From: kutluk@ccl.umist.ac.uk (Kutluk Ozguven)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek,soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Re: An article about Macedonia in TIME (october 12, 1992)
Keywords: time,macedonia,greece,bullying
Date: 10 Oct 92 17:55:48 GMT
Organization: Manchester Computing Centre



>                  GREECE'S DEFENSE SEEMS JUST SILLY

>                                   by 
>                               Strobe Talbott

>   in TIME, october 12, 1992
>   page 64.. 
>  
>   GREECE IS REMINDING THE WORLD THAT IT TOO IS A Balkan country, the 
>   inhabitant of a region where history often introduces hysteria. In 
>   this policy toward the disaster zone that used to be Yugoslavia,
>   Greek prime minister Constantine Mitsotakis is well on his way to
>   deepening and widening the war there.

>     When Slovenia, Crotia and Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence
>   and appealed for international recognition last year, Macedonia had 
>   no choice but to follow suit. Otherwise it would have been swallowed
>   up by Serbia.

>     A commission of the European Community established criteria for 
>   recognition, stressing respects for the rights of ethnic minorities.
>   Macedonia passed the test. Its population is a mixture of nearly a
>   dozen nationalities, but its political system is democratic and 
>   pluralistic.

>     The E.C. was quick to recognize the other breakaway republics 
>   including Crotia, whose reegime discriminates against local Serbs. 
>   But the community stiff-armed Macedonia. Why? Because Greece objects
>   to the name and exercised a veto in the councils of the E.C. 
>   Macedonia is the birthplace of Alexander the Great and the name of
>   Greece's northern province. Therefore Athens thinks it has a 
>   2,400-year-old trademark on the word.

>     Last week the Greek Foreign Minister Michalis Papaconstantinou was
>   in Washington, and I had a chance to ask him about this whole business.
>   He maintains that for Macedonia to ``adopt a Greek name'' is a
>   ``provocation'' that ``implies territorial claims against us.''

>     Never mind that Macedonia's constitution explicitly disavows any such 
>   claim. Or that its army consists of about 6,000 ragtag troops armed 
>   with pistols and rifles, while Greece's is more than 25 times larger 
>   and is equipped with tanks, heavy artillary and jet fighters. Or that 
>   there is neither precedent nor justification in international law for 
>   one country to tell another what it can call itself.    

>     Partly because the Greek position is so preposterous, the suspicion
>   persists that the complaint about the name camouflages a revival of
>   Greece's own ageold expansionistic ambitions. Several European 
>   governments have relayed to Washington reports that Mitsotakis has
>   secretly discussed the partition of Macedonia with Serbia and perhaps 
>   with Albania and Bulgaria as well. 

>     Papaconstantinou denies this charge ``categorically: I have never 
>   seen any document or heard anything of this sort. We want them 
>   [the Macedonians] to exist  [as a separate state]; we want them as
>   a buffer zone'' between Greece and Serbia. ``The authorities in Skopje
>   [the Macedonian capital] can change their name to anything except 
>   Macedonia,'' and that will remove ``a point of friction in the Balkans.''

>     Another recent visitor to Washington -Jane Miljovski, a minister
>   in the Macedonian government-offers a persuasive rebuttal: `` As 
>   citizens of a newborn, almost defenseless nation, we are afraid that 
>   if we can be bullied into changing our name, we will next come under 
>   pressure to change our borders.''

>     Privately, most Western officials acknowledge that Miljovski is right.
>   Yet publicly the E.C. and the U.S. have, in effect, sided with Athens 
>   on the ground that there are other, overriding interests at stake.

>     As a member of NATO, which is undergoing a post-cold war identity
>   crisis, and the E.C., which is trying to keep the Maastricht treaty 
>   from unraveling, Greece has extra leverage these days on both sides 
>   of the Atlantic. In the U.S. it has the additional help of the 
>   powerful Greek-American lobby.

>     To his credit, Mitsotakis is working to resolve the long-simmering
>   dispute over Cyprus and reach a raprochement with Turkey. He keeps 
>   hinting that if he budges on the Macedonian question , extreme 
>   nationalists in the Greek parliament - where he has only a two-vote
>   majority- will bring down his government and replace it with one that 
>   will undo his welcome diplomatic initiatives.

>     Meanwhile, under the pretext of complying with international 
>   sanctions against Serbia, Greece is blockading fuel shipment to
>   Macedonia. As a result, factories there have had to shut down; crops
>   are rotting in the fields; ambulances are sitting useless in hospital
>   parking lots. ``It's murder without bullets,'' says Miljovski.

>     Economic strangulation will soon lead to social interest, which in 
>   turn could ignite an ethnic conflagration worse than the one in Bosnia. 
>   Because Macedonia has large Muslim minorities, civil war within that 
>   republic is more likely than anywhere else to escalate into a religious
>   and regional war that could end up pitting Greece against any number of 
>   its neighbors, including Turkey. Where will the overriding interests
>   of the U.S., the E.C. and Nato be then?

>     Having heard out the Greek Foreign Minister, I'm prepared to give 
>   him and Mitsotakis the benefit of the doubt on their motivation:
>   they are not guilty of irredentism-a desire to recover lands lost long
>   ago- but merely of PARANOIA and MYOPIA. The situation has all the makings
>   of the tragedy, which Aristotle, another Great Macedonian who was 
>   Alexander's teacher, defined as THE RESULT NOT OF WICKEDNESS BUT OF 
>   FOOLISH PRIDE.
>    
>    TIME
>    October 12, 1992
>    Vol. 140 No. 15
>    page 64...
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek