From: dk0a@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu (DIMITRIOS KOUVATSOS)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.greek
Subject: Re: Trip to Skopje, 9/92
Date: 16 Nov 92 08:36:46 GMT
Organization: Lehigh University

In article <1473100066@igc.apc.org>, lgsax@igc.apc.org (Lynn Gazis-Sax) writes:
In article <1473100066@igc.apc.org>, lgsax@igc.apc.org (Lynn Gazis-Sax) writes:
Ms. Lynn Gazis-Sax has done her best to write as moving a defense of her
Vardar friends as possible. Her quite civilized, literary style only adds to
the appeal of her writing, in sharp contrast to Greeks who, no matter how much
they are right, cannot control their emotion... I only wish that she had also
tried to really find out the truth for herself before exposing such a lack of
knowledge of Balkan history and such an anti-Greek bias of hers, as will be
evident below.

>"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.

A "personal connection"... an appeal to her Greek ancestry first, sure to
bolster her credibility and loosen the critical examination of her subsequent
writing, to alleviate any suspicion of anti-Greek bias.

....
>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.

Her friend is quite right. We'll see.

>Marshall Tito square is filled with red flowers.  A restaurant

Most certainly, Marshall Tito is the one person that should be revered in
Skopjie!

>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.

Even though Ms. Gazis-Sax does mention the provocative flag here, she only
does it by immediately adding that no "nationalistic paraphernalia" was
present! Any thought that it might not be so easy for an underdeveloped
communist land to produce vast volumes of T-shirts, buttons etc like the US
did during Desert Storm does not appear here - the obvious explanation is
avoided in favor of a defense of her Skopjian friends as not having any
intentions against Greece. No, her friends are just peaceful flower children
minding about "rock groups", not war (war with Greece - how would they dare at
this time? - but no, it is not pragmatism but love of peace, Ms. Gazis-Sax
implies). How cute of her... And Greece's objection is just in passing stated
- Ms. Gazis-Sax cannot possibly think just why do her "peace loving" friends
so blatantly steal an ancient Macedonian Greek symbol as the very emblem and
flag of their state, when even their president Gligorov has to admit, to
avoid sounding utterly ridiculous, that they are Slavs who only arrived in the
Balkans 1,000 years after the ancient Macedonian Greek state flourished!

And, sure, Ms. Gazis-Sax just does not want to let the crucial point be
really understood: This blatant misappropriation of the ancient Macedonian
Greek symbol by the Vardaris, when _they themselves_ officially are forced to
admit that they are totally unrelated to the ancient Macedonians, can
obviously only mean that they are intent on seizing for themselves the entire
Macedonian history, if they are eventually recognized under the Macedonian
name - when the world will have gotten used to associate them with the world
"Macedonia" - when nobody but the most educated will remember that "Macedonia
is something Greekish, not Slavish" (as a Swedish netter once expressed his
historical feeling). And, in the more distant future, when this monstrous
distortion of history will have taken root, on claiming the entire Macedonian
land - most of which lies within Greece - itself. If they did not have that
purpose, they would never choose this particular symbol as their emblem and
flag.

>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).

Really telling! It was Marshall Tito who invented the "Republic of Macedonia"
out of the Vardar Province of Yugoslavia in 1945, for the purpose of cutting
off the Bulgarians (what the Vardaris really are) of Vardar from their roots
and claiming the real Macedonia (90% of historic Macedonia lies in Greece -
and the city of Skopjie itself does _not_ lie in historic Macedonia) from
Greece in the event of a communist victory he expected in the Greek civil war.
Of course, "Macedonians" - the ruling elite of Skopjie that wants to impose
this artificial nationality in order to establish a unifying factor on the
hotpodge of nationalities it controls and later claim Macedonia, Greece - know
to appreciate their benefactors... But of course, Ms. Gazis-Sax rationalizes
this by stating that "perhaps" this only reflects past partisan strongholdship!
Again, how cute of her...

>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.

Of course, Ms. Gazis-Sax subtly endorses here as the "truth" whatever the
Vardaris - presented here by her in a "noble" fashion - tell her. Which is
what? We 'll see!

>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.

And yet, no explanation for the blatant misappropriation of the Vergina star!
No explanation for their "constitutional" claims on the possibility of border
changes and on "caring" for their "minorities" in "neighboring countries"...

>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.)
 ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

It is not "to Greeks" - it is to every decent historian that no distinct
"Macedonian" nation was ever mentioned prior to the 20th century! All, I
repeat ALL, Ottoman and European statistics prior to 1912 mention Greeks,
Bulgarians, Serbs, even Albanians, Jews and Gypsies in Macedonia - but not a
single "Macedonian"! For "Macedonian" is a geographic, not an ethnic
attribute. It was always used to describe a Greek from Macedonia or (after the
Bulgarian setllement) a Bulgarian from Macedonia. And Ms. Gazis-Sax casually
admits that judging who is right is beyond her competence - when, by fully
accepting the Skopjian pretensions, she has performed a judgment in favor of
them - an incompetent judgment by her own admission! Of course, as she herself
admits, objective and competent judgment is not the scope of her article. She
is not interested in the truth - only in propagating the purposes of her
Vardar friends.

Further, even if it were true - which is not - that a distinct from the
Bulgarians or the Serbs Slavic nation has existed in Macedonia for centuries,
still they would have no right to appropriate the _entire_ Macedonian history
- they should at least use a name that would distinguish them from the
Macedonian Greeks. But they even refused to be called "slavomacedonians". Of
course, no comment from Ms. Gazis-Sax on the reason for her friends' behavior.

>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)."
 /////////////////////////

And here, the "truth" that Ms. Gazis-Sax's Skopjian friends told her can be
exposed for all to see - as can the assistance in the perversion of history that
is her real motivation. The Bulgarian King Samuil, the man who brought the
mediaeval Bulgarian state to the pinnacle of its power, is now presented as
"Macedonian" - so that her "Macedonian" friends can acquire the stolen
identity they crave! It was the Byzantine Emperor Basil II the Macedon - of
the Macedonian dynasty of Byzantium - who, after a long war, eventually
crushed Samuil's Bulgarian state - who was the Macedonian, an identity that
Samuil himself never even thought of assuming. And, in remembrance of his
victory over the _Bulgarians_, Basil II has been called "Bulgar-slayer" - not,
of course, "Macedon-slayer", for he had no suicidal tendencies...

And this monstrous inversion of the truth - this is the grotesque rape of
history Ms. Gazis-Sax is engaged in - this is the real cause she is
interested of propagating.

>(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."

A "distinction" - from the people who steal Alexander the Great's and his
father's Philip II's symbol of the Vergina Star as their own flag! Ms.
Gazis-Sax's attempt to excuse and cover up her Skopjian friends is really
pathetic.

>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.

First, the European Community had asked Greece to stop shipping oil to the
north out of fear that it would end up in Serbia. And second, Greece has not
exactly cut off supplies to Skopjie itself. Greece simply refuses to trade
with a "Republic of Macedonia" she justifiably does not recognize. If the
Skopjians accepted in the destination papers the name "former Yugoslav
Macedonia" there would be no problem. But they refuse to do this, so we refuse
to trade with them - it is our right.

>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.
.....
>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."

Of course, this is the only spot Ms. Gazis-Sax can see - since whatever her
"Macedonian" friends claim is the truth! And these people are so noble that
only under her "prompting" do they state their complains against Greece! A
"Macedonian" minority in Greece is pure fiction - what does exist is a
slavic-speaking population of some 30,000 people, descendants of leftover
Bulgarians who were left out of the Greek-Bulgarian population exchanges of
1913-24 because they declared that they felt Greeks and wanted to live in
Greece. And some 800 noisy individuals, mostly descendants of collaborators
with the German-Bulgarian occupation forces of WW II, who only confine
themselves to international propaganda and have never tried to form a
poilitical movement in Greece (like the 105,000 Moslems of Thrace have done) -
because the counting of 800 votes would once and for all destroy the myth of a
"Macedonian" minority in Greece! Yet Ms. Gazis-Sax is gullible or devious
enough to propagate yet another gross fabrication...

>(The document does deny that its minority
>concerns stem from any claims on Greek territory, "The movement
>expressly renounces any separatist or irredentist goals . . . ")

Yes, what else? Yet another rationalization of her Vardar friends - without a
word of explanation of why their actions are so manifestly at odds with the
above claim...

Ms. Gazis-Sax is of course free to express whatever opinions she wishes. But
she would do us Greeks a favor if she at least stopped bragging about her
Greek ancestry! It is disingenuous, to say the least - when she has betrayed
it and actively propagates blatant historical revisionism with the aim of
harming Greek interests.

Dimitris Kouvatsos
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