From: sk@groo.sunbim.be (Sasa Konecni)
Subject: THE NEW BULLY OF THE BALKANS [ Part 1 from 4 ]
Reply-To: sk@sunbim.be ()
Organization: BIM Everberg Belgium
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 92 15:56:25 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

                               I   
 (Pictured Parthenon in barbed wires)

     You begin to notice it in the moment you arrive on Greek
soil. If you land at Athens airport, you can find crude
posters declaring "Macedonia is Greek" in the customs hall. If
you are crossing by land from the former Yugoslavia, you will
find the passport control booth covered with stickers making
the same point, some of them in English more hysterical than
grammatical: "Macedonia is Greece Since Ever". 

......Glancing at the print-out on a computerised bus-ticket,
I found, in the space where you might expect "Have a nice
trip", the statement, "Macedonia was and shall be Greek".
Never outside the communist block have I had such a sense of
an all-pervading and unanimous campaign, in which all levels
of public life are mobilised to whip up popular feeling. If
one adds the world-wide campaign run under the cover of the
Greek Tourist Board, it must be the most expensive publicity
campaign in Greek history. [!!!!]
     It is also the silliest......

     Throughout the last two centuries, "Macedonia" has been a
geographical expression; it refers to a whole region, which in
1913 was divided between Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia...
The part which Yugoslavia obtained was named "the Republic of
Macedonia" in 1946; the people who lived there had already
been widely referred to as "Macedo-Slavs", and their language
as "Macedonian" for decades. When the people of that Yugoslav
republic voted for independence last year, it was not
surprising that they wanted their new state to be called
"Macedonia"-they had no other name.
     But at this point the Greek government claimed a kind of
copyright on the word........

     A high-level commission of jurists from the EEC ....
recommended immediate recognition [of Macedonia]. But the
Greece still block it; and ...... It would take the pen of a
Swift or an Orwell to explore all the ramifications of this.
More than [two] million people who have spent their lives
thinking that they spoke Macedonian, that they read Macedonian
literature and watched Macedonian television, are now to be
told, at the whim of 12 people lunching in Lisbon, that they
speak some nameless thing.....


            Continue

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

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

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
= Sasa Konecni                     e-mail: sk@sunbim.be           =
= BIM   sa/nv                      tel:    +32 (2) 759.59.25      =
= Research & Development           fax:    +32 (2) 759.47.95      =
= Kwikstraat 4,   B-3078 Everberg,    Belgium                     =
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=



Xref: sparky soc.culture.yugoslavia:8102 soc.culture.jewish:14485