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Ethnic Macedonian refugees to return home to Greece
after more than 50 years.
by Aleksandra
Ilievska
SKOPJE, Macedonia--The Greek government has announced it
would try to right some of the wrongs committed against ethnic
Macedonian political refugees who were exiled from Greece
after the Greek Civil War of 1946-1949.
In a new age
of European Union standards of human rights, the government
will allow those refugees to return home after 55 years in
exile, Greek Deputy Foreign Minister Andreas Loverdos said in
an 8 June interview with the Greek daily
Eleftherotypia.
Approximately 60,000 ethnic
Macedonians--28,000 of them children between two and 14 years
old--were expelled or forced to flee from Greece after the
Greek Civil War. Stripped of their Greek citizenship and their
properties confiscated, the expellees were not permitted to
return to Greece for even a brief visit unless they denied
their own ethnic origin and declared themselves “Greek.”
A few days after Loverdos’ 8 June interview, Greek
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Panaiotis Beglitis confirmed the
government’s decision. The spokesperson said that Foreign
Minister Yorgos Papandreou wants the political refugee problem
resolved as soon as possible and has managed to come to an
agreement on the return with opposition parties and local
authorities in northern Greece.
The agreement is
expected to be a hot topic when, between 15 and 20 July,
thousands of the refugees--now living in the Republic of
Macedonia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary,
Romania, Uzbekistan, Bulgaria, Canada, the United States, and
Australia--are expected to come to the northern Greek town of
Florina (Lerin, in Macedonian) to attend the third gathering
of Macedonian political refugees.
The first two such
gatherings were organized in the Macedonian capital of Skopje
in 1988 and 1998.
The preparations for the third world
reunion of the refugees in Lerin (Florina) began immediately
after the second reunion in 1998 ended. In the words of Georgi
Donevski, the executive secretary of the organizational
committee of the reunion, the intention from the beginning was
to organize the third gathering in northern Greece.
“I
have to admit that Greece’s decision to open its borders this
summer came to us as a cold hand on a fevered brow,” Donevski
said in a 20 June interview with TOL.
The exiled
Macedonian emigrants hope they will be able to enter Greece
this summer without visas--a measure likely to only be
temporary.
Asked if the Greek government was
considering the possibility of eliminating visas altogether
for the citizens of the Republic of Macedonia, Loverdos told
Eleftheroptypia, “We are trying to find a solution to
the visa problem in any way we can. I consider it a high
priority that we immediately resolve such problems.”
OWNING UP TO MISTAKES
Until 1912,
Macedonia--a territory much larger than the present-day
Republic of Macedonia--was part of the Ottoman Empire. During
the first Balkan War of 1912, it was liberated from Turkish
rule with the help of Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria. The
following year, however, the three liberators sought repayment
for their assistance, fighting each other in the second Balkan
War of 1913, and partitioning Macedonia.
The northern
part, also known as Vardar Macedonia because it stretches
along the valley of the River Vardar, was annexed by Serbia.
The eastern part, or Pirin Macedonia, became part of Bulgaria,
while the southern part, Aegean Macedonia, stretching along
the northern coast of the Aegean Sea, was annexed by Greece.
When the Republic of Macedonia (Vardar Macedonia)
proclaimed its independence from the former Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) in 1991, Greece perceived it as
an expansionist claim over its territory based on the fact
that the state of Macedonia bears the same name as Greece’s
northern province. Considering the size and military capacity
of the Republic of Macedonia, many believed Greece’s fears to
be out of place.
According Loverdos, the recent
decision to open the borders to the ethnic Macedonian refugees
has nothing to do with the name dispute.
“We do not
consider this [political refugees] a subject of our bilateral
relations. I repeat that the only unresolved issue in our
bilateral relations is the question of the name,” said
Loverdos, calling the political refugee problem a “thorn” in
Greek-Macedonian relations that must be “uprooted.”
“Our own disposition is to offer a solution, and in
particular, not in the distant future but immediately,”
Loverdos said.
In his view, a technical solution
should be found for these people to be able to return after 55
years of exile.
“This will not become, however, a
prelude to the resolution of the name dispute,” Loverdos
warned.
Speaking about Greece’s policy toward the
Western Balkans, Loverdos said that one of the priorities of
Greek foreign policy is to improve the country’s relations
with its neighbors.
“I truly believe that FYROM [the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the name Greece and
other countries use to refer to Macedonia, at Greece’s
insistence] as a strong, European-oriented country, will be of
benefit to the region. It is a viable country, and we must
strengthen its existence in any way we can,” said
Loverdos.
ABOUT FACE
In
1982, Greece passed a law on repatriation of political
refugees that were “Greek by genus.” The recognition by the
senior Greek official that Greece had discriminated against
the ethnic Macedonians by leaving them out of the 1982
repatriation law received much attention in Macedonia.
“This decision is a result of the constructive policy
of the Greek government, whose new strategy nurtures a
European approach in its foreign policy toward neighboring
countries. … Only a few months ago, we could not have even
imagined that such delicate issues would be raised,”
Macedonian Ambassador to Greece Blagoj Handziski said in a 9
June statement.
Metodija Tosevski, a member of the
Association of Refugees from the Aegean Part of Macedonia,
looks at the development from historical
perspective.
“I believe historical injustice cannot be
undone. Thousands of lives were lost, thousands were
displaced, and families were torn apart. Of course, the new
generation of Greek politicians should not be held accountable
for the wrong policy of the past. Therefore we want to look at
this as a new beginning and new relations with new people that
have views different from those of the past,” Tosevski told
the Macedonian daily Utrinski vesnik.
On 27 May,
Greek Parliament ratified the Stabilization and Association
Agreement (SAA) that Macedonia had earlier signed with the
European Union--an agreement that makes Greece even more eager
to sort out the political refugee problem.
Though it
is now evident that Greece has softened its rigid policy
toward its northern neighbor, the turnabout has a history that
reaches further back than at first glance.
Borjan
Jovanovski, a distinguished Macedonian journalist,
long-standing analyst of the Macedonian-Greek relations, and
former spokesman for Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski,
says that when Kostas Simitis became Greek prime minister,
Greece changed the way it perceives the Balkans and the EU.
“Right from the beginning,” said Jovanovski, “Simitis’
government adopted a pragmatic approach, which implies
accepting reality the way it is, and part of that reality is
the Macedonians living in Greece. Greece wanted to realize the
ambitions of its foreign policy, and those ambitions involved
becoming a factor in the Balkans and obtaining recognition by
the EU that Greece is the leader of the region, which would
certainly make the EU hold Greece in high esteem.”
PART OF SOCIETY
According to
Jovanovski, Greece has realized it cannot argue for promotion
of human and minority rights elsewhere while turning a blind
eye to what is happening in its own backyard. Simitis’
government managed to resolve the conflict between Greece’s
foreign and domestic policy.
Jovanovski also said that
Greece could find no way out of undoing the injustice against
the political refugees once it discovered that its ethnic
Macedonian minority was not politically radical.
“[They] are European-oriented; they understand the
European context of minority rights. There are no nationalists
among them that would try to take advantage of the granted
minority rights to eventually demand the breakaway of Greece’s
northern province,” Jovanovski said.
Vinozito
(Rainbow), the political party of the Macedonian minority in
Greece, has been taking patient and very cautious steps over
the years to prevent its struggle for greater minority rights
from being understood as an attempt to violate Greece’s
territorial integrity or disrupt its national and social
order.
“We do not want separate schools as some ethnic
communities in other countries have. We want the Macedonian
language to be taught within the framework of the national
educational system. We do not want to be separated from Greek
society. Therefore we are cooperating with the Greek political
parties. We are part of this society, but for the sake of
respecting the democratic right of distinction, the Macedonian
ethnic minority should be recognized.,” Pavlos Vaskopulos, a
member of Vinozito’s presidency, told the Macedonian daily
Dnevnik.
As regards human rights, the change in
Greece’s policy toward the Macedonian minority has also
reverberated among the public. Macedonians in northern Greece
can now more freely use Macedonian, not fearing prosecution.
A tombstone inscribed in the Macedonian Cyrillic
alphabet has recently appeared in one of the
Macedonian-inhabited villages, while a billboard bearing the
name of Vinozito, written in Macedonian, has just
recently been posted in the heart of Lerin (Florina).
Greece’s implementation of such European values in the
Balkans is hopefully a sign that more positive change is to
come, Jovanovski said, adding that it is better that the
process of change remain a slow and cautious one, as radical
changes could instigate resistance.
The agenda of the
third world reunion of the refugees foresees visits to a
number of towns and villages in northern Greece, the
birthplaces of the political emigrants.
What some of
the refugees will see, however, will not at all fit in with
the pictures that have lingered in their memories for half a
century. Many of the villages whose rebellious residents
fought for the Resistance--the Greek Democratic Army--against
the monarchists in the Greek Civil War were burned to the
ground. One of those is the village of D’mbeni near Kostur.
Though D’mbeni no longer exists, its memory is still
alive in the Skopje neighborhood of Butel II, where architect
Andrej Andreevski created a miniature model of the village
with astonishing precision based on a few photographs and his
memory.
Andreevski left D’mbeni in 1949 never to
return. D’mbeni was then burned and flattened to the ground
with bulldozers. Even the village cemeteries were not exempt
from the monarchists’ vengeance.
Once he heard of the
destruction, Andreevski gave up his desire of ever going back.
He wanted to remember his birthplace the way he left it. He
died a few years ago, but the model in his Skopje home is the
only “birthplace” the one-time residents of D’mbeni, now
scattered all over the world, can return to. 
Aleksandra Ilievska is TOL’s
correspondent in Skopje.
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