From: sachz@montebello.ecom.unimelb.EDU.AU (SAS)
Subject: Greece's Defense Seems Just Silly [Macedonia]
Followup-To:  soc.culture.yugoslavia,soc.culture.greek
Summary: TIME Magazines recent article by Strobe Talbott.
Originator: sachz@montebello.ecom.unimelb.EDU.AU
Organization: Dept. Engineering Computer Resources, Melbourne Uni.
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 09:51:05 GMT


                "Greece's Defense Seems Just Silly"
                         by Strobe Talbott
                      TIME, October 12, 1992

Greece is reminding the world that it too is a Balkan country, the 
inhabitant of a region where history often induces hysteria.  In 
his policy toward the disaster zone that used to be Yugoslavia, 
Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis is well on his way to 
deepening and widening the war there.  

When Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovinia declared 
independence and appealed for international recognition last year, 
Macedonia had no choice but to follow suit.  Otherwise it would 
have been swallowed up by Serbia. 

A commission of the European Community established criteria for 
recognition, stressing respect for the rights of ethnic 
minorities.  Macedonia passed the test.  Its population is a 
mixture of nearly a dozen nationalities, but its political system 
is democratic and pluralistic.  

The E.C. was quick to recognize the other breakaway replublics, 
including Croatia, whose regime discriminates against local Serbs.  
But the Community stiff-armed Macedonia.  Why?  Because Greece 
objects to the name and exercised a veto in the councils of the 
E.C.  Macedonia is the birthplace of Alexander the Great and the 
name of Greece's northern province.  Therefore, Athens thinks it 
has a 2,400-year-old trademark on the word. 

Last week the Greek Foreign Minister Michaelo Papaconstantinou was 
in Washington, and I had a chance to ask him about this whole 
business.  He maintains that for Macedonia to "adopt a Greek name" 
is a "provocation" that "implies territorial claims against us".  

Never mind that Macedonia's constitution explicitly disavows any 
such claim.  Or that its army consists of about 6,000 ragtag 
troops armed with pistols and rifles, while Greece's is more than 
25 times larger and is equipped with tanks, heavy artillery and 
jet fighters.  Or that there is neither precedent nor 
justification in international law for one country to tell another 
what it can call itself. 

Partly because the Greek position is so preposterous, the 
suspicion persists that the complaint about the name camouflages a 
revival of Greece's own age-old expansionistic ambitions.  Several 
European governments have relayed to Washington reports that 
Mitsotakis has secretly discussed the partition of Macedonia with 
Serbia and perhaps with Albanis and Bulgaria as well. 

Papaconstantinou denies this charge "categorically:  I have never 
seen any document or heard anything of this sort.  We want them 
[the Macedonians] top exist [as a separate state]; we want them as 
a buffer zone" between Greece and Serbia.  "The authorities in 
Skipje [the Macedonian capital] can change their name to anything 
except Macedonia," and that will remove "a point of friction in 
the Balkans." 

Another recent visitor to Washington -- Jane Miljovski, a minister 
in the Macedonian government -- offers a persuasive rebuttal:  "As 
citizens of a newborn, almost defenseless nation, we are afraid 
that if we can be bullied into changing our name, we will next 
come under pressure to change our borders." 

Privately, most Western officials acknowledge that Miljovski is 
right.  Yet publicly, the EC and the US have, in effect, sided 
with Athens on the ground that there are other, overriding 
interests at stake. 

As a member of NATO, which is undergoing a post-cold war identity 
crisis, and the EC, which is trying to keep the Maastricht treaty 
from unraveling, Greece has extra leverage these days on both 
sides of the Atlantic.  In the US, it has the additional help of 
the powerful Greek-American lobby. 

To his credit, Mitsotakis is working to resolve the long-simmering 
dispute over Cyprus and reach a rapprochement with Turkey.  He 
keeps hinting that if he budges on the Macedonian question, 
extreme nationalists in the Greek Parliament -- where he had only 
a two-vote majority -- will bring down his government and replace 
it with one that will undo his welcome diplomatic initiatives. 

Meanwhile, under the pretext of complying with international 
sanctions against Serbia, Greece is blockading fuel shipments to 
Macedonia.  As a result, factories there have had to shut down; 
crops are rotting in the fields; ambulances are sitting useless in 
hospital parking lots.  "It's murder without bullets," says 
Miljovski. 

Economic strangulation will soon lead to social unrest, which in 
turn could ignite an ethnic conflagration worse than the one in 
Bosnia.  Because Macedonia has large Muslim minorities, civil war 
within that republic is more likely than anywhere else to escalate 
into a religious and regional war that could end up pitting Greece 
against any number of its neighbors, including Turkey.  Where will 
the overriding interests of the US, the EC, and NATO be then? 

Having heard out the Greek Foreign Minister, I'm prepared to give 
him and Mitsotakis the benefit of the doubt on their motivation:  
they're not guilty of irredentism -- a desire to recover lands 
lost ago -- but merely of paranoia and myopia.  The situation has 
all the makings of tragedy, which Aristotle, another great 
Macedonian who was Alexander's teacher, defined as the result not 
of wickedness but of foolish pride. 

TIME/12Oct92

SAS.