History of the SNOF/NOF

[Tsontos]

[Flipper]

I usually ask them "Do you think we (The Hellenes) woke up one day and decided to kick you out? Don't you think there was something behind that action?". When I tell them the story they don't believe me ofcourse since I had only one written source from answers.com but no book. Enjoy...

From The Logic of Violence in Civil War - Cambridge University press, page 312

After the end of the occupation and the demobilization of the communist partisans (1945-6), the reconstructed Greek state persecuted leftists and Slav Macedonians alike. Trials of collaborators were used as an opportunity for ethnically motivated persecution as well as the pursuit of all kinds of local feuds. As a result many slav Macedonians, both those who had participated in EAM but also many who saw action in the various collaborationist militias, fled across the border into the Republic of Macedonia, newly formed as part of the Socialist Yugoslavia. Whereas during the occupation many Slav Macedonians had claimed a Bulgarian identity and collaborated with the Bulgarian troops, many now claimed a Macedonian identity and looked up to Tito's Yugoslavia; many amongst them joined an independence movement (NOF) and the unit known as the First Aegian Brigade. Both organizations were closely allied with Yugoslav Macedonia's Communist authorities, who themselves maintained complex ties with the Greek Communists. At the mass level there was a growing overlap between Slavophonic linguistic identity the Slav Macedonian (or Macedonian) ethnic identity, and the propensity to side with the Communist Left in 1946-1949. Although the overlap was no complete, with a significant minority of Slav Macedonians siding with the Greek goverment, it is clear notheless that most Slav Macedonians either collaborated with or openly fought with the Greek Communist rebels between 1946 and 1949 - 85 percent according to one estimate (Rossos 1997:63). Conversely many Greek settlers especially in mixed villages, supported the Greek Right, even though they had been ardent supporters of the Liberal Party during the interwar period (Marantzidis 2001).

In short, although the Greek Civil War in Macedonia was by no means an ethnic war, it took on pronounced ethnic character. The Slav Macedonians "made a significant, indeed critical contribution to the communist side during the civil war in Greece"; they bore the brunt of the war, since they inhabited regions of Macedonia where the heviest fighting took place. Their participation in the ranks of the rebel army was very high, "far out of propotion to their relatively low number in the total population of Greece at the time...Their estimated representation in the DSE (The Democratic Army of Greece, as the communist rebel army was known) ranged from more than a quarter in April 1947 to more than two-thirds in mid-1949". By 1948 the communist party "had become almost totally depended on the relatively small, mainly Slav Macedonian populated areas it held in central and western Macedonia. Importantly, however, the nature of the Slav Macedonians participation in the Greek civil war (at least at the elite level) was nationalist rather than communist. The communists were convenient allies in a strugle that was supposed to lead to secession from Greece and a merger with the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

In a civil war the side who wins prosecutes those who they consider war criminals. In this case another ethnic, non-Greek group entered a civil war not of compassion but for their own sake of nationalism.

Before I close, I want to state that I do not take sides [Left or Right] in the matter of civil war BUT i condemn both sides for killing each other in the name of the cold war.

[Flipper]

From answers.com

Second World War

During Second World War (1941-1945), the inhabitants of Vardar Macedonia took part in the anti-fascist coalition. The uprising began in 1941 in the cities of Prilep and Kumanovo. In Greece, it has been estimated that the military wing of KKE – DSE (Democratic Army of Greece) had 14 000 soldiers of Slavic Macedonian origin out of total 20 000 soldiers. Given their important role, the KKE’s General Secretary Nikos Zachariades proceeded to change his party’s policy on Greek Macedonia. At the fifth Plenum on 31 January 1949, a resolution was passed claiming that the Macedonian people are distinguishing themselves, and that after the liberation they will find their national restoration as they wish it. In August 1949 the DSE was defeated in Grammos and Vitsi. [7]

[akritas]

The Tito Heresy

This saying, which was going the rounds at the end of 1949, may or may not prove to be justified. But its mere circulation testifies to the impact of the Tito heresy. Time will tell whether Tito will become the Luther of the Communist world. But his heresy already has caused as much controversy and soul-searching as the nailing of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses on the church door. And his effect on the Greek civil war was not confined to metaphysical disputations. The Tito-Moscow rift smashed the common front of the northern Balkan states against Athens, and contributed significantly to the disintegration of the Greek guerrillas in the summer of 1949.

The roots of the schism go back to the middle of World War II. The Communist "line" throughout the world at that time was unity--unity within the Allied countries and unity among the Allied countries. The Communist leaders of the Greek resistance forces obediently toed this line. Hence their entry into the royal exile cabinet to form a national unity government in spite of the fact that they already were virtual masters of the country. Hence also their willingness to permit British troops, obviously sent for purely political reasons, to land in Greece. In December 1944 the Greek Communists paid the price for their orthodoxy when Churchill smashed their resistance army while Stalin looked on without lifting a finger. A few months earlier Stalin had divided the Balkans with Churchill, leaving Greece to Britain's sphere. One wonders what the faithful Greek Communists would have thought had they known that at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 Stalin blandly assured Churchill that he had complete confidence in British policy in Greece, and that Churchill in turn thanked Stalin for his kind words.

Meanwhile Tito, unlike his Greek comrades, was deviating from the party line. In 1943 he decided that he had a large enough army and had won enough territory to warrant the establishment of a provisional government. Moscow urged instead that the government question be postponed until after the war. Tito nevertheless went his own way and convened the first meeting of the "AntiFascist Council of National Liberation" in November 1943 at Jajce. This probably explains why the Soviet government trailed the British and American governments in announcing open support for Tito's partisans.

After the end of the war Tito continued to show his independence. The dispute over Trieste is a good example. Tito was then demanding Trieste for Yugoslavia. He felt that the Soviets were not supporting his claim strongly enough, and attributed this to their desire to strengthen Togliatti in Italy. "It is said," declared Tito, "that this is a just war, and we have considered it such. However, we also seek a just end. We demand that everyone shall be master in his own house. We do not want to pay for others. We do not want to be used as a bribe in international bargaining."

This, coming from a Communist leader, was heresy--a dangerous heresy with a natural and universal appeal. "The mortal sin was the notion of equality and independence-the equality of Communist parties, the independence of Communist states."

Moscow reacted quickly against the heresy. "Tell Comrade Tito," the Soviet ambassador warned, "that if he should once again permit such an attack on the Soviet Union we shall be forced to reply with open criticism in the press and disavow him."

The heretic refused to recant. Instead, he committed more sins. He criticized the behavior of Soviet officers and officials in Yugoslavia. He presumed to lecture the Communist parties of other countries for their lack of militant programs and leadership. He tried to form a Yugoslav-Bulgarian federation, which Moscow forestalled by ordering Dimitrov to withdraw. And when Tito found that he was being spied upon, he put some of his secret-service men to work shadowing the Russian diplomats and industrial experts in Yugoslavia.

Thus there was no alternative to carrying out the earlier threat of excommunication. In June 1948 the Cominform,
expelled the Yugoslav party in an angry proclamation. The expectation apparently was that this would bring down the Tito regime and put the Yugoslav government in orthodox hands. It did not. Instead, "Titoism," a new word in the Marxist lexicon, spread to minor epidemic proportions throughout the eastern bloc.

"Karl Marx is God, Lenin is Jesus, Stalin is St. Paul, and Tito the first Protestant."

source:
1-Greece: American Dilemma and Opportunity ,by L. S. Staurianos

[akritas]

The critical five years: 1945-50
[ Greece and The Macedonian Question,Etairia Makedonikon Spoudon]

Nonetheless the Slavo-Macedonians, with the backing of the newly- formed Tito regime in Yugoslavia, kept up their efforts. Just a few days after the Varkiza agreement, Slavo-Macedonian èmigrès from Greece formed an organisation named NOF (National Liberation Front) in Skopje, and sent armed guerrilla bands back to the border areas of Greek Macedonia. The activities of these bands attracted the criticism of the KKE, since they were in conflict with the terms of the Varkiza agreement and gave the government forces an excuse for applying severe measures to suppress them.

However, when the Civil War began in 1946, the Slavo-Macedonians, returned to Greek Macedonia in great numbers and joined the Greek Communist movement, while still retaining their own organisation, the NOF. To judge from the various collections of documents and memoirs which have been published in Skopje, the Slavo-Macedonians — that is, the part of the Slavic-speaking population whose national consciousness was Slavic — were fighting what they saw at this time as a "national liberation struggle for the Macedonians of the Aegean" in order to win their national rights. These rights were none other than the policy which Yugoslavia was officially pursuing at this time and which was intended to incorporate the Macedonian territories of both Greek and Bulgarian Macedonia into the Socialist Republic of Macedonia.

In the meantime, and while the outcome of the civil war in Greece still hung in the balance, the Yugoslavs exerted unbearable pressure on their Bulgarian comrades in order to blackmail them into ceding Bulgarian Macedonia to Yugoslavia. In the end, by the Bled accords of 1947, Dimitrov agreed, in return for minor concessions, to acknowledge the inhabitants of Bulgarian Macedonia (Pirin) as "Macedonians" and to pave the way for the incorporation of the province of Pirin into the Socialist Republic of Macedonia. The incorporation of Greek Macedonia would await the outcome of the civil war.

The split between Stalin and Tito, which occurred suddenly in the summer of 1948, upset all the Yugoslav calculations about playing a leading role in the Balkans using the Macedonian question as the central lever. Bulgaria seized the opportunity to release itself from the concessions it had made over the Macedonian question. It repudiated the theory of the "Macedonian nation" and drove the commissars from Skopje off its territory. It then attempted to exploit the difficulties which the Yugoslavs were facing in order to advance once more the pre-war slogan of an "independent and united Macedonia ". This slogan also served to increase the more general political pressure which the Soviet Union was at that time exerting on Tito.

The Moscow-Belgrade split, however, also had dramatic repercussions for Greek Macedonia. The leadership of the KKE judged it to be expedient to fall into line with the Soviet Union in attacking Tito and at the same time adopt its new policy towards Macedonia. Thus, by decision of the 5th Plenum of the Central Committee, in January 1949, the KKE revived the old pro-Bulgarian slogan of the "independent and united Macedonia" in the framework of a future Balkan Communist Federation.

This shift of policy had grave consequences for the course of military operations, since the Yugoslavs, in order to protect their own rear, closed the border with Greece, which until that time had been the main channel through which supplies had flowed to the Communist forces in Greece. Some of the NOF supporters fled to Yugoslav Macedonia, where they settled. Later, when the armed conflict ended in August 1949, the remaining masses of NOF supporters followed the other Greek political refugees into exile in the countries of Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.

The final outcome of those five tragic years was that those Slavic- speakers who had originally joined forces with the Bulgarians during the occupation and later identified with Skopje's Slavo-Macedonians left Greece. This was the last exodus from Greek Macedonia of people who felt themselves to be Slavs or had pro-Slav sentiments. Certainly, in the maelstrom of the fighting and the events of the time injustices must have been done, and consequently there later occurred a kind of selective repatriation of Slavic-speakers with Greek national consciousness. Those Slavic-speak­ ers with Greek national consciousness who had been fighting to keep Greece free and Macedonia Greek ever since the Macedonian Straggle remained in Greece . It was these frontier fighters who, even in the most difficult times, refused to become instruments of the Bulgarians' occupation forces or of Tito's SNOF and NOF.
Yugoslavia , faced with the nightmarish prospect of a Soviet invasion, sought support in the West, which opened up the way for the normalisation of relations with Greece and the signing, in 1954, of a tripartite Balkan pact of defensive alliance, of which Turkey also was a member.

The new circumstances led Yugoslavia to drop the territorial demands it had been putting forward and to restrict itself to formal claims for the recognition of "Macedonian" minorities. These claims were, however, to­ tally insubstantiated, since the objective conditions to justify them no longer existed. The KKE, on its part, soon realised the enormous political cost of the decision taken by the 5th Plenum and reversed it with a theoretical position involving "the equality of the Slavo-Macedonians". However, since the Slavo-Macedonians concerned were no longer in Greece , this position gradually lost force and was officially abandoned with the categorical statement by General Secretary Harilaos Florakis in Thessaloniki in September 1988 that "for the KKE, there is no Macedonian minority in Greece".

Lastly, Bulgaria too dropped the slogan of a united Macedonia after the death of Stalin in 1953. After a considerable amount of vacillation — directly connected to the state of Soviet-Yugoslav relations at any given time — Bulgaria also adopted the position that there is no "Macedonian nation" and that consequently there can be no "Macedonian" minority in Bulgaria.

As a conclusion, after the upheavals of the period 1940-50, the three sections of Macedonia went over to licking their wounds and have since followed, peacefully, the political, economic and social development of the countries to which they belong.

[akritas]

SNOF at the beggining

Most of the Slavophone inhabitants in all parts of divided Macedonia perhaps a million and a half in all - felt themselves to be Bulgarians at the beginning of the Occupation; and most Bulgarians, whether they supported the Communists, IMRO, or the collaborating government, assumed that all Macedonia would fall to Bulgaria after the war. Tito was determined that this should not happen. The first Congress of AVNOJ in November 1942 had paranteed equal rights to all the 'peoples of Yugoslavia', and specified the Macedonians among them. By inplication, the guarantee could be extended to Pirin (Bulgarian) Macedonia and Aegean (Greek) Macedonia. The Communist Party of Macedonia, which had passed through a troubled time, first under a pro-Bulgarian leadership and then under pro-Yugoslav Macedonians, was taken in hand early in 1943 by Tempo, who formed a new Central Committee and informed it that it was now an integral part of the Yugoslav CP.

After suitable re-indoctrination, the Macedonian CP issued a pro-Yugoslav 'Ilinden Manifesto' on 2 August, the anniversary of a national rising in 1903. Tempo told them that they could look forward to unification and autonomy within a Yugoslav Federation. This prospect was confirmed by resolutions passed at the second Congress of AVNOJ, held at Jajce at the end of November. It was said to have the approval of Moscow, but this was untrue. Stalin expressed indignation, and so did the Fatherland Front of Bulgaria (including, but not yet dominated by, the Communists), which urged a rival policy of 'an integral, free and independent Macedonia'. Tito in turn repudiated this policy in a message to Dimitrov on 24 January 1944.

....................

[Chris Woodhouse, The Struggle for Greece, 1941-1949, page 67]

[akritas]

One from the building that used Communist querillas in NE Macedonia.Picture came from the book of Alexandros Zaouses and has title Tragiki Anamaetrisi(1945-1949)

[akritas]

One from the known leader of the NOF a was Keramijiev or Stamko. His opinion regarding the education in the “minorities” was:

If we give Greek school to the Ellinozontes Slav Macedonians as you said, and if there are Bulgarizontes Slav Macedonians then must give also and Bulgarian schools.

In this case I am afraid that we would be a tail of a small part of people that have distorted national conscience

Source:
[AM-Skopje, Fond 996 –Egeska Makedonija vo Graganskata 1946/49/25/44, Stamko Report 31-10-1947].

[Teukros]

I've read an article in a magazine about SNOF and Gotse and I'd like to ask because I couldn't find the answer there, if those *****left Greece or managed to remain here.I suppose if they did stay here now they are the supporters of Ouranio Toxo eh??But have they been removed??

[akritas]

Originally Posted by Τεύκρος

I've read an article in a magazine about SNOF and Gotse and I'd like to ask because I couldn't find the answer there, if those *****left Greece or managed to remain here.I suppose if they did stay here now they are the supporters of Ouranio Toxo eh??But have they been removed??

These raiders left to the Vardaska. Gotse was one from the NOF leader and left in 1944.