The Macedonian Affair - Part 1

The "Macedonian Question" Today

The 'Macedonian Question' can be understood only when its historical evolution is perceived. That historical evolution is connected with general developments in the area and sheds light on the far-reaching and dangerous consequences which any recognition by the international community of a state bearing the name 'Macedonia' would have in an area which, once again, is living up to its description as the 'powder-keg of the Balkans'.

By using the geographical term 'Macedonia', the expansionists in Skopje have always sought to convert that term into a national name for a Slav nation. In the course of that process, they have also attempted to deprive the Greek people of its lawful rights over a considerable portion of its cultural identity. For 45 whole years, the name Macedonia has become the principal means for promoting the territorial and cultural expansion of Skopje at Greece's expense.

Today, Greece has many serious reasons for refusing to recognise the so-called 'Socialist Republic of Macedonia'. The most important of these reasons are as follows:

First, the fact that for forty years Skopje was the leading edge of Tito's policy of expansion: a policy which in other respects relied on a simplistic and ignorant view of the history of the area. This, with justice, creates a feeling that expansionist designs on Greece are being harboured.

Second, the claim made by Skopje that "the whole of Macedonia has never been liberated" and that "only that part of it which is controlled from Skopje" is free, is an indirect but clear questioning of Greek sovereignty.

Third, the use by Skopje of the denomination of Greek Macedonia is also a questioning of Greek sovereignty, especially in conjunction with Skopje's persistent refusal to accept the placenames used in the area since the Balkan Wars.

Fourth and last, by using the name Macedonia Skopje is lodging a cultural claim against Greece, since what is geographically 'Macedonian' is being appropriated so as to turn it into 'nationally Macedonian'.

Any recognition of a Yugoslav republic as an independent 'Republic of Macedonia' would be a constant threat to peace and security in south-eastern Europe.

It is common knowledge that Bulgaria lays claim to historical and ethnic bonds with the Skopje area and with the Slav part of its population, and that it has already proceeded to recognise the 'Republic of Macedonia'.

The composition of the population in the Skopje area creates a risk of the provocation of renewed ethnic conflict in the Balkans. The Albanians who make up one third of the total population of the Skopje Republic have already made plain their objections to the Skopje government and have demanded self-determination. In the event of recognition, the lack of homogeneity in the population of the Skopje Republic (which includes Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Gypsies, Bulgarians, Serbs and others) could lead to one of the minorities gaining dominance over the others - with consequences which are impossible to predict.

It is clear today that the Skopje Republic is an ethnically antagonistic and economically non-viable entity which suffers the further disadvantage of being surrounded by rival 'suitors' and 'protectors'. As a result, the area is liable to the intervention of stronger powers which might be interested in expanding their influence.

Apart from anything else, recognition of the Skopje Republic as an independent state is impossible under International Law, since the Republic fails to comply with all the requirements for recognition (such as the concepts of a 'people' and of 'organised authority'). The reasons for this are as follows:

The national identity of the so-called 'Macedonian people' is highly questionable in terms of historical, ethnological and sociological criteria.

The requirement of 'organised authority' is also not complied with, since it is a historically indubitable fact that the so-called 'Republic of Macedonia' is identified with the creation, by Tito, of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, whose main objective was to restrict and weaken Serbia. The main objective of Skopje, on the other hand, is to gain an outlet on the Aegean.

Historical Evidence of the Greekness of Macedonia

All the historical sources are agreed on the location of Macedonia: it lay between the Aegean Sea and the Mounts Cambounia, Pieria and Olympus to the south, lakes Ochrid and Prespa and Mounts Bambouna, Skomion (Rila Planina) and Rhodopon to the north, the river Nestos to the east and the Grammos and Pindus ranges to the west.

The inhabitants of this area (Macedonians) were one of the most ancient Greek tribes. Their closest relatives were the Thessalians and particularly the Magnesians, with whom they shared Aeolian ancestry. The language they spoke was among the oldest forms of Greek, and it had affinities with the Aeolian, Arcado-Cypriot and Mycenean dialects. The religion of the Madeconians was that of the other Greeks, and their myths and traditions were those found throughout the Greek world (1).

King Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great - to whom Skopje is currently attempting to attribute a 'Slavomacedonian' (sic) identity - acted not simply as Greeks but as Panhellenic leaders in the sense that they embodied the old idea of the formation of a united Greek state with the amalgamation of the Greek city-states. As Johann Gustav Droysen - among other scholars - points out in his History of Alexander the Great, both Philip and Alexander "brought to the peoples of Asia and implanted in them not the Macedonian culture, which had no independent standing, but the Greek culture".

In subsequent periods, and especially after the appearance in the Balkans of the Slavs and Bulgars (6th and 7th centuries AD), the geographical area of Macedonia as defined above continued to be the bulwark and bastion of the Greek race, just as it had been in antiquity. Polybius calls Macedonia "the advanced line of defence" and pays tribute to the Macedonians for fighting the barbarians ('non-Greeks') to preserve the security of the (other) Greeks" (2). This view is reiterated for the Byzantine period by the French historian Paul Lemerle in his classic work Philippe et la Macedoine Orientale (Paris, 1945).

No mention is made of 'Macedonia' or 'Macedonians' as a distinct ethnological group in any official text of either the recent or the mo Neither the Treaty of Berlin, for example, nor the Treaty of San Stefano which was revoked by it make any reference to such concepts. The official Turkish census of 1905 gives figures for the populations of Greeks, Bulgarians and "quasi-Bulgarians" in the vilayets of Thessaloniki and Monastir, where the Greeks were in the majority, but contains no reference to 'Macedonians'-for the simple reason that none of those questioned stated such descent (3).

E.M. Cousinery, who served as French consul in Thessaloniki, informs us in his Voyage dans la Macedoine (Paris, 1851) that "the Bulgarians" (as the Slav-speakers were called at that time) "never penetrated into the forests below Mt. Vermion, where the population remained Greek". The German geographer Leonard D. Schultze, writing of the same area in his Macedonien Landschafts und Kulturbilder (Jena, 1927) observes that in terms of language, tradition, cultural affinities, national will and religion the inhabitants of Macedonia are "as genuinely Greek as their brothers to the south". Both these authors repeat, in different ways, what Lord Salisbury, representing Britain at the Congress of Berlin, said at the session of 19 June 1878: "Macedonia and Thrace are as Greek as Crete".

The fact that a small percentage of the population of this area also speaks a language which is fundamentally Bulgarian (though containing numerous loan words from Slav, Greek, Vlach and Albanian) is no proof of Slav or Bulgarian origins. As demonstrated in the recent past with the forcible removal to Greece of Greeks from Asia Minor who spoke not a word of the Greek language, the linguistic criterion, taken in isolation, is of no value whatever.

It is also characteristic that among the freedom-fighters of the 'Macedonian Struggle' (1904-1908) there were many who spoke the local tongue but were fully Greek in terms of national consciousness. Their names-Kotas, Dalipis, Kyrou, Gonos and others-are still remembered. The Russian historian E. Goloubinsti (4) wrote of these Greeks who were not Greek speakers that "they had relentless hate and profound contempt for everything Bulgarian or Slav".

After the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the area occupied by ancient Macedonia was divided up, 51% of it becoming Greek territory, 38,32% going to Yugoslavia and 10,11% passing into Bulgarian hands (5). This brought about a territorial status in which, with the voluntary exchange of populations under bilateral agreements (the Treaty of Neuilly, 1919, which provided for the voluntary exchange of populations between Greece and Bulgaria, and that of 1926 known as the 'Kafantaris-Moloff agreement') and the settling of Greeks from Turkey in the Greek part of Macedonia, the population of that area became purely Greek even though some of the inhabitants were bilingual. In other words, Greek Macedonia became an entirely homogeneous part of the Greek State. This became even more the case in the post-Occupation period (1945-1949), when almost all the bilingual inhabitants of the area whose national consciousness was not Greek moved to neighbouring states, and to Yugoslavia in particular (6), where their quasi-Greek or quasi-Bulgarian nationalities were mutated into the 'Macedonian' - that is, Slav-Macedonian - nationality.

The emergence of this state of affairs was preceded by a number of violent incidents, such as the Ilinden rising, during which the Bulgarians were alleged to have revolted against the Turks on 2 August 1903 in the town of Krushevo, near Monastir, where the population was overwhelmingly Greek. In fact, however, the Bulgarians rose in revolt against the Greek population, whom they attempted to exterminate-with the co-operation of the Turks-without significantly harming the other inhabitants of the town (7).

Until the year 1914, the concepts of "Macedonia" as a Slav state and of "the Macedonian race" as a separate nationality were completely unknown. The part of Macedonia which was incorporated into Serbia, like that which became Bulgarian, was a narrow strip of territory along the Greek border, and it amounted to a very small proportion of Serbia as a whole. Skopje, which today claims to be the capital of what it calls "the Republic of Macedonia", in fact lies a considerable distance outside Macedonia. The "People' s Republic of Macedonia" later renamed "Socialist Republic of Macedonia", was founded at the end of the German Occupation as a deliberate political attempt intended - with the conceding of the Skopja and Tetova districts, which had never belonged to Macedonia in any sense - to state the presence of a Serbian population in the thinly-populated part of Macedonia beyond the Greek frontiers (where the inhabitants were Serbs, Greeks, Greek Vlachs, quasi-Turkish Muslims and Bulgarians), or, at least, of a Slav-speaking population with a language of their own and a shifting national consciousness. The founding of the People's Republic of Macedonia was thus intended to lead, in the long term, to the re-constitution of a 'Macedonian' state-though this time under a Slav mantle and with the aim of giving Yugoslavia an outlet on the Aegean.

Conflicts between National Movements in the 19th Century

During the l9th century, as the Balkan peoples - one after the other-acquired the nuclei around which their nation-states would be built, their national ideologies coincided in areas where there were mixed populations and where there were also overlapping national claims.

One of the areas in which these problems manifested themselves in particularly acute form was Macedonia. In the l9th century, this part of the world was the place where four mutually conflicting national ideologies-the Greek, the Bulgarian, the Serbian and the Albanian-came up against one another. As a result, it was inevitable that the national identity of the inhabitants of the area should be one of the fundamental factors in the promotion of each side's claims.

Leaving aside the Muslims, who made up approximately 1/3 of the total population, it was at this time extremely difficult to determine the national identity of the Christian population groups. Until the mid-19th century, the bulk of the rural population remained faithful to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which was the guardian of the Greek language, the Greek Byzantine tradition and even of historical memory. This factor reinforced an automatic tendency towards Greek culture on the part of the population groups which did not speak Greek: in other words, those which spoke Slav languages, Vlach or Albanian. However, in the hinterland and particularly in the Slav-speaking areas of central and north Macedonia, the Greek national ideology advanced slowly and new influences began to penetrate the region. The antagonism between the Greek and Bulgarian churches, which became much more acute after the foundation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, caused sharp clashes between Greeks and Bulgarians in the parts of Macedonia which they shared.

The Greek-Bulgarian Conflict

The Greek national ideology attached particular importance to the Classical Greek past of Macedonia and, naturally enough, stressed the period and achievements of Alexander the Great. At about this time, a pamphlet telling the story of Alexander's life and emphasising the continuity of the Greek nation was printed in the local Slav dialect (though in the Greek alphabet) and placed on the curriculum in schools in areas still under Turkish control. Attention was also paid to cultivating and disseminating the tradition of the Byzantine Empire. The two multi national empires, that of Alexander and that of Byzantium, provided forceful arguments for believing that despite their differences of language and custom the various population groups would choose to identify themselves with Greek culture against a background of broader state formations. Indeed, Rigas Pherraios had envisaged something of this nature with his Balkan Federation.

The Bulgarian national ideology, on its part, attempted to graft the cultural tradition of Bulgaria on to the Slav-speaking population of Mthe fact that a considerable proportion of the Slav speaking population, particularly in the central and southern regions, had retained a flourishing Greek historical tradition. The Bulgarians soon realised that the factor of history militated against the dissemination of the Bulgarian national ideology, and for that reason they turned their attention to other mechanisms by which national consciousness can be moulded.

The first such mechanism which they exploited was that of linguistic affinity. Subsequently, the Bulgarians attempted to manipulate popular indignation over the social oppression exerted by the area's Ottoman rulers. Their aim was to provoke a popular uprising which, suitably handled, might turn into a Bulgarian national movement. In parallel, the Bulgarians fomented a confrontation between the rural population and the Greek clergy, launching a violent attack on what they called the 'spiritual slavery' of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. With the help of the Bulgarian State, Bulgarian schools began to spring up in the towns and villages of Macedonia. The basic aim of these schools was to inspire in the pupils pride in the medieval history of Bulgaria and particularly in the empire of Tsar Samuel, whose capital was at Ochrid. The Bulgarian historical armoury was not, of course, sufficient to eliminate the Greek cultural and historical heritage in Macedonia, and for that reason a system of forging historical truth by appropriating historical events and personalities was adopted. The Greek missionaries Cyril and Methodius were thus presented as Bulgarians, while their apostolic and civilising work among the Slavs was deemed to be a 'political and cultural achievement on the part of the Bulgarians'. Even Alexander the Great, who occupied so important a place in the hearts and minds of the people of Macedonia, was portrayed in popular texts of the time as being of Bulgarian descent. This is closely related to the nature of Skopje's current propaganda target, which is to portray Alexander the Great as a 'Skopjian'.

The Serbs, Romanians and Vlachs were late in appearing on the scene in Macedonia. However, they, too, saw it as expedient to enlist the aid of the memory of a Serbian presence in Macedonia in the Middle Ages-regardless of the fact that from the chronological point of view this presence was confined to the period of Tsar Dusan and his successors (14th century).

Romanians and Vlachs

A further problem was the appearance among the Vlachs of Macedonia of the Romanian national ideology in the last two decades of the l9th century. Of all the non Greek-speaking population groups in Macedonia, the Vlachs had given the most whole-hearted support to the Greek national ideology. They were a living example of how a non Greek-speaking population could be fully incorporated into the Greek national movement. During the War of Independence of 1821 a similar phenomenon had been observed in the case of the Christian Albanian-speakers (the 'Arvanites'), who identified themselves completely with the Greek national cause. However, in the late 1860s the Romanian national ideology began to penetrate some Vlach communities, and its impact was still stronger after Romania gained its independence in 1877. The Romanian 'enlighteners' pointed to the common Latin origin of the Romanian and Vlach languages and also attempted to exploit the historical factor, inventing theories about a common historical origin for the Vlachs of the southern Balkans and the Romanians of the Danubian areas. These efforts had very limited-though far from negligible-results. One of the fundamental reasons why the Romanians failed to win the majority of the Vlachs over to their cause was undoubtedly the fact that for many centuries the Vlachs had identified themselves with the Greeks by whose side they lived and had taken active part in all the struggles of the Greek nation for its liberation. This living memory could not be substituted by historical references to the Roman period.

A further central problem which arose during the l9th century was that of whether the Slav-speakers of Macedonia were Bulgarians or belonged to a separate Slav group. At that time, the term 'Macedonians' was very widely used, sometimes in a regional and geographical sense and sometimes culturally. When the Serbians realised that they could not pass the Slav-speakers of Macedonian of as true Serbs, they chose to put forward the theory of the existence of a separate Slav-Macedonian people which differed from the Bulgarians but had affinities with the Slavs. At a later date, some of the revolutionaries who emerged from the ranks of the Bulgarian national movement began to promote the idea of an autonomous 'Macedonian' state which would be independent even of Bulgaria. They took as their slogan "Macedonia for the Macedonians", but in effect this was only a tactical maneuver. Although the leaders of this movement appeared to be supporting the creation of an independent Macedonia, they made no attempt to interfere with the Bulgarian historical identity of the Slavs of Macedonia, thus demonstrating that in fact they continued to be attached to the Bulgarian national identity. The only difference was that their political aim was autonomy and not union.

The 'Macedonian Struggle'

After the foundation of the Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870, clashes between Greeks and Bulgarians began in Macedonia. The main aim of the Greek side was to prevent the Bulgarian attempt to gain control of the Slav-speaking populations who lived in the area between a Kastoria-Ptolemaida-Yannitsa-Zichni (Serres) line to the north and a Ochrid-Perpeles-Stromnitsa-Meleniko-Nevrokopi line to the south. The Greek defeat in the war of 1897 allowed the Bulgarians to compel a large part of the Slav-speaking population in this area to embrace Bulgarian ideals. This resulted in the Ilinden rising on the feast day of the Prophet Elijah in 1903, a revolt which was crushed by the Turkish army.

The rising led, in turn, to the sacking of many Greek villages and towns, including Krushevo. The looting and the persecution of Greek populations put the Greek on to a war footing, and 1904 saw the beginning of the Greek armed rising known as the Macedonian Struggle, which was to last until 1908. Throughout the Macedonian Struggle armed bands of volunteers from the free Greek state (from Crete, Epirus, Thessaly and many parts of the Greek world which were as yet unredeemed), fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the local inhabitants, were able to prevent any extension of Bulgarian activities and to preserve the Greek character of southern and central Macedonia. In many cases, the Greek units consisted principally of Slav and Vlach-speaking guerrillas fighting for the Greek cause. This preference for the Greek national ideal caused the Bulgarians to call them 'Grecomani'-that is, fanatical Greeks. The descendants of these freedom fighters still live in the Monastir district.

The armed Macedonian Struggle was broken off in July 1908, because of the Young Turk Revolt. When the Young Turks overthrew the feudal regime of the Sultan, they issued a general amnesty and also promised all the nationalities equal civil rights.

The Macedonian Struggle, which began under the most adverse circumstances and lasted four whole years, was an unqualified triumph for the Greeks. One reason for this was that the Struggle attracted Greeks from the free state, from Crete and from other enslaved areas, who fought side-by-side with the Macedonians. A second, and equally serious, reason for the success was that the Greeks were fighting in an area inhabited by a fraternally-related population with the same ideals and the same dedication to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek national idea, regardless of the fact that the Greek language was not always spoken.

How to Construct a Nationality

The Turkish defeat in the First Balkan War brought the Ottoman period in the history of Macedonia to an end. Of the geographical area of Macedonia as a whole, Greece received 51%, Serbia 39% and Bulgaria 10%. foreign soil, together with exchanges and deportations, drastically altered the ethnological composition of all these parts of Macedonia, and were particularly noticeable in the Greek section.

The successive defeats of Bulgaria in the First and Second World War led to the growth in Bulgarian Macedonia of a combative Bulgarian Macedonian nationalism. The Comintern attempted to exploit the irridentist trends of this nationalism by adopting the policy of a "unified and independent Macedonia" to form part of a "Balkan Communist Federation ".

In Yugoslav Macedonia, the policy of conversion to Serbian ideals applied by Belgrade produced relatively poor results. In order to escape ill-treatment, part of the population refrained from expressing its pro-Bulgarian disposition, suppressed its Bulgarian names and made use of the politically neutral geographical term Macedones. Other sections of the population chose to incorporate themselves openly into the Serbian national community.

In Greek Macedonia, the remnants of the Slav-speaking population amounted to 100-150,000 after the exchange of populations and were divided into two groups: one fairly large group, which under Turkish rule had thrown in its lot with the Greek national identity, and a smaller group which had adopted the Bulgarian national identity or remain non-aligned.

During the Second World War, the incursion of the Bulgarian army into Yugoslav Macedonia was welcomed by one section of the population as the first step towards the liberation and incorporation into the Bulgarian state for which they longed. A similar phenomenon, though on a much smaller scale, also occurred in Greek Macedonia.

The Yugoslav partisans under Tito soon became aware that at all costs they must break the bonds between the population of Yugoslav Macedonia and Bulgaria. They thus exploited the growing discontent towards the Bulgarian occupying forces among the population: the Bulgarians reacted with cruelty and mass reprisals to the attacks of the partisans. Tito's partisans promised the population that in post-War Yugoslavia the Macedonians- that is, the Slavs of Yugoslav Macedonia-would have rights equal to those enjoyed by all the other nationalities, and even equal to those of the Serbs. They emphasised, however, that the Slavs of Macedonia had no affinities either with the Serbs or with the Bulgarians: they constituted a separate, Macedonian, nationality. The idea of distinct Macedonian nationality was welcomed by a significant proportion of Yugoslav Macedonia. The political and social conditions were ripe for acceptance of the new theory: Bulgaria had been defeated, Tito had succeeded in gaining Stalin's consent to implementation of the new Macedonian policy, and the population was worn out after half a century of Serbian and Bulgarian efforts to impose on it their own national identities.

After the success of the Patriotic Front revolution in Bulgaria (in which the Communist Party of Bulgaria played the leading role) in September 1944, negotiations began between the Communist Parties of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria on the future of Macedonia and of the Balkans as a whole once the War was over. On 2 August 1944 the formation of the "Socialist Republic of Macedonia" was announced at Prohor Pcinjsci Monastery: it was to form part of the new federal Yugoslavia.

In September 1944, a Yugoslav delegation headed by General Tempo and Lazar Kolisevki, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Macedonia, visited Sofia and extracted from the new Bulgarian leadership a promise that the inhabitants of Pirin (Bulgarian Macedonia) would be granted autonomy as a first step towards unification with the federal "Republic of Macedonia " in Tito's Yugoslavia. In April 1945, Tito imposed a federal system on Yugoslavia and installed the governments of the federal states of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Montenegro and Skopje, the last of which was founded on 30 April 1945.

In the meantime, and while the outcome of the civil war which had broken out in Greece remained in the balance, the Yugoslavs exerted ever-increasing pressure on their Bulgarian comrades to have Bulgarian Macedonia ceded to Yugoslavia. By the end of 1946, the Bulgarians' had made specific concessions to Yugoslavia over Macedonia. At its 10th Session in August 1946, the Central Committee of the CPB resolved to work "towards cultural convergence between the inhabitants of Pirin Macedonia and the People's Republic of Macedonia ". This was followed by a sweeping programme of cultural exchanges, while at the same time the inhabitants of Pirin were given the right to chose between the Bulgarian and the "Macedonian" nationality.

Tempted by the various incentives offered, most of them chose to be "Macedonians". After a long period of consultation, Tito and Dimitrov, the leaders of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, met at Bled in Yugoslavia on 2 August 1947 and signed a series of agreements known as the Bled Protocols, by which Bulgaria agreed, in return for certain minor concessions, to recognise the inhabitants of Bulgarian Macedonia (Pirin) as "Macedonians" and to prepare the ground for the incorporation of the Pirin province into the "Socialist Republic of Macedonia". In return, Bulgaria requested only that the so-called "Western districts" which the Serbs had occupied at the end of the First World War be returned.

However, Tito's grandiloquent plans for a "Federation of the South Slavs" under his leadership fell foul of Stalin. The split came in the summer of 1948, and it made nonsense of all Yugoslavia's plans to make Tito the master of the Balkans using the 'Macedonian question' as a lever. In these circumstances, Bulgaria was able to release itself from the concessions it had made over Macedonia. It rejected the theory of the "Macedonian nation" and expelled the political instructors dispatched to Bulgaria by Skopje. Sofia then attempted to exploit the difficulties in which the Yugoslavs found themselves to raise once more the pre-War slogan of a "united and independent Macedonia ".

Written by To Kalami

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