Macedonia News - Open Letter to the Pan Macedonian Association by Lazar Gacevski

The Pan Macedonian Association claims Macedonia has been the Northern province of Greece for three thousand years and that Macedonians are Greek. This is incorrect.

During the First and Second Balkan Wars (1912-1913) Macedonia's neighbors fought with the Ottoman Turks using the Macedonian people as a ploy in an effort to grab land. As a consequence, under the Treaty of Bucharest, Macedonia was partitioned and Greece annexed the southern portion of Macedonia (what Macedonians call Aegean Macedonia). Before 1913 and throughout history Macedonia was never a territorial part of Greece.

After 1913, Greece, which was still ruled by a Bavarian king, undertook a policy of forced assimilation to unify its many different ethnic groups. Let me highlight a few examples of Greek policy towards Macedonians:

In 1925, the primary school textbook (the ABECEDAR) sponsored by the League of Nations and printed in Athens, was revoked by Greece in order to deny Macedonians an education in their native language.

Greece changed the names of some 1500 Macedonian towns and villages, as well as the personal names of the population it acquired when it annexed Aegean Macedonia, in order to make them appear Greek.

Do you recall the humiliation, torture and killings inflicted upon Macedonians who refused to assimilate or call themselves Greek?

Greece declared there are no Macedonians, only Greeks and referred to those Macedonians who refused to assimilate as "Bulgarians."

Macedonia, the Macedonian language, and everything Macedonian was forbidden by the Greek dictator, Metaxas. Even our ancient churches and cemeteries were destroyed to cover up any historical evidence of the Macedonian people in the area.

One could only hear whispers from the Macedonians who lived in Greece, and they were whispering when they spoke in Macedonian because they where afraid of the Greek police who constantly monitored them. If the police heard them express their Macedonian identity in word or song they would place them in jail, their businesses would be confiscated and they would be beaten, and worse.

Everything was going on, and on, like this in Greece, until the Republic of Macedonia became independent from Yugoslavia. At that time, Greece started worrying about the Macedonian territory it annexed in 1913 and all the Macedonian properties it had confiscated over the years. It became concerned about the Macedonians who were forced to flee Greece because they declared their nationality as Macedonian and not Greek.

My grandmother was born in Chegan (Agios Atanasios), in the Voden (Edessa) region. For centuries, all of her ancestors were born there. They were never Greeks. Like hundreds of thousands in the Kukush (Kilkis) area, the Lerin (Florina) area, the Kostur (Kastoria) area and the many other areas of Aegean Macedonia they spoke an older Macedonian language, which was the precursor of today's standardized Macedonian.

My grandparents' ancestors transferred the history of Macedonia and the Macedonian people orally for centuries within the family, "od koleno na koleno" (from knee to knee) as we say. My grandfather was murdered in a jail cell by Greeks because he declared his Macedonian ethnic heritage and refused to say he was Greek.

I feel very sad when I think about my grandmother and grandfather and the mistreatment they received under the Greeks only because they were Macedonian. I know that thousands of Macedonian families suffered a similar fate.

Macedonians never stated that they were not Greek citizens, they just wanted to have the right to freely express and preserve their ethnic identity, language and culture. Greece never permitted this because it would undermine its revisionist claims on Macedonia.

The terms "Macedonia" and "Macedonians" were suppressed in northern Greece until the late 1980s. When it finally became clear the Republic of Macedonia would separate from the Yugoslav Federation just about everything in Greece was instantly renamed "Macedonia."

Greece became anxious the Republic of Macedonia might make a (legitimate) claim to be re-joined with its ancestral southern portion, the Aegean part of Macedonia, now the heavily-colonized northern Greek province of Macedonia.

At that moment Greece had a golden opportunity to take responsibility for the mistreatment of its Macedonian minority and get beyond the Macedonian issue. Instead, it whipped up nationalist frenzy, closed schools and businesses and initiated a huge, "spontaneous," demonstration in Solun (Salonica) aimed at silencing any dissent.

Nowadays, through its unofficial extensions like the Pan Macedonian group, it uses questionable political tactics abroad to promote revisionist histories and myths of Greek racial purity in Macedonia.

I believe it is a fundamental right that people be allowed to freely express their ethnic identity. That Greece, via the Pan Macedonian Association, would try to impose a Greek identity upon its Macedonian minority reveals the extent to which racism is still rampant in Greece today.

Lazar Gacevski

E-mail: lazargacevski@yahoo.com

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