population

exchanges or expulsion, and assimilation, more than in other European countries; this often

means the refusal to recognize the presence of such minorities, just like the competing

Balkan nationalisms had in the past refused to acknowledge each others legitimacy.

It is indeed instructive to recall that, in the last two centuries, there has been an almost

systematic will to refuse the existence of the neighbor nation (Raufer & Haut, 1992:11) in the

Balkan peninsula. The Illyrianist movement in its Pan-Croatian form (19th century) considered

all Southern Slavs as Croats (Banac, 1992:71-6); it was reciprocated (in the 20 th century) by a

denial of the existence of separate Croat and Slovene identities by Pan-Serbian nationalists

like the interwar Radicals (Banac, 1992:161-2). Likewise, the Bulgarian distinct nation was

challenged by Croats (Banac, 1992:71-6), Serbs (Ancel, 1992:164) and Greeks (Jelavich,

1991:41). Serbian nationalism also considered Albanians lost Serbs, who had become

savages, and their nationalism was the product of Austrian and Italian intrigue (Banac,

1992:293-5); the latter view was shared by Greek nationalists too, who contested the

existence of a separate, non-Greek Albanian nation (Lazarou & Lazarou, 1993:171;Vakalopoulos, 1994:246). Naturally, the irredentist Croat and, especially, Serbian

nationalisms had no room for the Bosnians, demeaned as Asians, unstable, perverted etc.

(Banac, 1992:371-7). Likewise, Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks have never come to terms with

the presence of culturally distinct Macedonians and Vlachs in the area: the Macedonians have

been considered as Southern Serbs by the Serbs, Western Bulgarians by the Bulgarians,

and Slavophone Greeks by the Greeks (Raufer & Haut, 1992:11), who have regularly

demeaningly called in 1992-3 the Republic of Macedonia Skopjan statelet and its

inhabitants Gypsy-Skopjans, Balkan Gypsies, Skopjan Vlachs (Elefantis, 1992:39). On

the other hand, the word Vlach has often had a pejorative meaning among Croats and

Albanians (derogatory for Serbs) (Banac, 1992:257 & 300-2) and Greeks (meaning coarse)

(Tegopoulos & Fytrakis, 1993:152). For the generalised use of hate speech in modern 1995

Balkan electronic and print media, see Dimitras, Lenkova and Nelson (1995).

This attitude has hardly changed in recent years; in fact, the collapse of communism in

Central and Eastern Europe has led to the reappearance of nationalism as strong as ever

(Plasseraud, 1991:13-4; see also Garde, 1992:344):

There is a point on which the nations of Central and Eastern Europe differsubstantially from us; it concerns their relation to time and history. Contrary to the

Westerners who hardly have an historical memory and today gladly place themselves

in the instant, the people in the East often forget to live in the present as a result of anacute historicist consciousness. Their thought and their instinctive reactions are

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usually located in an historical perspective even if that reference handed down from

parents to children is often largely mythical.

This is particularly true in the Balkans, whose people are loaded with more history than they

can bear according to Winston Churchill (quoted in Rupnik, 1992:11). Throughout the

regions recent history, with rare exceptions, minorities were perceived, sometimes notwithout reason, as being manipulated by the fellow ethnic state at the expense of the national

interests of the state they lived in. Since in the new order, imposed by Hitler at the height of

World War II, their presence was used as an excuse to redraw the frontiers at the expense of

the winners of World War I, once the protecting curtain of the Cold War collapsed, the

populations started fearing the return of the old ghosts, i.e. the border games that shattered

Europe in the first half of this century; in some nationalist sectors in almost all Balkan

countries, nevertheless, such a return was seen in a positive way, in the hope that it could

restore some of the lost fatherlands.

The case of Macedonian nationalism

Macedonian nationalism is the last nationalism to have developed in the Balkans, in the very

end of the nineteenth century. The creation in Salonica of the Internal Macedonian

Revolutionary Organization (IMRO or VMRO in Macedonian) by teachers of the Bulgarian

high school (Lory, 1993:133), in 1893, is celebrated today as the beginning of the

Macedonian struggle for a nation-state. However, from the very beginning, there were two

trends among Macedonian-speaking activists: one, the centralist, which aimed at an

independent Macedonia, and another, the supremist which believed that the Macedonian

struggle was, in the end, a component of Bulgarian irredentism which sought the creation of

Great Bulgaria encompassing all territories granted by the San Stefano Treaty to the

ephemeral Great Bulgarian state in 1878 plus Salonica: for the supremists, an autonomousMacedonia would be only a first step towards eventual annexation by Bulgaria, as in the case

of Eastern Rumelia (annexed in 1885 by Bulgaria), while the centralists wanted the

autonomous Macedonia to become a part of a Balkan federation (Crampton, 1993:45).

It is generally believed today that, since the seventh century, [Macedonia] has been

overwhelmingly Slavic and, moreover, the cradle of Slavic literary activity (Banac, 1992:35)

and that these Slavs spoke various Bulgarian-Macedonian dialects, on which was based the

first codified Slavic language, St. Cyril and Methodius Church Slavonic (Garde, 1992:24-7).

However, it is not accepted neither that the Church Slavonic is just Old Macedonian, as

Macedonian nationalists claim (Danforth, 1993:7), nor that a separate Macedonian identity

had developed in these early ages (Banac, 1992:23):

It is highly significant that, among the South Slavs, the national identity of the

Bulgars, Croats, and Serbs was acquired, though not firmly fixed, long before thedevelopment of modern nationalism. These three nations maintained a collective

memory of their medieval statehood, and this memory survived in various forms -inthe consciousness of national elites but also in part in popular imagination- despite

interruptions or reductions in full state independence. As a result, the measure of

state-historical tradition separates old South Slavic nations from the Slovenes, whoacquired a national consciousness only in the nineteenth century, and especially from

the Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Bosnian-Hercegovinian Muslims, who are theproducts of twentieth century mutations in South Slavic national affinities and are,

indeed, still in the process of formation. Since the ideological underpinnings of these

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new South Slavic nations were seemingly incomplete without a state tradition,

modern Slovenes therefore looked upon the early seventh-century Carantanianprincipality as their prototypal state and the proof of their continuous nationhood,

and theorists of Montenegrin and Macedonian national uniqueness augmented theirclaims with references to eleventh-century Doclea (Duklja) and the Western

Bulgarian empire of Samuil.

Banac exaggerates when he speaks of national identities, formed in such early years, but he

is right in pointing out that Bulgarians, Croats, and Serbs had a richer history to look back to

than the other South Slavs. Bosnians, too, can trace their roots back to the fourteenth-century

Bosnian rulers and, especially, the emergence of the dualist sectarian Church of Bosnia, often

confused with the Bulgarian Bogomils (Banac, 1992:39-40). Albanians can be proud of their

ancestral states in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, some having stretched all the way

south to include todays Western Continental Greece (Nakratzas, 1992:21-4 and Sellier &

Sellier, 1991:173). Romanians trace their roots back to the Moldavian and Wallachian

principalities of the same period (Sellier & Sellier, 1991:132). Even the Southern Balkan

Aromanians (Vlachs) could recall Vlach principalities in the tenth and the twelfth andthirteenth centuries (Brard, 1987:296; Nakratzas, 1992:51-4) and the Kingdom of Vlachs and

Bulgarians (1185-1260), usually known as second Bulgarian kingdom (Brard, 1987:297). On

the contrary, the Macedonians claims to historical precedents are common with the

Bulgarians, like Samuils Empire: this has contributed, on the one hand to the confusion

between the two contemporary national identities and, on the other hand, to an intense conflict

between Bulgarians and Macedonians. This weakness in the historical roots in the medieval

period may also explain why the Macedonians have been very keen to invent a direct

historical link with the ancient Macedonians and Alexander the Great, a source of equally

intense conflict between Greeks and Macedonians also involving the latters name.

However, the Greek propaganda in the nineteenth century inadvertently contributedsignificantly in the development of the Macedonian identity (Kofos, 1990:107-138, from

where most of the information in this paragraph is drawn). Following the establishment of the

Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, a nationalist-based secession from the Patriarchate of

Constantinople not recognized by the latter but sanctioned by the Ottoman authorities, a fierce

Greek-Bulgarian rivalry developed in, still Ottoman, Macedonia to win its mostly mixed

populations (hence the salade macdoine and the macdoine de fruits for vegetable and

fruit salads in French cuisine) to the competing national causes, later joined by Serbian,

Albanian and Romanian claims. Already after 1830, when neither the Bulgarian nor the

Macedonian national awakenings had occurred and these Southern Slavs had fought in

Greek and Serbian independence struggles, Greek propaganda in that area focused on the

revival of its Macedonian name, the learning of and the identification with the glorious

history of ancient Macedonians and Alexander the Great, who had, undoubtedly for the

Greeks, Greek origins. To achieve that purpose, even a popular story of Alexanders life in

the local, i.e. Macedonian, dialect, but in Greek script, was published and circulated. The

effort was successful, as in the end of the century, most inhabitants of Macedonia proudly

called themselves Makedones (in Greek), Makedontsi (in Macedonian), Makedoneni (in

Vlach). But Alexander was by then claimed as an ancestor not only by Greeks but by

Bulgarians, too, just as had done much earlier (in 1525) the initiator of Slavic reciprocity

which led to the Illyrian movement, Vinko Pribojevic (Banac, 1992:71).

One of the most respected authors in modern Greek literature, Penelope Delta, in a book sheresearched for twenty years in among other places the Greek Foreign Ministrys archives,

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gave in 1937 (when it was first published) the following definition of Macedonia in the

second half of the nineteenth century (Delta, 1992:46):

Macedonia was then a mixture of all Balkan nations. Greeks, Bulgarians, Aromanians, Serbs, Albanians, Christians and Muslims, lived higgledy-piggledy

under the heavy yoke of the Turks. Their language was the same, Macedonian, also ablend of Slav and Greek, mixed with Turkish words. As in the Byzantine era, thepopulations were so mixed that it was difficult to tell apart a Greek from a Bulgarian

-the two dominant races. Their only national consciousness was the Macedonian one.When though Bulgarians declared their religious independence and, in

Constantinople, the Exarch was recognized as the head of the Bulgarian Church

instead of the Patriarch, and when the 1872 Synod [of the Patriarchate] declared the Bulgarians schismatic, Macedonia was divided in Patriarchate Greeks and

Exarchate Bulgarians, and so were divided the people of the same area, the samevillage -even the same family.

Given the close proximity of Bulgarian and Macedonian dialects, it is important to clarify themeaning of the word Bulgarian (Ancel, 1992:180-1):

[T]he word Bulgarian [u]ntil the emancipation of Danubian Bulgaria, indicated

in the Balkans the farmer attached to the land, under Turkish yoke; before 1878,

Nich, Pirot, in the middle of Chopi, were considered Bulgarian lands; after thecreation of the Exarchate as a Bulgarian Church (1870), protected by Russia, the

Macedonian Slavs claimed the name of Bulgarians, looked towards Sofia, ratherthan a Belgrade enslaved by Austria and which was temporarily renouncing the

deliverance of the Yugoslavs.

So (Jelavich, 1991:90-1):

In the late nineteenth century four states put forward claims in Macedonia

-Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia, and Romania. In addition, Albanian national leaders, at a

minimum, wanted the vilaets of Bitola and Kosovo to form part of their futureautonomous region. As in the past, the arguments were based on three main

principles: the historical background, the ethnic composition of the population, andthe necessity of maintaining the balance of power. The third consideration involved

the idea of compensation: should one state gain an increase of territory, then its

neighbors should receive equal acquisitions. If history were used as the basis formodern ownership, then the Greeks had the advantage. The lands had been

associated with ancient Greece and Byzantium, and they had been under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which functioned as a Greek

national organization. The Bulgarians and the Serbs also had, of course, historical

claims dating back to the pre-Ottoman period. The really difficult question was thedetermination of the national divisions of the population. The Ottoman census of

1906, which was based on the millets, reported 1,145,849 Muslims; 623,197 GreekOrthodox, who were under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate; and 626,715

Bulgarian Orthodox, or member of the Exarchate. The figures for Muslims, of course,

included the Albanians. The numbers given for the Patriarchate and Exarchate werealso misleading. The Serbs, without a strong national organization, could join either

church; Bulgarians could be counted among the Greek Orthodox if they lived in anarea outside the jurisdiction of the Exarchate. The major problem in drawing

national lines was not separating the Albanians, Greeks, and Turks, who could be

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differentiated by language, but distinguishing among the Slavs. (...) Because of this

confused situation, it was also possible to argue that the Macedonian Slavs wereneither Serbian nor Bulgarian, but formed a unique nationality of their own.

The three-quarters of the century following the proclamation of the Exarchate were dominated

by the efforts of the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Serbs to covet the allegiance of theseMacedonian Slavs, countered by the struggle of Macedonian nationalists who aimed at

transforming the Macedonian Orthodox identity to a Macedonian national identity. Though

religious and secular propaganda was used, the most important and the most efficient efforts

were violent and bloody. In the five-year Macedonian Struggle (1903-1908) among Greek

andartes, Bulgarian comitadji, and, to a lesser extent, Serbian chetniks (Kofos,

1990:115):

Under the threat of imminent extermination by rival armed bands, entire villagecommunities rapidly changed national allegiances which had been shaped,

painstakingly, over decades. The long, laborious process of nation-building had

given way to the show of arms, which proved to be a more efficient method for serving Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian state-building needs. The Balkan wars of

1912-13 led to the eviction of the Turks from Macedonia and confirmed thesuperiority of force over ideological conversion.

The resort to the use of force was in a way called for by the attitude of the Great Powers at the

time, following the Ilinden and Preobrazhenie uprisings of 1903. On St. Elias day (Ilinden in

Macedonian), 20 July/2 August (old and new calendar respectively), IMRO forces rose in the

vilaet (district) of Bitola (in Macedonia) and proclaimed an independent administration in

Krushevo; on the Lords Transfiguration day (Preobrazhenie) on 6/19 August, a second

IMRO uprising took place in the Andrianople vilaet (in Thrace) leading to the creation of an

independent administration in Strandja (Banac, 1992:316):

Contrary to the expectations of the revolutionary leaders, the European powers

failed to intervene on behalf of Christian insurgents. Both uprisings were drowned in

blood, the Turkish soldiers and Albanian irregulars having burned some 150 villagesround Bitola.

After the first effort to establish a Macedonian state failed, Austria and Russia, the European

powers mainly concerned with the area, agreed on a scheme to manage the Macedonian crisis

by introducing European supervisors in Macedonia (Crampton, 1993:48):

Unfortunately, the Murzsteg scheme also contained the provision that Ottomanadministrative boundaries should be redrawn so as to produce the greater possible

degree of ethnic homogeneity within each unit: this merely made the Greeks,

Bulgarians and Serbians more determined to establish cultural dominance in as widean area as possible, and thereby sharpened the struggle between the protagonists of

the three potential successor states.

The powers scheme was an invitation to ethnic cleansing, similar to the one their late

twentieth century successors have, with their attitude and their decisions, invited in Bosnia

and in other areas of former Yugoslavia. As, following the defeat of the 1903 uprisings, the

IMRO centralists or autonomists were weakened to the benefit of the supremists orverhovists, the final and most crucial phase to win allegiances in Macedonia was

characterized by the absence of fighters for an independent Macedonia. The result was that,

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after the Balkan Wars and World War I, the legitimate pretenders to the area of Macedonia

were only the Serbs, the Bulgarians, and the Greeks. It is interesting though that the Carnegie

Commission thought that an independent Macedonia would have been the best solution

(Carnegie, 1993:38 & 59):

The most natural solution of the Balkan imbroglio appeared to be the creation inMacedonia of a new autonomy or independent unity, side by side with the otherunities realized in Bulgaria, Greece, Servia and Montenegro, all of which countries

had previously been liberated, thanks to Russian or European intervention. (...) Whatwas precipitated [by the Balkan wars] was the loss of Macedonia to the profit of the

allies. Fear of a real liberation of the Macedonian nation brought about its conquest

by the competitors [Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia].

The right for Macedonian self-determination was briefly and not very seriously discussed on

the negotiating tables of the late 1910s (Wilkinson, 1951:233), though the existence of a

separate Macedonian identity was acknowledged at least by the Greeks, as Macedonian

Slavs in the official ethnological map produced in 1918 by the Venizelos government(Soteriadis, 1918), the Serbs in Cvijics maps they officially used (Wilkinson, 1951:203), and

the British (in an internal memorandum) (Green, 1970:193):

Yet if a right of appeal is granted to the Macedonians or the German Bohemians it

will be difficult to refuse it in the case of other nationalists movements.

Macedonia was divided up in 1913 with little respect to the national affinities of its Slav

population, the large majority of whom were Bulgarophiles. Greece annexed over half of that

area, but the political frontier, dating from 1912, was traced clearly to the north of the

linguistic frontier; as a result, Greek or Aegean Macedonias population is in its majority

Greek, but there are Slavs in the whole northern part (Garde, 1992:246). Serbia receivedover a third of the territory with Bulgaria getting only a mere tenth, in inverse ratio to their

ethnological strength (Kofos, 1990:114).

As soon as they acquired these territories, Serbia and Greece engaged in, often brutal,

systematic and forced assimilation (if not extermination sometimes) aiming at eliminating

Bulgarophilia among Macedonians: a detailed report of the related practices can be found in

the Carnegie Endowment Report (Carnegie, 1993:158-207). Its conclusion (Carnegie,

1993:268):

These supreme acts of intolerance on the part of Greece and Servia toward

educational institutions, which had long been a saving grace in Macedonia, may findsome defense in the militant nature of the national propaganda which priests and

schoolmasters carried on; but such coercion and ill treatment employed by one set of

Christians against another, all adherents of the same [O]rthodox faith, can not hopeto escape the censure of the civilized world. They were fiendish, both in their

conception and in their execution, and were appropriate only to the times of theSpanish Inquisition. (...) They also convict the Greeks and Servians of mal-

administration and intolerance at the very beginning of their avowed work of

reconstruction. Recalling that under the Turks there had been a high degree of libertyin education and worship, is it strange that large populations are now wishing that

the Turks were again in control?

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Soon after, though, most of these territories reverted back to Bulgaria (1915-1918) which

engaged in an, often equally violent, persecution of Graecomane and Serbomane

Macedonians, Greeks and Serbs, documented by the special Inter-Allied Commission after

the war (Poulton, 1995:76). Such practices invited more repression by Bulgarias revengeful

opponents after these territories were returned to Serbia and Greece, though, this time,

between (1918-1924) the repression in Aegean Macedonia was far less intense than inVardar Macedonia (Banac, 1992:317-9). This round of terror repeated itself during World

War II, when Bulgaria fully annexed (and not just occupied) once again most of the

Macedonian territories it had lost to Serbia and Greece: initially, Bulgarian rule was popular

especially in Vardar Macedonia, as a result of the preceding repression; soon, though, the

centralizing and ruthless methods of the Bulgarians led to the final emancipation of

Macedonians from their Bulgarian affinities, an emancipation which had started developing

since the 1930s, and paved the way for the creation of a distinct Macedonian republic in the

post-war federal Yugoslav state. The latter was the only way Yugoslavia could keep Serbian

Macedonia under its rule after the War; it also furthered Titos short-lived ambitions for a

Belgrade-centered Balkan federation with a Macedonian component which would have

included a Great Macedonian component at the expense of Bulgaria and Greece (Crampton,1993:125; Banac, 1991:327; Danforth, 1993:7; Wilkinson, 1951:298-300).

The Macedonian entity within Yugoslavia developed through 1991 entirely under

communism. It showed most of the traits of Balkan nationalisms of the preceding century.

First, the language which became official in that state, and one of the official languages of

Yugoslavia, was certainly based on the Bitola dialect, but with a deliberate effort to de-

Bulgarize it, like the phonetic orthography which is a characteristic of the Serbian and not of

the Bulgarian language (Garde, 1992:243). Macedonia also acquired an official history that

led to a permanent conflict with Bulgaria and Greece, as it appropriated historical figures

and entities which were traditionally considered to belong to the latter two peoples histories,

as we said above. Moreover, the Macedonians considered their entity as only the Piedmontof an eventual Great Macedonia, which was to include the unredeemed territories under

Bulgarian and Greek rule, regardless of the fact that massive population movements had

altered the ethnological composition of these areas, turning the Macedonians still living there

into minorities, with a large number of them, perhaps as a result of past repression, having

been assimilated. Anyway (Kofos, 1990:139; the quotation marks in the Macedonian terms

from the original text):

The movement for unification was particularly strong during the war years and

until Tito was expelled from the Cominform in 1948. It has since been abandoned asofficial dogma, but has survived in Macedonian literature and historical treatises,

and has been adopted by certain Macedonian groups in the diaspora.

In the 1990s, the irredentist dream has not disappeared and is in fact included in the program

of the new states largest party in the first elections, the VMRO (37 out of 120 seats in 1990;

always in opposition to the governing coalition, but has disintegrated in the mid-1990s);

moreover, the choice as national symbol of the star found on the tomb of Philip II, father of

Alexander the Great, discovered in Greek Macedonia could not but fuel the Greeks fears

about contemporary Macedonian revisionism. Nevertheless, irredentism has been a key

characteristic in every new Balkan state fifty years after its establishment (the current age of

the Macedonian separate entity); whereas, though, it was legitimate in the nineteenth

century, it can be destabilizing in the late twentieth century: an official, concrete andsustained, condemnation of it was perhaps Greeces only reasonable demand in the conflict

over the international recognition of the new state in the mid-1990s. Finally, every new

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Balkan state with an Orthodox population sought to create a national church; the

Macedonians, thanks to a decision of the, theoretically atheist, federal Yugoslav authorities,

acquired their autocephalous church in 1967, despite the opposition by the Serbian and, as a

consequence, the other Orthodox Churches including the Greek one: this ecclesiastical

conflict is expected to last longer than the problem of the international recognition with a

definite name.

An impartial review of Macedonian history leads to the conclusion that (Garde, 1992:243; &

Granger, 1924:232):

A consciousness of identity (...) has always existed among Macedonians. French

geographer Ernest Granger wrote in 1924: The Slavs of Prilep, Bitolj, Strumica,Lower-Vardar have not had to this date the consciousness of belonging to a clearly

defined nation. To the question: are you Serbian? are youBulgarian? are youGreek? or Albanian? they were answering: I am Macedonian.

A leading Greek writer who fought in the Bitola area during World War I made the sameobservation also in 1924 (Myrivilis, 1991:104):

These peasants, whose language is perfectly understood by the Bulgarians and the

Serbs, dislike the former because they drafted their children in the army. They hate

the latter who mistreat them as they consider them Bulgarians. And they look with alot of sympathetic curiosity to us, the passing by Rums [Greeks] because we are the

genuine spiritual subjects of the Patrik, that is the Orthodox Patriarch of the Poli[Constantinople]. (...) But they want to be neither Bulgar, nor Srrp, nor Grrtc.

Just Makedon Orthodox.

This feeling of a separate Macedonian identity (albeit not yet a national one) was shared bymany scholars in the first half of the twentieth century, as indicated by the dozen maps which

included them separately from the Bulgarians, the Greeks, or the Serbs (Wilkinson, 1951).

However, the frustration of their earlier struggles for independence and the cultural affinity

with the Bulgarians led them to often identify with the latter. So, in the 1930s (Banac,

1992:327):

They were Bulgars in struggles against Serbian and Greek hegemonism, but within

the Bulgar world they were increasingly becoming exclusive Macedonians.

After World War II, they were elevated to an official nation by Tito who wanted to distance

them from the Bulgarians and, secondarily, the Serbs, just like Stalin established Moldavian

nationality, language and entity in formerly Romanian Bessarabia (Garde, 1992:245):

But in Bessarabia linguistic differences were fictitious, regional specificity non-existent, while in Macedonia they were both real. (...) So, Moldavia, after

independence, eagerly seeks reunification with Romania. Macedonia claims plainand simpleindependence.

We can therefore conclude that a distinct Macedonian ethnic identity -just like a distinct

Vlach ethnic identity- had definitely developed before World War II, irrespective of the

varying historical explanations for it: it is on that basis that the post-war Yugoslaviarecognized and helped develop the Macedonian national identity. On the contrary, no distinct

Moldavian ethnic identity existed before the War; hence Stalins failure to definitely distance

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the Moldavians from the Romanians. Bulgarians have accepted that, in the last fifty years, the

Slav population of Yugoslav Macedonia developed a separate identity although they keep the

hope that they can be reintegrated in the Bulgarian nation in the future (Kofos, 1990:127).

Their attitude has enabled them to be the first to recognize Macedonian independence in

1991, though they will not officially acknowledge the separate nation. Greeks have yet to

come to terms with that reality and, thus, were the last to fully recognize their neighbors. Inany case, both countries adamantly deny the existence of Macedonian minorities in their

respective territories.

Past repression in Greece

According to League of Nations statistics, which however were based solely on Greek

sources, when Greece annexed over half the territory of Macedonia in 1913, the Greek-

speaking population made up just 43% of its 1,200,000 inhabitants as compared with 39% for

the Turks, 10% for the Slav and 8% for the Jews (Wilkinson, 1951:266; Nicolaidis, 1992:32).

However, in those figures, Slav-speaking people who belonged to the Patriarchate wereclassified as Greeks. Should we limit the Greek population to the Greek-speaking one, we

would reach an estimate of 20%-25% of Greeks vs. 30%-35% of Slavs (Lithoxoou, 1992c;

Carnegie, 1993:195; Poulton, 1995:85). In general, to quote Greek Minister of the Army K.

Nider from a 1925 memorandum (Divani, 1995:77):

When Macedonia was liberated by Greece, there was a mosaic of national

consciousness, of Greek-leaning (), Bulgarian-leaning, Serbian-leaning,Romanian-leaning people.

The Slavs tended to be considered as Bulgarians by the Greek authorities, which explains why

Professor R. A. Reiss who was commissioned by the Greek government to studyethnologically the new territories felt compelled to insist that those you call Bulgarophones, I

will simply call them Macedonians (Reiss, 1915:3). Following World War I, and the Greek-

Bulgarian convention of 27/11/1919, which allowed voluntary population exchange, some

53,000 Slavs left for Bulgaria (Wilkinson, 1951:262), usually compelled by the Greek states

discriminatory implementation of that convention in favor of those leaving the country

(Nicolaidis, 1992:32); in exchange some 30,000 Greeks emigrated from Bulgaria to Greece.

Divani (1995:58) -whose book is using Greek foreign ministry archives- mentions -though

without a source- an exchange of 46,000 Greeks for 92,000 Bulgarians, though she uses the

53,000 figure for Bulgarians later on (p. 332); Poulton (1995:86) mentions 25,000 Greeks for

52,000-72,000 Bulgarians. At the same time, and following the implementation of the

mandatory exchange of population between Greece and Turkey after the Greek defeat in Asia

Minor in 1922 and the Lausanne Treaties in 1924, some 700,000-800,000 Greeks settled in

Macedonia (Wilkinson, 1951:263-269). So, in the inter-war period, the composition of the

population of Greek Macedonia was dramatically altered. To quote the current bishop of

Florina: If the hundreds of thousands of refugees had not come to Greece, today there would

be no Greek Macedonia. The refugees created the countrys national homogeneity (Avgi,

9/2/1992). Still there were many Macedonians left: some 82,000-85,000 according to official

census data in 1928 and in 1940 (with their language referred to as Slavo-Macedonian), but

probably as many as 200,000 in reality, as even the association created to help Hellenize

them (Association for the Dissemination of Greek Letters) admitted (Mavrogordatos,

1983:247; Divani, 1995:333).

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This homogeneity could not have been achieved though without additional compulsory and

repressive assimilation policies of the Greek state. Although the Greek state was compelled to

protect its Bulgarian minority by the 1920 Svres treaty and, in fact, tried to negotiate the

implementation of the provisions of the latter in 1924 (by the Kalfof-Politis agreement),

strong reaction by public opinion and by Yugoslavia canceled all such initiatives, and the

special Abecedar printed in 1925 to teach the (Latin not Cyrillic) alphabet (based on thedialects spoken in Greece rather than on the Bulgarian or Serbian alphabets -hence its

rejection by Bulgaria -Divani, 1995:148; Poulton, 1995:88-9) at the primary schools (as

promised by Greece in the League of Nations on 10/6/1925, see Divani, 1995:323) was never

used, as (Williams, 1992:83):

The Hellenistic ideology of the post-Lausanne Greek state favors nation-buildingand assimilation into one Greek people of all other non-Turkish constituent

minorities.

On the contrary, since the mid-1920s, all Exarchate and Serbian schools from the pre-

annexation era were closed, while the Slavonic icons were replaced or repainted with Greeknames (Poulton, 1993:176 & 1995:89); likewise, the Slavic names of the villages were

changed, a process which had already started in 1909 in the territories which were already

part of Greece then (Lithoxoou, 1991: 63-4; Poulton, 1995:88). Moreover, from Thracian

villages near Bulgaria -but also from villages in Western Macedonia-, many Macedonians

were exiled to Crete in an effort to neutralize hostile Bulgarian propaganda, partly carried out

through IMRO band intrusions in Greek territory (Kargakos, 1992:100; Mavrogordatos,

1983:248; and Tounta, 1986:56). But for the Macedonian masses (Mavrogor-datos,

1983:249):

The most explosive and perennial issue, however, was that of the land in

conjunction with refugee settlement. Slavo-Macedonian natives reacted strongly andoften violently to the massive settlement of Greek refugees and to their occupation of

fields they had themselves coveted or even cultivated in the past. (...) Slavo-

Macedonian peasants would massively declare themselves Bulgarians, or even Serbs,

in the futile hope that their villages and lands would thus be spared the refugeeinvasion.

As a result, Macedonians tended to oppose the most nationalist political family, the liberal

Venizelists, whose electoral base was the refugees, and vote for the conservative populists,

also because the latter were receiving strong support from Greek Old-Calendarists (Orthodox

Christian who have not accepted the new calendar) and Macedonians were Old-Calendarists

too. In fact, some local populist politicians campaigned among Macedonians using separatist

slogans Macedonia for Macedonians and Macedonia iskra (Divani, 1995:80).

Nevertheless, a minority of the Macedonians was voting for the communists, who, along with

the other Balkan communists, advocated an independent Macedonia. The consequence

(Mavrogordatos, 1983:251):

[T]he connection between Slavo-Macedonians, Communists, and the threatened

loss of Greek Macedonia was most effective-not only for propaganda, but also for the

police repression of both Communist and Slavo-Macedonian agitation.

Despite all this harassment, a large number of Macedonians, and their vast majority in theFlorina and Kastoria district, lacked Greek national consciousness (Mavrogordatos, 1983:247;

& Lithoxoou, 1992a:36-42). So, during the Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1941) -ironically

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Metaxas was the leader of a populist political party Macedonians had supported in the past-,

compulsory and repressive methods of assimilation were introduced, resulting in the

alienation of the non-assimilated Macedonians (Kofos, 1990:116). The use of the Macedonian

language was prohibited both in public and at home, and the penalties included fines, forced

drinking of castor oil, thrashing, torture, and exile. All its native speakers were forced to

attend night school to learn Greek. Special training schools for women were created to helpHellenize the Bulgarian-speaking mother (Divani, 1995:345). Finally, all those who had

not changed their names from Slavic into Greek ones, were obliged to do so, while 340

Macedonians emigrants to Canada or the USA were losing their Greek citizenship and were

not allowed back even with their families living in Greece (Divani, 1995:345). It is no wonder

therefore that many Macedonians, having felt hostile towards the Greek bourgeois state,

were eager to cooperate with the Bulgarian occupants during World War II and, especially,

with the communist resistance in the same period and the communist forces in the ensuing

civil war, which, towards the wars end even openly supported the idea of an independent

Macedonia (Karakasidou, 1993:3; Kargakos, 1992:187; Lygeros, 1992:33; & Mavrogordatos,

1983:252). In the villages under control of the resistance and then the communist forces,

Macedonians had their schools, schoolbooks, newspapers, and church services and enjoyed afreedom they had never had before and have never had since (Poulton, 1993:178 &

1995:110).

The Macedonians paid dearly their civil war (1946-9) choice and the call for an independent

Macedonia made during it. Like most communists, some 35,000 Macedonians fled Greece

after the defeat of the communist side (Danforth, 1993:4); but, whereas, in 1982, a law

allowed the free return of and property restitution to all these political refugees, it excluded

specifically all those of non-Greek origin, i.e. the Macedonians. All those who left lost their

citizenship (on the basis of decree LZ/1947) and their property (first during the civil war with

decrees M/1948 and N/1948 and after it with law 2536/1953) even if the latter had been left at

the hands of relatives or tenants. Greek Helsinki Monitor (GHM) and MRG-Greece havedocuments showing that, at least in one case, a Macedonian, named Athanasios Gotsis, was

stripped of his citizenship four years after his death in a civil war battle. With the same 1953

law, nationally-minded Greeks, mostly retired army and police officers and privates, but

also some Vlachs, were resettled in the Macedonian-populated areas, in the very lands which

had been expropriated (Poulton, 1993:178; SAKE, 1993:20).

In the 1950s, the policy of memoricide was subtler than in the past. For example, the state

opened many more kindergartens in the Florina district, where the Macedonian children could

go spend the day, enjoy day-care and warm food, and take lessons of Greek, the only

language they were allowed to speak. Thus, young children, when their parents were at work,

were growing up away from the influence of the Macedonian-speaking grandmothers. The

Bishop of Florina praised the kindergartens work. (Avgi, 9/2/1992) Also, the best and the

brightest pupils were -and have since been- sent to at least two boarding schools far away in

Kefallonia and Volos, in order to receive proper education. Moreover, Macedonians could

hardly find a job in the civil sector and their children were, reportedly, being discouraged

from having a complete secondary education. Towards the end of that decade, the authorities

pressured many villages to stage public swearing-in ceremonies in which they pledged never

to use again the Macedonian language: these ceremonies were proudly reported in the Greek

press (see for example: Eleftheria 7/7/1959; Hellenikos Vorras 8/7/1959; Vima 8/7/1959;

Hellenikos Vorras, 5/8/1959; Kathimerini 11/8/1959; Hellenikos Vorras 11/8/1959).

Finally, many Macedonian villages near the border had been included, through the period ofthe dictatorship, in a restricted zone, where the movement of the citizens to and out of that

zone was controlled by the authorities (such zone had also existed through 1995 in the

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mountain villages of Thrace where Pomaks and Turks, both identifying as ethnic Turks, have

been living). At the same time, Greek authorities resettled in Macedonian-populated areas

many Greeks with healthy national consciousness often giving them the property of the

Macedonians who had fled the country (Poulton, 1995:162).

In that context, it is interesting to mention the Greek-Yugoslav border movement agreementof 18/6/1959: it called for the freedom of movement of inhabitants of the villages and the two

towns (i.e. Florina/Lerin in Greece and Bitola/Monastir in Yugoslav Macedonia) in a 10 km

zone each side of the frontier between the two countries: some 3,000 of them from each side

(excluding political refugees from Greece, though) could travel (without passports), trade,

cultivate land and exercise liberal professions freely within that zone; the special licenses

were issued in Greek and Macedonian (the term was used not in the text but by Greek foreign

minister E. Averoff-Tossizza in parliament), which implied an official recognition of the latter

by Greek authorities. The agreement was repealed in 1967 by the dictatorship and has never

been reinstated since the restoration of democracy in 1974, despite repeated Yugoslav

dmarches in that direction (Valden, 1991:12-14 & 128).

Recent repression

Discrimination against average Macedonians

Even the most militant Macedonians acknowledge that their situation has improved since the

restoration of democracy in 1974, and, especially, since the coming of the socialists to power

in 1981, when the public use of their language, dancing of their dances and singing of their

songs was again tolerated, at least until the return of the conservatives to power, when again

some of the public festivities were broken up by police. After the socialists returned to power

in 1993, many Macedonians reported a slight easing up of repression.

From an international human rights point of view, the most important discrimination against

the minority is the official refusal to recognize it, even as a linguistic one, with the

consequence that there is no education in Macedonian, not even any teaching of the

Macedonian language in the public schools of villages and towns with large, if not exclusive,

Macedonian population. The Greek authorities may be partners of the CSCE agreements that

call for the respect of the self-determination of the minorities, but they do not acknowledge

that there are Greek citizens who declare having not a Greek but a Macedonian consciousness

and national identity; or just a Macedonian ethnic identity and no national identity: when

confronted with information about self-professed Macedonians, the official Greek attitude is

either demeaning, they are a handful, or demonizing, they are Skopjian agents. As for their

language, the official position repeated to the fact-finding mission over and over again is that

it is an idiom with many Greek, Slav, and other words, based on Homeric Greek, with no

syntax or grammar (Karakasidou, 1993:11), therefore not able to be considered a proper

language.

These arguments are also put forward for the Aromanian and the Arvanite minority languages

in Greece, and they are even defended by some Greek linguists, but by no non-Greek ones.

The speakers of the Macedonian language are therefore called bilinguals or, at best,

Slavophone Greeks. As a result, the use of the language is waning from generation to

generation, especially as, after decades of repression, many parents do not want their children

to learn it as it could jeopardize their future. The mission was told of one recent case of aharsh and humiliating punishment of a pupil for speaking the language at the Xyno Nero

school, and of reproof to the parents of another pupil who disagreed with his history teacher

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on a matter related to his culture. It should be mentioned though that, in recent years, there

has been a -limited in scope- revival of interest, with young people eager to learn their

parents and grandparents language, mainly in the Florina department which has always been

the strongest in Macedonian population (almost all people the mission met there agreed that

50%-70% are Macedonian native speakers).

The Macedonians of Greece, though, have a higher priority than the official recognition and

the teaching of, or in, their own language. With no exception, the first concern is granting

their relatives who live abroad, mostly in the Republic of Macedonia, as political refugees, the

right to freely return to and/or visit their native land. The latters plight was eloquently

described by the socialist deputy of Florina George Lianis, when his party was in opposition

in 1991 (EDM, 1992:16):

There are a number of political refugees from the Florina area who has neverreturned to Greece. (...) And I tell you that they are Greeks, who have brothers,

fathers and grand-fathers in Florina, in the villages of that area, who they cannot

visit with for weddings, (...) for funerals, (...) and these people cannot enter ourfatherland not even with the status of visitors. I want to add that some, exploiting the

fact that Skopje are indeed making anti-Hellenic propaganda, hurt the local pride byinsinuating that whoever raises such issues or demands the return of a certain

number of refugees who are Greeks (...) is suspect.

Mr. Lianis became secretary of state for sports in the 1993 PASOK government and is

reported to be very close to the Prime Minister: although the easing up of repression may bear

his influence, he has done nothing to correct the above situation, as the conflict between

Greece and the Republic of Macedonia makes such a policy decision very delicate and

probably very unpopular. The mission heard of many specific cases of political exiles who

could not come to Greece for a short visit even when an important family matter (relative onthe deathbed, funeral, wedding) was involved. However, in all these cases, on both sides of

the border, it was clear that the people concerned indeed defined themselves as Macedonians

and not Greeks, contrary to Mr. Lianis argument. The mission visited the annual festival of

these Macedonian exils in the Republic of Macedonia in 1993 and was convinced that they

all have a Macedonian national identity that they are not willing to renounce in order to return

to Greece. This division of families by the border was the subject of Angelopoulos film The

Suspended Step of the Stork, shot in Florina amidst continuing unrest of the most nationalist

sectors of the local population, led by the bishop.

As official census data do not exist, and if they did they would not be reliable, we will

mention here the most frequent estimate of some 200,000 Macedonian speakers in Greece

(IHF, 1993:45; & Rizopoulos, 1993); the 1987 Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year

1987 gives an estimate of 180,000 (Banfi, 1994:5). Also, an anonymous Greek ethnologist

gave an estimate of 200,000 for the community, among whom some 100,000 understand the

language and a few thousands have a Macedonian conscience (Chiclet, 1994:8). Another

scholar, based of a detailed estimate of 30,000 speakers in the Florina and Aridea area makes

a global estimate of 100,000-150,000 Macedonian speakers throughout Greek Macedonia

(Van Boeschoten, 1994). Thus, the 200,000 estimate for the Macedonian community seems

reasonable, also in view of the fact that the -naturally conservative- prefects of Greek

Macedonia estimate the idiom speakers at some 100,000 (Financial Times, 4/11/1992), also

the estimate of the Jyllands Posten correspondent (17/7/1993). Among them, a minority of afew tens of thousands, a figure growing since the beginning of the recent Macedonian

imbroglio (Karakasidou, 1993:20), have a non-Greek consciousness (Danforth, 1993:8);

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most of the latter probably live in the Florina area: the figure [of nationally conscious

Macedonians] may increase in conditions of free expression which today do not exist

(Valden, 1993:21), when many people are afraid to [even] admit they know the language

(Karakasidou, 1993:11). The results of the Macedonian minority list in the June 1994

European elections (7,263 votes which correspond to a total population of more than 10,000)

also confirm that the Macedonians with a national identity are neither a negligible (ahandful) nor the largest section of the Macedonian community. In fact, given the difficult

circumstances of this first election appearance, the estimate of a few tens of thousands of

people with a Macedonian national consciousness in Greece seems plausible.

The issue of the return of the political refugees who left Greece after the civil war was solved

for all non-Macedonians with ministerial decision 106841/1982 (Official Gazette, second

volume, 5/1/1983):

All the Greeks by origin who during the Civil War 1946-1949 and because of it

sought refuge abroad as political refugees may freely return to Greece even if they

had been stripped of the Greek Nationality.

The decision also called for the restoration of the citizenship to all those applying for it, and

covered their immediate family. The refugees who were not Greek by origin, that is the

Macedonians, were not allowed to return, a decision taken by the then socialist government

with the tacit agreement of the conservative and the communist opposition. In fact,

[s]uccessive Greek governments have claimed that these people are agents deeply involved

with Skopjan anti-Greek propaganda activities (Karakasidou, 1993:12). The origin of each

applicant was established on the basis of his/her declaration: nevertheless, most Macedonian

political refugees opted to declare their different, Macedonian nationality and lose their right

to return to Greece.

In a related matter, since the collapse of Yugoslavia and the practical closing of the border

between Greece and Macedonia in early 1992 (those crossing it were being harassed and often

ended up with security files, later conveniently leaked in the extreme nationalist weekly

Stohos), the population of Florina lost their regular contacts with that of Bitola, less than half-

an-hour away, with which it had more frequent contacts than with the closest Greek city.

Florina and Bitola are in the same plain and are separated by mountains from the other major

cities in their respective countries. The economy of Florina was severely hurt as a

consequence; but for the Macedonians, this severance also meant being cut off from their

relatives as many live in the Bitola area or they could easily reach it.

Macedonians have also been discriminated against in the hiring in the public sector, though

the mission heard that that was more acute in the past than nowadays. Such a practice was

certainly commonplace before the 1980s, and a leaked secret National Security Service

memorandum of 16/2/1982 (reg. no. 6502/7-50428), at the hands of GHM and MRG-Greece,

recommended, besides the non-return of the Macedonian political refugees, also the hiring of

non-Macedonian-speakers in the civil service and, especially in schools. Moreover, a hand-

written letter to Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis by the commune president of Kelli (a

village with Macedonian-speakers with Greek consciousness) in February 1992 with the plea

to hire some villagers in the public sector acknowledged past discrimination against the

villagers: we do not have one civil servant from our village (Moglena, May 1993). On the

other hand, the Meliti commune president and secretary of the PASOK District Committee,

who told the mission he is Macedonian (how can I say I am a Greek when the state refusedmy grandfather the right to return to Greece because he is not a Greek) just like many of his

villagers, argued that, since the restoration of democracy, all local party organizations have

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been taken over by indigenous -dopioi- (as Macedonians are usually called) who, through

the usual patronage system, have pushed for the hiring of party sympathizers regardless of

their origins; this resulted in more indigenous than refugees being hired, as the district has a

70% local population, and, as a consequence, it is now the refugees who are complaining that

they are discriminated against.

Moreover, some name changing of localities is still taking place. The mission saw that the

Pozar Baths (in the Pella district) have been renamed to Loutraki Baths (poorly corrected road

signs and pre-1990 official maps were convincing evidence) and heard allegations that an

effort to rename Kopano (in the Katerini district) was under way in mid-1993. Sometimes, the

name changing is requested by the villages administration, either because it is so instructed

or in an effort to prove the villagers Greekness by adopting an ancient Greek name of some

adjacent archeological site. Another prewar measure, the replacement of icons with Slavic

inscription and the tearing down of Exarchist churches, resumed in Florina since the current

bishop took office during the junta: he is still implementing an order of the foreign ministry

as he wrote in a local newspaper about the icons removal (Moglena, May 1993) and

because of irreparable structural damages for the churches as he, and some priests, told themission.

Conflict over land is also reappearing from time to time: the mission heard allegations that a

dried-out section of the Vegoritida lake was refused to the adjacent indigenous villagers of

Aghia Paraskevi (Florina district) despite State Court decisions in their favor, so that it be

given to the refugee villagers of Vegora. Especially after 1989, moreover, public singing and

dancing of Macedonian songs and dances has often been broken up by police (Karakasidou,

1993:13), as such a cultural activity remains a nationally suspect if not anti-Greek act

(Lygeros, 1992:97).

To conclude this section, we should mention the views of the prefect of the Florina district,the mayor of the city of Florina, and the bishop of Florina, in July 1993. The prefect denied

the existence of a distinct minority and gave the aforementioned arguments for the idiom,

admitting though that it is broadly spoken in the area. He denied the existence of any

discrimination against the indigenous generally and in the public sector or the existence of

any climate of fear, claiming that those who make these arguments and those who say they

are not Greeks but Macedonians are a small group (they can be counted one by one) who

are not serving Greek national interests, as they are directed from centers abroad.

Asked to substantiate these serious allegations, he said that he could not give any proof, but

that such is the impression they give when they say they are not free to exercise their

activities. He also denied knowledge of the Misalis case of lost citizenship (see below),

though the mission later saw official correspondence between him and Mr. Misalis to that

effect. He also assured the mission that it was not followed by any security police or secret

service, something that contradicted the missions experience as related above.

Florinas mayor argued that the idiom (for which he offered similar arguments) was spoken

by very few and those who claim the contrary are wrong. He even took exception to the use of

the term Slavophone Greeks by then Prime Minister Mitsotakis (to whose party he belongs)

saying that he said it because he does not know the situation in the district. He finally named

five activists who, according to his view, are the only ones who claim to be Macedonians.

When told that the commune president of Meliti also claimed a Macedonian ethnic identity,he embarrassingly replied he is sorry to hear it but he is wrong.

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Finally, the bishop was very hostile and accused the missions foreign members of being

agents of foreign powers or of Skopje. In the brief encounter he even denied things he had

said to the Greek press, especially that, for a large number of inhabitants of Florina, the idiom

is their mother tongue and it is anyway largely spoken in the area, where the Greek language

is shrunk, as the large majority of people barely know 500-600 Greek words (Avgi,

9/2/1992).

After the October 1993 parliamentary election, when a Macedonian activist stood as an

independent in the Florina district and received 369 votes, the official argument that those

with a Macedonian consciousness were a mere handful was updated (letter of Ambassador

Elias Gounaris to The Independent, 16 May 1994):

This has been proved once more, and quite dramatically, at the last elections. When

a local eccentric, one A. Boules, decided to test the waters, run for parliament andbecome the recognized chief of a slavophone community in Greece, he polled at the

general elections of 10 October 1993 exactly 369 votes. Now this number is certainly

not representative of the bilingual Macedonians living in Greece. However, Mr.Boules and company, maverick leaders of 369 voters, have been misled to believe

that they represent a minority, even an oppressed one; and that as a result of thisnewfound status, they can enjoy internationally sanctioned privileges and immunities.

This is not the case.

A month later, the Macedonians polled more than 7,000 votes. The Greek authorities had then

to revise their arguments again.

Harassment of Macedonian activists

Until the late 1980s, there was no apparent autonomous (i.e. outside the mainstream political

parties and associations) minority activism in Greece. However, as on the one hand the

problems grew and on the other the emphasis in the post-cold war European world moved

towards human rights, both in Thrace and in Macedonia some members of minorities became

energetic human and minority rights activists. Among those with a Macedonian national

identity, two organizations had emerged by 1994: the older one is the Macedonian Human

Rights Movement, with Christos Sideropoulos as president in recent years, and the newest

one is the Macedonian Movement for Balkan Prosperity (MAKIVE), run by a five-member

secretariat and occasionally publishing a newspaper (first called Moglena -Byzantine name of

the area- then Zora -Macedonian for dawn). The former appears to be more active in the

international fora and in close contact with the overseas Macedonian organizations, while the

latter seems to have a broader base within Greece with members from at least six districts.

In 1993, they both filed candidates in elections: Tasos Boulis of the first organization ran as

an independent in the October parliamentary elections, in the Florina district, and received

369 votes (1% of the electorate), while Pavlos Voskopoulos of the latter ran in the January

indirect elections for the prefecture councils (elected by the president and the council

members of all municipalities and communes of each district) and received 84 votes (14% of

the electorate). In the June 1994 Euroelections, a Rainbow list was presented by MAKIVE, in

cooperation with the Rainbow group of the European Parliament (which included the minority

and regionalist MEPs between 1989-1994). The list was immediately strongly attacked andslandered by the state news agency and some media; then the countrys Supreme Court

invalidated its candidacy, on the grounds that it had not declared it was not aiming at

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overthrowing the regime, a declaration not used since 1974. Following the outcry, the

Rainbow and two other leftist lists, which were initially excluded were reinstated. The

Rainbow list was the only one not to get any air time on state television during the campaign

and was not able to distribute ballots in most Southern Greek electoral districts; also, on

election day, GHM and MRG-Greece received reliable information that the Rainbow ballot

was not given to the voters in many Greater Athens voting places. Despite all those problems,Rainbow received 7,263 votes or 0.1% of the total electorate. Its relative share of the vote was

significant in three districts where it received more than half its votes: 5.7% in Florina, 1.3%

in Pella, and 0.9% in Kastoria. In the October 1994 more polarized district elections, the

Rainbow list in Florina received 3.5%.

A year later, in September 1995, the office Rainbow opened in Florina, with an inscription in

both Greek and Macedonian, was attacked and sacked by a mob, led by the mayor of

Florina; before the sacking, the prosecutor had ordered the removal of the inscription and had

announced the indictment of Rainbow leaders for having incited division of the people

through the use of the Macedonian language on their sign: no political party, nor any medium

condemned the sacking of the party offices, which was on the contrary praised by extremeright nationalistic papers like Stohos and Chrysi Avghi, whose members reportedly took part

in the sacking. In fact, the use of the bilingual inscription was condemned by all political

parties, one of which, PASOK, even initiated a court procedure which was later withdrawn, as

it appeared that many signatures on it had been put without the knowledge of those

concerned.

The authorities continuously harass the Macedonian activists, as they claimed, and the

mission was able to substantiate in some instances. First, they are often followed by national

security or secret service agents, just like the mission itself was. Secondly, they are repeatedly

treated as Skopjan agents by authorities and media alike, without ever the latter providing any

substantive claim or -in the case of most media-publishing disclaimer or protest letterssometimes sent by the activists: it is characteristic to mention here the instructive public

dialogue between two then mere deputies, the conservative Virginia Tsouderou, who later

became secretary of state in the foreign ministry in charge among other things of human

rights, accusing some groups of Macedonians of their willingness to serve another country

(...) [and] along with the Skopjans make this cultural assault and genocide to the detriment of

Greece; and the socialist George Lianis, deputy of Florina, and since late 1993 secretary of

state for sports, who called this allegation an inconceivable thing for Greece in the 1990s

(EDM, 1992:18 & 22).

Thirdly, at least two activists, Christos Sideropoulos and Tasos Boulis, have stood trial and

were convicted for having spoken out as Macedonians, while the former was also indicted for

having spoken out at the 1990 Copenhague CSCE meeting (the charges were dropped in

1995, after an international mobilization campaign launched by our organizations). In early

1994, a general amnesty led to the dropping of the charges in the former case, as well as in

most cases of mainly leftist Greek activists who had publicly disagreed with official history or

policy of Greece on Macedonia and the minority and were convicted or had cases pending

against them (two such cases still await for their appeals in 1996). In other cases, intellectuals

or journalists were left without jobs for publicly holding similar, heretic views (details of

these persecutions can be found in Helsinki Watch et al., 1993). Also, in May 1994, the ultra-

nationalist weekly Stohos gave the addresses, phone numbers or car license numbers of two

scholars who have such dissident views, encouraging its readers to show them their feelings;one of them received death threats as a result and was forced to cancel her field research plans

in the Macedonian villages (see The Independent, 10 May 1994, for one of these cases).

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Moreover, the same newspaper, on 17 August 1994, asked that MRG-Greece and Greek

Helsinki Monitor spokesperson Panayote Elias Dimitras and his likes be thrown out of the

country.

Fourthly, the mission witnessed the expulsion from Greece of a young Macedonian from

Meliti, George Misalis, who is an activist in Australia. He has been stripped of his citizenshipon the basis of article 20 of the nationality code (for alleged actions abroad benefiting a

foreign government) without ever having been properly informed of the decision; an appeal

was turned down by the prefect who asked him to come in person to file it; when he finally

did, in July 1993, and while he made a short visit to Bitola to see his relatives, he was not

allowed back in, as Greeks who lose their citizenship are blacklisted even when they have

other passports (Australian in this case): so, he was practically denied an

Documents

The Macedonians-paper written by the Greek Helsinki Committee