From: sk@groo.sunbim.be (Sasa Konecni)
Subject: THE NEW BULLY OF THE BALKANS
Reply-To: sk@sunbim.be ()
Organization: BIM Everberg Belgium
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 92 15:43:10 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". [ha,ha,ha]

......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.....


                               II   
 (Pictured A statue of Goddess with a machine-gun)

     We are dealing here with the strangest and yet in some
ways most typical of all Balkan states - a state with a
profound neurosis about its own sense of identity. I refer, of
course, to Greece. Much has been written about the problems of
ex-Yugoslav Macedonia, and the potentially catastrophic
consequences of the EEC's destabilising policy towards it. But
little is ever written about the root cause of the problem:
the neurotic nature of Greek nationalism....

     Their unbroken descent from Plato, Aristotle and
Demosthenes sets them apart; theirs is a higher civilisation,
a higher destiny. They have nothing to do with the messy
history of the Balkans north of their ancient and immemorial
border established in 1913 and 1919. [ha,ha,ha] This approach
to history requires skimming rather selectively over the
thousands of years when there was no such thing as a national
Greek state. The early Slav invasions, which reached far into
Peloponnese and left settlements which spoke Slav well into
the 15th century, are preferably ignored. So, too, are the
influxes of Albanians which settled many parts of eastern and
central Greece ....

     In the early 19th century, the population of Athens was
24% Albanian, 32% Turkish and only 44% Greek. In the early
20th century, Salonica was 60% Spanish-Jewish, 18% Turkish and
18% Greek. Things have changed since then.... But just
changing the people was not enough. In the mid-1920s, nearly
all the Slav, Vlach or other non-Greek place-names were
suppressed. Even personal names were not exempt...Boris had
been instructed by the local officials that he must change it
to a proper Greek name; the choice they offered him was
between "Pericles" and "Byron".[???]
 
     The consequence (or rather, the basis) of this policies
is that Greece is that rare thing, almost unknown in Europe, a
country with no national minorities. They do not exist; the
Greek government says so. For such a phenomenon to be found in
the Balkans of all places is indeed a miracle- a sign that
Greece is certainly not like other countries. Sitting at a
cafe in a Slav village near Florina [Lerin], in northern
Greece, surrounded by people talking in the Slav Macedonian
language, I pondered this minor miracle. "They say we don't
exist," said one of them; "but tell me, do I look like a
ghost?"
       

                               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]


                               IV

     The Greek Slav Macedonians are caught between the hammer
ant the anvil of Greek policy on minorities: assimilation or
expulsion. To see successful assimilation in action, one has
only to visit the Vlach region in the Pindus mountains of
northern Greece. The Vlachs who speak a language closely
related to Rumanian, have a population of perhaps no more than
50,000 in Greece.... Most modern Greek writings about the
Vlachs claim that they are "pure Greeks", descended from
ancient Greeks who just happened to acquire a Latin language
when they did military service for the Romans... and one
recently published Greek book about the Vlachs gives a list of
words in the Vlach language borrowed from Greek, and concludes
in all seriousness that Vlach is "a Greek dialect".....

     The 100,000 Turks of western Thrace, on the other hand,
have a much stronger sense of ethnic identity. Yet in the eyes
of the Greek state they are not Turks at all; they are "Greek
Muslims", a religious minority, not an ethnic one. When Dr
Sadik Ahmet, a surgeon who stood for parliament in 1989,
referred in a campaign leaflet to "the Turkish minority", he
was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using the word
"Turkish"......(The Turkish population is mainly agricultural;
though they have tractors, they have not been granted licences
in the past. [!!!!])

     ...this summer's Amnesty report on torture and ill-
treatment in Greeks prisons and police stations happen to
concern Turks, Albanians and other non-Greek victims.... The
new Greek electoral law will prevent Dr Ahmet from being re-
elected next time, and when he loses parliamentary immunity he
may face another deferred prosecution. And the long-standing
policy of driving these Turks out of Greece continues....More
than 3,000 acres have been confiscated for various public
projects in the last ten years, and there is now a plan to
seize 15,000 acres of farm-land which at present support
20,000 Turks ......
     Fear of Turkey is, in the long run, a greater stimulus to
neurotic Greek nationalism than the Macedonian issue.The fall
of the communist bloc has badly damaged Greek self-esteem; ...
today it is Turkey that is emerging as the strategic power-
base of the whole region...Hence, ..a Greek government
television advertisement every night, "means equal status for
Greece in Europe!" - is a statement either meaningless or
mendacious......

     Personally, I have found that whenever I have long
conversation with EEC politicians or officials, there always
comes a point when they say, "Between you and me, I can't
understand how we ever let Greece in." [!?!?!] With its
peculiar brand of paranoid nationalism, Greece's foreign
policy is now the biggest single impediment to any sensible
EEC policy in the Balkans; and if the Greek public mood
intensifies any further, it may threaten not only the future
of the ex-Yugoslav Macedonia but the territorial Integrity of
Albania as well. Amid all the discussions about the procedure
for new members to join the EEC, has anyone thought of a
polite way of inviting one member to leave?
            
	- The End -

>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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