From: Lynn Gazis-Sax <lgsax@igc.apc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek
Date: 11 Nov 92 21:45 PST
Subject: Trip to Skopje, 9/92
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1473100066:000:13668
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!lgsax    Nov 11 21:45:00 1992


"You do more harm than good."  The words of a Greek friend were on
my mind as our train pulled into Skopje.  He was referring to a
message of mine which was too supportive of the Macedonian
position in their dispute with Greece.  Skopje, Macedonia was the
stop of our trip which I viewed with most apprehension, because it
is the one Balkan conflict in which I have a personal connection.


My father was born in the Greek province of Macedonia, in the city
of Thessaloniki.  The name of the town where my grandfather was
born was  a bone of contention in a debate on a computer network I
follow.  Kozhani, says a Macedonian Slav whose family came from
not far north of there, is derived from the Slavic word "kozha,"
or "skin," a reference to the leatherworking industry which once
flourished there.  Kozani, says a Macedonian Greek who grew up
there, is absolutely not Slavic in any way.  The name derives from
a kind of goat which used to live there.  It is my history they
are arguing about.  I am close enough to the issue to offend - to
be mistrusted by the Macedonians, perhaps, due to my Greek
ancestry, or to offend the Greeks, as I offended my friend, by a
too ready (and, in his view, naive) acceptance of Macedonian
claims.

As in Budapest, we arranged through a travel agency to stay in the
room of a private house.  The couple renting to us (like many
people in Skopje) spoke no English or German.  We made do with
Joel's Croatian and my Russian.  Renting a room in the same house
was a Bulgarian journalist.  We carried on a conversation in three
languages, with him speaking Bulgarian, Joel Croatian, and me
Russian.  He had previously been in Nicaragua and Afghanistan.  He
had been to Osijek, Vukovar, and Sarajevo.  He thought the war
would last a long time, "It is like Lebanon."

The center of Skopje is filled with modern apartment buildings
with nothing obviously Balkan about them, and people who could
pass for Greek.  Some men (Albanian Muslims) wear round caps, and
some of the women have their heads covered with shawls -
presumably Muslim women.  Others dress much the same as people in
Zagreb or Beograd or Athens - or any American city.  Some of the
men wear earrings - a style not so common in Zagreb or Beograd.
The streets, like the streets of Zagreb, are filled with cafes and
tables covered by umbrellas advertising various products, such as
Marlboro.  The public drinking fountains, however, are distinctive
- Skopje has some of the best tasting water in the Balkans.

Marshall Tito square is filled with red flowers.  A restaurant
there serves pizza Macedonian style (the sauce arrives on the side
and is poured on the pizza) and "American style" chicken.  We
ordered some, and learned that Americans eat their chicken
barbecued, served on a bed of French fries, and topped with
paprika and a slice of bacon.

The Turkish bridge leading from Marshall Tito square was covered
with street sellers; it reminded me of a scene in Andric's book
"The Bridge on the Drina." At the end, a boy lay on the bridge, a
pile of money collecting by his hand.  When we went back the other
way in the evening, another boy was in the same place - the next
shift. Cross this Turkish bridge, and there in the middle of this
modern city are buildings from a quite different time.  Winding
roads lead up stairs; small shops line the road.  We walked down a
few of these roads, and come to the Turkish bazaar.  In the stalls
of this open market and the shops of the streets leading up to it,
people sell  University of Arizona T-shirts, Athletics
sweatshirts, Mutant Ninja Turtles children's clothes, plastic
guns, and Barbie-like fashion dolls.  Also folk music, jewelry,
leather goods, and food.  After much searching through this
section of town, a pair of mitts hung outside led us to a shop
which sold many traditional Albanian crafts - clothing, woven
bags, rugs.  In the shop stood a postcard from Dubrovnik - "Pray
for peace" - sent by a friend of the owner who lived in Dubrovnik.


Having been so recently in Zagreb and Beograd, I was most struck
by the absence of nationalist paraphernalia.  We saw the new flag
of Macedonia, a very striking yellow star, or perhaps a stylized
sun, on a red background.  (A controversial flag - Greece objects
to the use of this star, on grounds that it was used in ancient
Macedonia.) But you could not buy it anywhere, it seemed.  I would
have thought, if Macedonia were preparing for war with Greece,
that I should see flags, T-shirts, buttons, products with
Macedonian slogans - something like we saw in the US during Desert
Storm, or what one finds in Zagreb today.  There was nothing of
the kind.  Graffiti was about rock groups, and not about war.

I was surprised to find that even the streets still have their old
Yugoslavian names.  There, in the center of town, there is still a
street named for Tito, and his portrait can still be seen some
places.  Perhaps Macedonia, once a Partisan stronghold, remembers
Tito more fondly than Croatia (though Tito was also a Croat and
Croats also served among the Partisans).  One Macedonian woman
(born in Florina, Greece) said, "Tito was a good man. Now we
remember only the bad, but we should also remember the good." Or
perhaps Macedonia, a poor country under much economic pressure,
has better ways to spend its money.  The postage stamps, for
example, were still the ones of old Yugoslavia.  The money,
however, is new, covered with pictures of women picking crops and,
in one denomination, a woman at a computer terminal.

I need not, as it turns out, have feared that Macedonians would
mistrust me as a Greek-American.  When we set out in the wrong
direction from the train station, a man offered us a ride back
into Skopje.  On hearing that I was Greek-American, he said that
it is good that I had come to know the truth.  A taxi driver
volunteered that he has a Greek wife.  Americans are popular here
("America super," said the taxi driver), and Greek-Americans are
especially happily received.

What is this truth that I was asked to learn?  The main complaint
of the Macedonians was of the oil embargo.  The Macedonian man who
gave us a lift back into town points to some parked cars and says,
"No petrol.  Greece is holding up a tanker at Thessaloniki."
Another man reported a nine hour wait for gas.  A woman told us
that she is riding her bike because there is no gas.  Nearly every
Macedonian we spoke to brought up this shortage of gas, and the
tanker which Greece has stopped at Thessaloniki.  Macedonians also
told me that they were no longer able to visit Greece, as they had
in the past. All expressed puzzlement at Greece's behavior.  "I
never expected that Greece would do something like this," and "I
don't understand" were typical comments.  Macedonia, everyone
assured me, had absolutely no interest in Greek territory and was
no threat to Greece.

To Greeks, the Macedonian identity is a recent, artificial
creation, to be viewed with suspicion as a tool to be manipulated
by the Serbs.  The Macedonians are linguistically and culturally
closely related to the Bulgarians, and Serbians are said to have
promoted this nationality to distinguish these people from
Bulgarians.  (They have some support for this view from historians
who say that the Macedonian national identity solidified only in
the twentieth century.  On the other hand, there is a lot of
disagreement among historians about when and how the idea of a
Macedonian nationality evolved - judging who is right is way
beyond my competence and outside the scope of this article.)

To the Macedonians, it is the nationality they have grown up with.
"It is in their folk songs," said a friend of ours from Beograd.
Though the Republic of Macedonia as it now stands is a post-WWII
creation, Macedonians argue that the idea of Macedonian nationhood
is older. One Macedonian activist told me that the Macedonian
national identity began in the nineteenth century.  Our guidebook,
_Skopje and Its Surroundings_ (written in 1986, before the breakup
of Yugoslavia) goes farther, saying, "the end of the first
millenium brought the first Macedonian state and the Macedonian
Emperor Samuil (976-1014)."  (It does not, however, trace
Macedonian identity as far back as Alexander the Great - a
distinction is made between those Macedonians and the Slavic
ones.) The money of the Republic of Macedonia is printed with a
picture of a monument to the Ilinden uprising of 1903, an uprising
which our guidebook to Skopje describes as "a message to the whole
world about the desire for freedom and the great hardship of the
Macedonian people."

Why is Greece acting as it is? In some ways, this Greek reaction
is not hard to understand.  At the beginning of this century,
Greece fought a war with Bulgaria over the possession of
Macedonia.  During World War II, Bulgaria occupied part of
Macedonia and imported settlers.  After World War II, Greece
suffered a bitter civil war in which Yugoslavia supported the
losing side (and during which Cominform attempted to promote the
idea of an autonomous Macedonia).  Fifty years is a long time in
international relations, long enough for massive changes in nearly
all of the governments of Eastern Europe.  But it can be a short
time in the memory of the people of the countries which suffered
these wars.  As my father says of the Balkan Wars, "This is recent
history.  My grandfather fought in that war."  One of my uncles
lost a hand in the Civil War.  I met him later in Greece - he
walks and even runs with the hand always in his pocket.  Those who
think that this historical memory is a peculiarly Balkan malady
may do well to ponder our own anxieties about a newly reunited
Germany.  And those who are puzzled by the intense Greek reaction
to the name and flag of the new country may do well to ponder our
own feelings toward the Confederate flag.

Yes, it is recent history.  But not, I think, current reality.
Current reality is a poor, not very well-armed country which is
not now making any actual threats toward Greece (which, in fact,
has written into its constitution a disavowal of territorial
claims).  And yes, the symbolism of the name and flag is deeply
felt in Greece.  But symbolic affronts, however deeply felt,
deserve only a response in words and symbols.  Unfortunately,
Greece instead has chosen to respond by cutting the oil supply.

The one real sore spot that I can see between Greece and Macedonia
is the issue of the treatment of the Slavic minority in Greece.
The status of the Slavic minority in Greece was not the first
concern we heard expressed by Macedonians.  The war in Bosnia, the
refugees from that war, and the situation in Kosovo all weigh on
the minds of Macedonians, and, of course, the lack of gas is an
ever present concern.  However, under prompting some will say that
there is a Macedonian minority in Greece which is mistreated.
There is a private organization which concerns itself with the
rights of this minority.  I have a document produced by the
Macedonian Human Rights Movement which lists offenses against the
Macedonian minority in Greece and Bulgaria; Greece, for example,
is accused of forcing Macedonian parents to send their 2- 3 year
old children to "integrated kindergartens."  Greeks who fear a
Macedonian-Bulgarian alliance may take comfort in the fact that
the list of Bulgarian offenses is as long as the list of Greek
offenses, but I am sure that this fact will not sweeten the
accusations by much.  (The document does deny that its minority
concerns stem from any claims on Greek territory, "The movement
expressly renounces any separatist or irredentist goals . . . ")

On the other hand, Macedonia itself faces the task of building up
a country with sizeable Albanian, Turkish, and Roma minorities,
and Macedonians seemed for that reason not inclined to draw any
claims from the presence of a Slavic minority in Greece (though
they disagree with Greeks about its size, national identity, and
whether its rights are respected). As Macedonian peace activist
Vladimir Milcin (a founding member of an Albanian theater group)
said, "Having minorities is normal."

On our last day in Skopje, we met with several women of Women for
Peace and heard about their organization.  Like Beograd, and
unlike Zagreb, Skopje is well-supplied with older activists; the
women are mostly middle-aged.  Through an interpreter, Teuta
Terckova told the story of the organization, "The Women's
Organization of Skopje started the peace movement in Skopje after
the war in Slovenia and Croatia.  We made contact with ecologists
in other countries, with the Helsinki Citizen's Assembly, and with
other groups.  Nowadays we have about 20 peace groups [in Skopje]
. . .  These organizations are non-governmental and non-partisan .
. .  They are all members of the Peace Conference."

The Women's Organization of Skopje maintains communication
(despite some difficulty in telephone communication) with peace
organizations in other parts of former Yugoslavia, in Europe, and
in the US.  It organizes to get supplies for a children's clinic
in Skopje, to find families to take in Bosnian refugees, and
support conscientious objectors (Macedonia itself is out of the
war, but the war came so unexpectedly that some Yugoslavian
soldiers were left in Macedonia, and the women's organization
supported those who chose not to fight).  Their chief problem is a
lack of medicine.

After we concluded the interview, we got an unexpected lift to the
train station.  Vladimir Milcin, on foot when we interviewed him
the night before, was now able to drive us; that morning he had
managed to buy five liters of gas.