From: sk@groo.sunbim.be (Sasa Konecni)
Subject: THE NEW BULLY OF THE BALKANS [ Part 3 from 4 ]
Reply-To: sk@sunbim.be ()
Organization: BIM Everberg Belgium
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 92 07:47:15 GMT



Parts from : THE NEW BULLY OF THE BALKANS for the benefit of
the readers who can not access the original( a beautiful piece
of professional journalism)
  Noel Malcolm on how Greece's profound neurosis about its own
identity is the biggest single impediment to any sensible EEC
policy in the region


                               III   

     ...Within Greece, there are no newspapers or radio
broadcasts in their [Slavo-macedonian] language. One group of
these Slavs has started a small monthly newsletter, with an
estimated readership of 10,000. But they have great difficulty
finding a printer, and they say that if copies are sent
through the post they tend to "disappear". "Even if we find a
sympathetic printer", one told me, "he's usually too scared to
take the work; he's afraid of losing all his other contracts,
or perhaps of getting bricks through his window." 
     Another group [Voden] has applied for permission to start
a cultural society; the application has been turned down, on
the grounds that it is "anti-Greek". They are not even allowed
to sing songs in their language; the last time this happened,
at the village festival of Malitis two years ago, proceedings
were broken up by the police.

     A few bold individuals have taken their case to human
rights conferences at Helsinki, Copenhagen and Moscow. I
talked to three of these people, each of whom had encountered
certain career problems on his return to Greece. Hristos
Sideropoulos, a forestry worker - sacked... His friend Stavros
Anastasiadis owns a small trucking company - now stand idle...
Archimandrit Nikodemos Tsarkinias, showed me a peremptory
letter from his bishop telling him that he must leave his
parish work....

     The public hysteria over the "Skopje Republic"
[Macedonia] certainly does not help. The weekly nationalist-
extremist newspaper Stohos ("Aim") now issues regular personal
threats against these individuals or their friends, listing
names and addresses; its more general articles on this subject
carry titles such as "Cut off Their Heads".[!!!!]

     ...When I attempt to discuss these issues with Prof.
Konstantopoulos, director of the Institute of International
Public Law in Salonica, I was assured that the so-called Slavs
were just bilingual Greeks...."Why cannot they have a
newspaper in their own language?" I asked. "They don't want
one!" shouted the professor.....His anger was cataclysmic....
A few minutes later, he assured me that "secret figures"
revealed that 18% of the population of Yugoslav Macedonia are
Greek- a piece of ethnographic nonsense so gross that even
Stohos ("Aim") might blush to print it. [ha,ha,ha]


                   Continue

>From "The Spectator" of 15th of August, 1992

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"I understand the world only as a field for cultural 
competition between the nations " GOCE DELCEV (1872-1903)
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