Fyrom - A Country With A Borrowed Identity

[Truth Bearer]

This article or thesis gives the best argumentive point for us a must read


FYROM - A COUNTRY WITH A BORROWED IDENTITY
George C. Papavizas
A dispute is going on between Greece and the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) on the name "Macedonia,"
which FYROM is using since 1991 when it broke away from the
crumbling state of Yugoslavia. The dispute goes deeper than
the use of the name. It is an attempt by FYROM to discredit the
ancient Macedonians’ ethnicity, break the connection between
present-day Greek Macedonians and the Macedonians of
antiquity, and establish a connection between FYROM’s Slavs
and Albanians with ancient Macedonia. The historically,
linguistically and archaeologically incorrect challenge is that
Macedonia was never part of Greece and the Macedonians were
barbarians who spoke a language incomprehensible to the
other Greeks.
It is true that ancient Macedonia was not part of Greece before
338 B.C. It is also true that Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Molossia,
Epirus, Aetolia, Akarnania and all the other city-states did not
belong to Greece because Greece did not exist as a single,
united state. The Hellenic nation before the battle of Chaeronia
(338 B.C) existed as hundreds of Hellenic tribes, subtribes and
families speaking more than 200 dialects of the Greek
language (Templar 2003). King Philip II, a leading statesman in
the Greek world, was the first who attempted, by conquest or
alliances, to unite the Greek city-states into a single country,
Greece. Philip organized the "Greek Community" (to koinon ton
Ellenon) in which the Greek states were bound by oath to keep
peace among themselves. "He [Philip]brought into being the
combination of a newly created Greek state, self-standing and
self-governing, and a Macedonian state which was unrivaled in
military power" (Hammond, 1997, p. 20).
The name-calling began with the ancient historian Thucyditis
who called the Macedonians, Epirotes, Aetolians and
Akarnanians "barbarians," but he never claimed that they were
speaking a language other than Greek. Calling the ancient
Macedonians "barbarians" began in Athens as a result of
political fabrications based not on ethnicity or language but on
the Macedonian way of life (Casson 1971, p. 158) and also
because Philip II and Alexander the Great incurred the enmity
of the Athenians, specifically Demosthenes, the orator who
shamelessly castigated the Macedonians. When the winds of
war were approaching from Macedonia, it was natural that
some people, especially orators, would call the Macedonians
barbarians. The Athenian way of life differed profoundly not
only from the Macedonian, but also from the Spartan and from
other city-states’ way of life. Eugene Borza (1990, p. 5) wrote
that "Only recently have we begun to clarify these muddy
waters by realizing the Demosthenes corpus for what it is:
oratory designed to sway public opinion in Athens and thereby
to formulate public policy. The elusive creature, Truth, is every
where subordinate to its expressive servant, Rhetoric." Even
Badian (1982), an opponent of Macedonia’s Hellenism,
concluded that the name-calling might have been no more
than invective by angry orators unrelated to historical facts.
More than anything else, the language of the Macedonians of
antiquity became the subject of strenuous disagreements
among scholars, some of whom claim that the Macedonian was
incomprehensible to the Greeks of the south. The German
historian Gustav Weigand wrote at the end of the nineteenth
century and later (1924) that the Macedonian soldiers spoke a
language not understood by the other Greeks. The allegation
was echoed in modern times by Borza in his 1990 book, In the
Shadow of Olympus, the Emergence of Macedon (p. 92) who
wrote that the written language
was a standard Greek dialect since the middle of the fifth
century B.C., with the common people speaking an unknown
language or dialect beyond recovery. He also speculated that
the common people’s dialect was replaced by the
standard koine (common) Greek. FYROM’s politicians and
historians, however, insist that the language of ancient
Macedonians is extinct, had no alphabet and it was not Greek.
If the Macedonian is extinct, no one would know it was not
Hellenic.
During the Greek Dark Ages (the five centuries following the
collapse of the Mycenaean civilization), before the reign of the
Macedonian King Perdiccas I (ca. 650 B.C.), Macedonia had
several Hellenic names (Templar 2003): Emathia, after its
leader Emathion(amathos=sand). Later it was
called Maketia or Makessa, and finally Macedonia. The word
"Macedonia" is derived from the very ancient Doric-Aeolic word
macos (in Attic mekos=lenght) (Homer’s Odyssey VII.106) and
from Makednos (=tall), a word found for the first time in the Homeric
poems as “o_o __ _____ _____v__ ______o_o” (look at the leaves of tall
poplars).
I have spent almost a year looking into the language of ancient
Macedonians. The table summarizes the findings:
Opinions of Scholars on the Language of Ancient
Macedonians_______________________________________ ______
___________________________
Muller, K. O. (1825) — Illyrian dialect mixed with Greek
Abel, Otto (1847) — Greek, "Die Makedonen waren Griechen"
Fick, A. (1874) — A northern dialect related to Aeolic Greek
and Thessalian
Kretchmer (1896) — A Greek dialect with a few Illyrian and
Thracian words
Hoffman, O. (1906) — A northern dialect related to Aeolic Greek and
Thessalian
Meillet, A. (1913) — Independent Indo-European close to Greek
Edson, C. F. (1934) — Elementary Greek dialect
Sakellariou, M. (1983) — Greek, with a non-Indo-European influence
Hammond, N. G. (1989) — Aeolic, of the western Greek language
Masson, Olivier (1996) — A north-western Greek, part of the Doric
dialects
__________________________________________________ ______________________
__
Of the ten scholars listed in the table only Muller concluded
that the Macedonians spoke an Illyrian dialect mixed with
Greek words. The other nine scholars concluded that the
Macedonian was a northern dialect related to the Aeolic Greek
or a Greek dialect, part of the north-western Doric Greek.
Analyzing the language issue carefully necessitates looking
into two important facts related to linguistics and the
Macedonians’ ethnicity: the existence of hundreds of Hellenic
tribes and the lack of linguistic homogeneity — or to put it in a
different way, the polyglot forms of the Greek language
encountered — among the Greek tribes of antiquity. The Greek
language was spoken by more than 250 Hellenic tribes in 200
dialects and idioms indicated by names describing the manner
of speaking: doristi, attikisti, ionisti, lakonisti, makedonisti,
etc. (Templar 2003). The great linguistic diversity resulted
from the excessive fragmentation of the Greek nation into
many city-states (Attica, Lacedaemon, Corinth, etc.) and larger
states (Macedonia, Molossia, Aetolia, Thesprotia, etc.). Even
today, the Greek language is characterized by inexhaustible
capabilities for "mutational" or locally accepted idiomatic
transformations. Thomas Cahill, discussing the controversy on
the Macedonians’ language in his book, Sailing the Wine-Dark
Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003, p. 221), remarked: "I
imagine the situation was somewhat parallel to a Scottish
movie needing to be distributed with subtitles even in the
English speaking world."
Three dialects of the Greek language were best known: Doric,
Ionic and Aeolic. Some other well-known dialects were Attic,
Cypriot, Arcadic, Aetolic, Akarnanian, Macedonian and Locric.
Livy (History of Rome, XXXI, 29) wrote: "The Aetolians, the
Akarnanians, the Macedonians, men of the same speech, are
united or disunited by trivial causes that arise from time to
time" (Templar 2003). According to Hammond (1989, p. 13),
the Macedonians spoke an Aeolic dialect of the western Greek
language that was later modified by Philip and spread to Asia
by Alexander. The Macedonian maintained peculiarities of the
Homeric times and preserved features that had disappeared
from other Hellenic dialects. That means that the Macedonians
were speaking a proto-Hellenic dialect around 800-1,000 B.C.
This is also shown by the fact that Roman and Byzantine
lexicographers and grammarians used examples from the
Macedonian to interpret difficult features of the Homeric
poems.
That the Macedonians spoke a Hellenic dialect before the
middle of the fifth century is also shown by at least two other
facts: (a) There are Greek words in the Macedonian not found
in other Greek dialects. If the Macedonians were Hellenized by
the middle of the fifth century, as Weigand and Borza insisted,
and the Macedonians were already using these words, where
did these words come from (Babiniotis 1992)? The following
samples found did not exist in other Greek dialects such the
Attic; yet, these are Greek words used by the Macedonians
before and after the middle of the fifth century: P r oper
names: Alexander, Alketas, Fillippos, Orestis, Macedon,
Ptolemy, Antigonos, Amyntas, Kassandros, Perdiccas, Krateros,
Parmenion, Seleucos, etc.(Kalleris 1954,
1992). T o ponymia: Aegae, Aliakmon, Almopia, Elimeia,
Emathia, Pella, Boion, Lyncestis, etc. (b) The scholar Ulrich
Kohler (1897) wrote about cities in Central Macedonia that had
been built before the beginning of the fifth century with Greek
names not found in other Greek dialects: Atalanti, Eidomenai,
Aeani, Europos, Dion, Pydna, etc.
Twenty one years ago, a remarkable inscription on a lead
tablet, dated to the fourth century B. C., was excavated in
Pella, the ancient Macedonian capital, 40 miles west of
Thessaloniki in Greece. The Pella tablet is a curse or magic
spell written by a woman of low social status, as evidenced by
her vocabulary. It is written in distinct Doric Greek, suggesting
that the Macedonian language was a Doric Greek dialect of the
north-western type. Professor Olivier Masson, who examined
the tablet, wrote in the third edition of the Oxford Classical
Dictionary: "We may conclude that the Macedonian is a dialect
related to North-Western Greek. This view is supported by the
recent discovery of a curse tablet which may well be the first
‘Macedonian’ text attested."
To determine the Macedonians’ ethnicity, many glossologists
take into account both linguistic findings and historical facts.
Such historians concluded that the Macedonians were a
Hellenic group whose dialect presented unusual linguistic
peculiarities (e.g., O. Abel, K. J. Beloch, E. Meyer, G. Glotz, J. B.
Bury, U. Wilcken, S. Casson, etc. (Kalleris 1992). These scholars
also expressed the view that the so-called Hellenization of the
Macedonians may never have occurred in the true meaning of
the world (Papavizas 2006, p. 169). The Macedonians, even
those before King Perdiccas II (ca. 454-413) were prone to
gradually embracing the linguistic refinements that brought
their archaic proto-Hellenic dialect to a level close to the Attic,
climaxing with the formation of a final product,
the koine (common), in Philip’s and Alexander’s time. Nothing
like that happened with the non-Hellenic Illyrians, despite their
proximity to the Greek world, simply because their tongue had no
linguistic affinity to the Hellenic dialects.
The Pella tablet, the findings in the table, 65,000 inscriptions,
200 Macedonian proper names and other artifacts found in
Macedonia, all in Doric Greek or Attic, demonstrate that the
Macedonians were Greek, with the remarkable findings
speaking firmly for the inclusion of ancient Macedonians in the
Hellenic family. Even Borza (1990, p. 78), the scholar who
expressed doubts on the Macedonians’s Hellenism, reluctantly
admitted that: "The ‘Macedones’ or ‘highlanders’ of
mountainous western Macedonia may have been derived from
a northwestern Greek stock. That is, northwestern Greece
[Macedonia] provided a pool of Indo-European speakers of
proto-Greek from which emerged the tribes which later
became known by different names as they established their
regional identities in separate parts of the country."
In view of the overwhelming historical, archaeological and
linguistic evidence amassed through the years, we have arrived
at the unacceptable point of history doubting the Hellenism of
ancient Macedonians. Worst yet, the international community
has arbitrarily shifted the Macedonian ethnicity from modern
Hellenic-speaking Macedonians to Slav-speakers who live in a
small country 2/3 of which, including Skopje, were not even
part of King Philips’s historic Macedonia (Map 1, Map 2).
The name "Macedonia" is important because it carries along
many important derivatives, far beyond what the name says:
history, identity, heritage, culture, heroes, customs, etc. We are
speaking about Greek Macedonia with its archaeological sites
of an age long gone, the Hellenic Macedonian age: Pella,
Aeane, Vergina, Dion, Amphipolis, Methone, Pydna, Olynthos,
Appolonia, Philippi, Potidaea, Stagira (Aristotle’s birthplace),
Thessaloniki. None of these historical city names in Greek
Macedonia sound Slavic. Is it really possible that the
Macedonians who lived in these Greek cities, spoke a Doric
Hellenic dialect, used coins with Greek inscriptions, prayed and
sacrificed to the Olympic gods, placed by the other Greeks on
Mount Olympus in Macedonia, and who participated in the
Olympic Games, where only Greeks were allowed, were not
Greek?
The contemporary misleading rhetoric, propaganda and
falsification of history disputing the Macedonians’ Hellenism,
emanating from Skopje — and more acrimoniously from
organizations of the Slavic diaspora — cannot be ignored,
especially because the unwonted challenge began at the time
communism began encroaching into the Balkans with its
implacable malice thrust upon the people. Therefore, I must
lay considerable stress on international communism being
greatly responsible for the revival and perpetuation of the
Macedonian controversy since the early 1920s, particularly in
the 1940s, and especially during the Greek Civil War of 1946-
1949 (Papavizas 2002, 2006). I must also demonstrate the
plundering of Hellenic Macedonia’s legacy by the dynamism
and the theoretical base of communism, with the Soviet Union
looming awesome behind the scenes; to show how the
international community has been ensnared in clever politicalhistorical
inaccuracies on the Macedonian issue; and to analyze
the pivotal role played by Tito’s communism in the struggle for
Macedonia, especially during the Greek Civil War of 1946-
1949. Communism’s role did not escape the attention of Ivo
Banac, professor of history at Yale, who wrote in 1992: "Only
communism could provide the theoretical base and the
necessary force to push for a separate "Macedonian’ nation."
Virtually from the beginning of communism’s encroach into
the Balkans in the early 1920s the Macedonian Question — and
the struggle for Macedonia — took on a different meaning and
dangerous new dimensions. It all began as a communistcontrolled
"Macedonian" ethnogenesis on August 1, 1941 with
Comintern (Communist International), Stalin’s right-hand
instrument, dispatching the following directive to Tito and
Dimitrov, the communist leaders of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria,
respectively (from Tsola Dragojceva, 1979): Macedonia must
be attached to Yugoslavia for practical reasons and for the
sake of expediency. The two parties must take up the stand of
the self-determination of the Macedonian people." Ignoring
Greece, Comintern decisively shifted responsibility over
Macedonia from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia and ruled for an
"Independent Macedonia and Thrace" under Yugoslav
hegemony. To put it bluntly, the Soviet-sponsored Macedonian
design arrogated the rights of Macedonia’s citizens of Greece
that owns 75% of King Philip’s historic Macedonia and
infringed upon the rights of 2.5 million Hellenic Macedonians.
Any doubts concerning communism’s unorthodox involvement
with an ethnic problem of paramount Balkan significance
would have been dismissed were it known that Comintern was
involved from its very early inception with the Macedonian
problem.

On August 4, 1944, following up on Comintern’s directive and
defying history, Tito organized the first Anti-Fascist Assembly
of National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM) at the monastery
of Prohor Pcinjsky, which proclaimed part of Vardarska
Banovina (South Serbia) as the People’s Republic of Macedonia
in the federated state of Yugoslavia (Poulton 1995, pp. 103-
105; Vattis 2002). The founding declaration said: "You will
succeed to unite all parts of Macedonia that the Balkan
imperialists [Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs]occupied in 1913 and
1918." With these words, Yugoslavia’s imperialism for Greek
Macedonia became stronger than ever, with the struggle
assuming a dangerous new dimension for the stability of the
Balkan Knowledgeable people, such as the Secretary of State
Edward Stettinius in the Roosevelt Administration, knew that
Tito’s new republic was formed on political criteria only and as
a ploy to serve as a bridgehead for the virtual annexation of
Hellenic Macedonia and the mutilation of Greece (Giannakos
1992; Woodhouse 1948, 1976).
Comintern’s directive and the 1944 ASNOM declaration
signaled a new phase of the struggle for Macedonia. For the
1940s, Tito’s Yugoslavia used every means available to it to
violate the Treaty of Bucharest (signed in 1913): seditious
propaganda, distortion of history, anthropological studies of
dubious or prejudiced nature that never considered the
existence of millions of Greek Macedonians; and an
unprecedented international conspiracy and violations of
international law to assist the Greek communists during the
Greek Civil War for the price of snatching away parts or the
entire Greek Macedonia. Macedonia was ravaged during the
civil war, fueled by communist Albania, communist Bulgaria
and especially communist Yugoslavia to which Skopje
belonged (Map 3).
For all the horrors and bloodshed, the Greek Civil War did not
happen in a historical vacuum. It happened within the context
of an unprecedented international conspiracy and grotesque
violations of international law by the communist world
(Averoff-Tossizza 1978; Papavizas 2002). It was fueled by
powerful communist organizations that threatened Greece’s
territorial integrity by conspiring to cede Hellenic Macedonia to
Tito’s People Republic of Macedonia. By 1943, Tito was
displaying in his hideout a large map of Greater Macedonia,
including Greek Macedonia and the Bulgarian Macedonia of
Pirin. A new map published later (1946, at the beginning of the
Greek Civil War) in Borba, the official newspaper of the
Communist Party of Yugoslavia, showed precisely Tito’s
intentions on Greek Macedonia (Map 4).
How did Tito and Yugoslavia manage to launch
the Macedonization of Skopje and of the southernmost
Yugoslav territory — known till 1944 as Vardarska Banovina —
to forge a new nationality from a polyglot conglomerate of
Slavs, Bulgarians, Albanians, Romanians, gypsies, Greeks,
Turks and others and to convince the world that his reasons
and methods for forging a new nationality were internationally
sanctionable? How did Tito manage to deceive the international
community of the Slavic Macedonian ethnicity’s legitimacy?
First, he converted a part of the Vardar Province to People’s
Republic of Macedonia within the Yugoslav federation, using
the geographic name "Macedonia" as an ethnic name; second,
he gave the people in the new republic a new language by
modifying their Bulgarian dialect, giving it an alphabet — the
dialect had no alphabet till 1945 — and calling it
"Macedonian;"5 third, he created an artificial nationality by
transforming the Slavs, Bulgarians, Albanians and others of the
new republic to "Macedonians," and fourth, he created the
schismatic "Macedonian" Church," not recognized by the
Serbian Patriarchate to the present day. Greece remained silent
for reasons of political expediency.
Ethnologically, the new republic was always a fluid country
inhabited by several ideologically contentious groups with ties
to Albania, Bulgaria, or Serbia. The 1940 official Yugoslav
census recognized only two ethnic groups in the Vardar
Province, Slavs at 66 percent and Muslims at 31 percent. In
1946, three years after the formation of the People’s Republic
of Macedonia, the Slavs magically disappeared from the census
that showed 66 percent "Macedonians." Was this remarkable
transformation process a massive genetic mutation of the
Slavic population or a census falsification? The Bulgarians
insisted that the so-called Macedonians in the People’s
Republic of Macedonia — and in FYROM later — were
Bulgarians except for the Albanians.
Giorgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian communist leader, objected to
Tito’s scheming, as it appears from his admonition to the
renegade Dimitar Vlahov, a prominent Bulgarian communist
who had adopted Tito’s views on Macedonia and who was the
first Bulgarian to be transformed to "Macedonian": " Are we
talking about a Macedonian nation or a Macedonian population
made up of Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs? Does a Macedonian
nation exist, and if so, where and how? Can Macedonia exist as
a separate state or find freedom and statehood within the
South Slav federation, regardless of the ethnic conglomerate of
which it is composed" (Kouzinopolulos 1999, from Dimitrov’s
Secret Diary, p. 21)?
What was Stalin’s role behind these manipulations? On June 7,
1946, Stalin met with Molotov and Zhdanov representing the
Soviet Union; Tito, Rankovic and Nescovic representing
Yugoslavia; and Dimitrov, Kolarov and Kostov representing
Bulgaria (Tsalouhides 1944). When Dimitrov expressed doubts
on the Macedonianism of the Vardar Province’s inhabitants,
Stalin rushed to explain to him and Tito how state
building—even if it is a fabrication—leads to acceptable nation
building. His remarks to Dimitrov on nation building were
revealing (Kouzinopoulos 1999, from Dimitrov’s Secret Diary p.
22):
Pirin Macedonia must become autonomous within
Bulgaria.… Whether there is a Macedonian nation or
not, and whether its population has not yet
developed a Macedonian consciousness, makes no
difference. Such consciousness did not exist in
Byelorussia either when, after the October
revolution, we proclaimed it as a Soviet republic. "
I have now a few serious conceptual questions on the history
of the Slavic society lying in the shadow of Tito’s dead
imperialism and in Comintern’s manipulations and intrigue. (a)
What characteristics (historical, cultural, genetic, linguistic,
ethnic and anthropological) do the people of
Tito’s Socialist Republic of Macedonia (now FYROM) possess to
be described as "Macedonians"? (b) What justification FYROM’s
inhabitants have to claim "Macedonian" ethnicity in view of the
fact half of their country, including Skopje, never belonged to
King Philip’s historic Macedonia? (c) If the slavophones in the
Socialist Republic of Macedonia were really Macedonians, why
did they call themselves Bulgarians, fighting to incorporate
Macedonia into Bulgaria, and why did they not assert their
Macedonian identity for 75 years (1870-1944)?
The answers given by Skopje historians to the third question
are not convincing: they insist that the people being illiterate
during the early years of the Macedonian struggle, did not
know what their ethnicity was. This is an unconvincing
explanation because the founders of the Internal Macedonian
Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in 1893, a Bulgarian group,
were not illiterate. Damien Grueff was a schoolmaster and
Christo Tatarcheff a doctor (Dakin 1966). The Macedonian
Slavs, according to Skopje, affiliated themselves with Bulgaria
because it pursued the Macedonian problem with
determination. Eventually, they eradicated the Bulgarian
sentiments and became Macedonians (Kofos 1962).
To put the state-controlled "Macedonian" ethnogenesis in
proper perspective, we need to go back to 1870 (the year of
the Bulgarian religious restitution, the formation of the
Exarchate) and trace the origin and sentiments of the FYROM
slavophones and their ethnic transformations through the
years (Koliopoulos 1995). They underwent several
transformations before their final ethnic conversion to
"Macedonians." They were Bulgarians from 1870 to 1913;
South Slavs or serbianized Slavs from 1913 till the German
army occupied Yugoslavia in 1941; Bulgarians again proudly
brandishing Bulgarian flags during the occupation of South
Serbia by the fascist Bulgarian army (a Hitler gift to Bulgaria for
joining Nazi Germany during World War II); Yugoslav
communist partisans during the occupation; and then
communist "Macedonians" by 1944 with new roots, history and
language.
While Tito’s communist regime was being laid to rest with his
death in 1980, what followed was the secession from
Yugoslavia in 1991 of a small country, whose politicians
decided to use the name Republika Makedonija for the newly
independent state to tie its Slavic past with the glorious
Macedonian history. To support the connection, FYROM
propelled to the world a population amalgamation theory to
show that its Slavic inhabitants are products of genetic
blending of their ancestors — who arrived in the Balkans
thousand years after Alexander’s death — with the ancient
Macedonians (Martis 1983; Panov 1996). According to this
theory, a Macedonian is a "completely modern product" of
racial amalgamation between the Slavs of the Middle Ages and
a mixture of ancient Macedonians and other inhabitants
(Anarhistov 1982). This theory is part of the curriculum in
FYROM’s schools today (Vlasides 2003, p. 346-47).
The theory overlooks a very critical point: Why did the
Macedonians wait thousand years to be amalgamated with the
Slavs? The other Greeks were always there. The Macedonians
had better chances; common language, myths and customs;
and a thousand-year span to be amalgamated with the other
Greeks than to wait all those long years for the new Slavspeaking
"suitors" from the north. It is useless for Skopjan
historians to attempt to prove differences between ancient
Macedonians and the other Greeks. Even if they existed, such
differences disappeared in the thousand years before the Slavs
arrived in the Balkans (Hammond 1989, 1997).
On September 13, 1995, Athens and Skopje signed an Interim
Agreement and established diplomatic relations (Zaikos 2003).
FYROM, with an initial irredentist constitution, agreed not to
interfere in the internal affairs of another state in order to
protect the status and rights of any persons in other states
who are not FYROM citizens. Athens recognized FYROM and
agreed to assist it to enter various international organizations.
The two countries also agreed to take effective measures to
prohibit hostile activities or propaganda by State-controlled
agencies and to discourage acts by private entities likely to
incite violence, hatred or hostility against each other. The U. N.
Security Council decisions 817 and 845 (1993) did not
introduce an agreement on the name, but directed the two
parties to find an amicable solution. No agreement has been
reached to this day.
Greece fulfilled all its obligations under the Interim Agreement
and has made more than enough other concessions during the
twelve years of the agreement as well as providing FYROM
other assistance. Greece encouraged more than a billion dollar
investment in FYROM by private persons; it allowed FYROM’s
commerce to move through the Greek port of Thessaloniki; it
helped FYROM enter several international organizations,
including the all important Stabilization and Association
Agreement with the European Union; it has permitted FYROM
officers to be trained in Greek military schools, some of them
with Greek scholarships; and it has stood politically and
financially by the FYROM government during its nationalist
clash with the local Albanian minority in 2001.
After signing the agreement, FYROM violated basic norms of
international behavior and almost every provision of the
Interim Agreement, paying Greece back for its assistance and
generosity with a constant anti-Hellenic propaganda barrage,
provocations in the media and the Internet and distortions of
history. For example, FYROM accused Greece of unjustifiably
using the name "Macedonia," and printed school books
depicting Greek heroes as FYROM heroes and Greek landmarks
as FYROM landmarks. It also circulated maps showing itself as
part of "Greater Macedonia," including Greek Macedonia all
together with Thessaloniki (Vlasides 2003, p. 338).6 Recently,
FYROM renamed the airport in the FYROM capital of Skopje, the
"Alexander the Great" Airport; resurrected the tenets of the
old, purely Bulgarian uprising of 1903 against the Turks and
embraced them to write its irredentist constitution; borrowed
personalities from the pantheon of Greek heroes and Bulgarian
heroes, writers, officers and revolutionaries; inculcated in the
young minds the defunct communist expansionist tendencies
and the idea to hate the Greeks, a violation of article 7 of the
Interim Agreement (Vlasides 2003); and, worst of all, it violated
article 11 of the Interim Agreement, stating that FYROM may
not use any other name, other that "FYROM" until an
agreement on the name is reached. FYROM has, in fact, been
referring to itself as "Macedonia."
It was obvious from their constitution’s irredentism that Greece
was targeted for future verbal, political and diplomatic assault
from day one. Considering all these disturbing facts, we see
now with apprehension that history has reached the absurd
and untenable point where a small country calling itself
"Republic of Macedonia" may not only demand — by the power
of its apprehended name — to be recognized as a Macedonia,
but to be propelled to the world as the only Macedonia; and its
Slavic people may not only demand — by the power granted to
them by a dictator — to be some "Macedonians," but to
demand recognition as the only Macedonians.
Now, a few words about the international community and its
stance on the issue. Calling the inhabitants of FYROM
"Macedonians," automatically deprives three million Hellenic
Macedonians of their Macedonian name and identity. This
serious argument has nothing to do with the glorious
Macedonian kings, the ancient Macedonian Hellenism, the
3,000 years of Macedonian history, or theHellenistic Era. It has
to do with the simple, unaccepted fact that the FYROM Slavs
are attempting to monopolize a name that people next door
have been using continuously for 3,000 years. It has also to do
with the fact that a country (FYROM), which forms a small part
of a larger whole country — less than 20% of Philip’s historic
Macedonia — portrays itself as representing the entire
Macedonia, with future rights on the entire geographic
Macedonia.7
FYROM’s dogma proclaims now on all levels — political,
scientific, educational, diplomatic, and media — that the entire
geographic area of Macedonia, stretching from Tetovo in
FYROM to the Bulgarian capital in the north, down to Mount
Olympus in the south, constitutes "ethnic Macedonian
territory," the homeland of the "Macedonian nation," which was
unfairly partitioned in 1913 with the Treaty of Bucharest; and
the homeland of the "Macedonian" people who consider the
Greeks and Bulgarians as foreign trespassers.
After the repeated violations of the Interim Accord, we must
ask: is FYROM ready to participate in the "Search for a
Roadmap of Peace in the Balkans?" Is FYROM ready to enter
NATO and the European Union?
Adoption of the name "Macedonia" by Skopje constitutes
another equally serious threat to Greece: a threat to its
national identity and cultural heritage. What does that mean? It
means that monopolizing the name, inadvertently will lead to a
Slavic monopoly of everything Macedonian: history, civilization,
culture, identity, heroes, customs, symbols, arts, traditions.
Failing to preserve the cultural-historical heritage is
tantamount to Greece failing to keep alive the Hellenic
Macedonian ethnic identity, culture, and pride.
Pushed into a difficult corner in the midst of the international
Macedonian controversy, Greece must find it hard to forgive
the disappointing stance of its friends and allies, who
sanctioned the use of the name "Macedonia" by the small
republic. The irony of the U.S. policy is that it assisted Greece
to protect its territory in the 1940s, and then, forgetting the
rivers of blood spilled by the Greek people to thwart
communism’s advance from its extensive bases in Yugoslavia,
Albania and Bulgaria, turned around and recognized as
"Macedonians" the people against whom Greece was fighting
with America’s help to preserve its territorial integrity during
the Greek Civil War; the people that welcomed the Bulgarian
fascists as liberators in 1944 in the streets of Skopje and who,
during Greece’s critical years in the 1940s assisted the Greek
communists in their attempts to overthrow the Greek
government.
Equally paradoxical is the fact that when the political and
military pendulum swung in the opposite direction after Greece
successfully repulsed Soviet-sponsored communism, Greece
became the aggressor in the eyes of the West, as if Greece
were the guilty party that usurped its neighbor’s name and
assumed an identity that belongs to another country; as if
Greece were the country that appropriated a foreign emblem to
decorate its flag; as if Greece were the country with an
irredentist constitution, claiming territories right and left,
north and south.8
With these perspectives in mind, the insistence of FYROM Slavs
to be called "Macedonians," a name dictatorially established
and supported by communism’s brutal force and theoretical
base sixty years ago, clashes now with the age-old freedom of
Hellenic Macedonians to be called "Macedonians." If FYROM
considers itself Macedonia, a false and audaciously daring step
that brings the origin of its Slavic inhabitants close to Philip
and Alexander the Great, then the insistence of these people to
be called "Macedonians"clashes head on with the age-old
freedom of others to be called "Macedonians." According to the
Academy of Athens, FYROM has the right to survive and
prosper, but it does not have the right to acquire, by
international recognition, an advantage enjoyed by no other
state in the world: to use a name which of itself propagandizes
territorial aspirations at Greece’s expense (Kargakos 1992).
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[Truth Bearer]

Sorry lads its a bit long but a must read and covers all our points!!!