Top Quotes: “Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History” — Andrew Rossos
Introduction
“After the destruction of the remnants of the ancient Macedonian kingdom, successive invaders — Roman, Gothic, Hun, Slav, Ottoman — passed through or subjugated the area and incorporated it into their respective dynastic or territorial empires. The last, the Ottoman Turks, ruled Macedonia for over five hundred years, until the Balkan Wars of 1912–13.”
“Balkan nationalists — Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian — who had already achieved independent or autonomous statehood from the Ottoman empire with aid from one or more great powers, chose to deny the existence of a separate Macedonian identity; indeed, each group claimed Macedonia and the Macedonians as its own. They fought over the territory, which remained under Ottoman sovereignty, with propaganda and armed force and against each other and the nascent Macedonian nationalists. The prolonged struggle culminated in 1913 with the forceful partition of Macedonia and the. Macedonians after the Second Balkan, or Inter-Allied War between Bulgaria and allied Greece and Serbia. However, even after partition, however, the Macedonian question remained, and it continued to dominate Balkan politics and peoples until the Second World War and its revolutionary aftermath — and even to the present day.”
“In 1913, Greece acquired Aegean Macedonia, at about 34,000 square kilometers the largest piece of Macedonian territory. Bulgaria took the smallest part, Pirin Macedonia, with about 6,778 square kilometers. Albania, a state that the great powers created in 1912, received the relatively small areas of Mala Prespa and Golo Bro. Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece have completely absorbed their portions, not recognizing them even as distinctive, let alone autonomous.”
“On the basis of “a fairly reliable estimate” in 1912, the British Foreign Office cited the following figures, with Slavic-speaking Macedonians by far the largest group and about half of the total: Macedonian Slavs 1,150,000, Turks 400,000, Greeks 300,000, Vlachs 200,000, Albanians 120,000, Jews 100,000, Gypsies (Roma) 10,000.”
“The region’s number of Macedonians began to decline in both absolute and relative terms during the Balkan Wars. The process accelerated after 1918 under Greek plans to transform the region’s ethnic structure. Policies included colonization, internal transfers of Macedonians, and “voluntary” (with Bulgaria) and compulsory (with Turkey) exchanges of populations, or what we now call “ethnic cleansing.” By the mid-1920s, removal of 127,384 Macedonians and settlement of 618,199 (most of them refugees from Greece and Asia Minor) had completely changed the ethnography of Aegean Macedonia. Macedonians had become an unrecognized minority in their own land.”
Medieval History
“In the sixth century, Slavic tribes began to invade and settle in large and growing numbers. Unlike the Goths and Huns, however, they planned to stay. They gradually assimilated the older inhabitants and altered permanently the ethnic structure of Macedonia. Available sources and evidence indicate that until the early twentieth century these Macedonian Slavs comprised the largest ethno-linguistic group in geographical Macedonia.”
“Attachment to religion, family, and place played a much greater role in medieval Europe than did ethnic identity. Even the word “nation” (the Latin nation) referred not to people of similar language and cultural heritage, but to a group possessing certain legal privileges. The masses of the population identified themselves not by nationality, but rather by family, religion, and locality. They considered religion, not nationality, as the primary source of any group’s identification.”
“Most scholars believe that the Indo-European-speaking Slavs originated north of the Carpathians, between the river Vistula in the west and the river Dnieper in the east, in lands today in (west to east) eastern Poland, northwestern Ukraine, and southwestern Belarus. During the first century AD, the slow spread began of these numerous, closely related, often-feuding tribes, with no central organization but a shared worship of nature and a common language or closely related dialects.
The Slavs moved in three directions and evolved into the three groupings (western, eastern, and southern) of the Slav world. Some migrated westward (today’s Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, and the remaining Slavs of eastern Germany), some eastward (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians), and still others, southward to the Balkans (Slovenes, Croatians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Macedonians, and Bulgarians).”
“Slav colonization changed the region’s ethnic character. The original inhabitants suffered losses in battle and absorption and assimilation by Slavs, who displaced them and forced them into smaller, safer areas. Illyrians escaped or were forced south, into the remote areas of present-day Albania. Latinized Thracians and Dacians had to retreat and found safety in the mountains. Their descendants emerged centuries later and survive today in mountainous regions of Albania, Greece, Macedonia, and Bulgaria as Vlachs (Kutsovlachs, Tsintsars, and so on), speaking a Latin language akin to modern Romanian.”
The Ottoman Empire
“Outside the empire, western Europe was going through a transformation that began with the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the scientific and commercial revolutions. It was leaving behind feudal particularism and church domination and moving toward capitalism and centralized, secular, absolutist, monarchial states, which created the basis for the rise of nations and nation-states.
Within the Ottoman empire, however, these revolutionary changes had little impact. Its system of government, which rested largely on the Sacred Law of Islam, proved unable to introduce change, to reform and modernize itself. It could not keep up with the times, did not progress, and stagnated. Indeed, because of degeneration and corruption at the top, the once-efficient centralized administration gradually disintegrated into a stagnant feudal anarchy.”
“The system presupposed distinctive and exclusive Muslim and non-Muslim religions. It did not assume equality; it held Islam to be superior. The Muslim faith enjoyed special status and privileges; non-Muslims faced discriminatory political, social, economic, and cultural obligations and restrictions. However, the system tolerated these other religions to a degree that Europe did not. Religious persecution and forced large-scale conversions were rare. Furthermore, the millets enjoyed considerable self-government and autonomy in both temporal and secular affairs.”
“The Orthodox peasants’ worsening economic situation and their harsher treatment by corrupt administrators and fief holders had political repercussions. Some peasants ran away and joined the growing number of bands of outlaws (klephts in Greek, khaiduts in Bulgarian, haiduks in Serbian, and ajduts in Macedonian). This movement, which became a feature of the declining empire, increased instability and insecurity throughout the Balkans, especially along major trade routes and around commercial and administrative cities. Peasant rebellions and unrest in general became more frequent; whenever armies of the great powers crossed the Danube or the Pruth rivers and penetrated into the Balkans, peasants supported or even joined them in their fight against their overlords. By the eighteenth century, they began to view Austrian and Russian forces, and during the Napoleonic Wars the French, as armies of liberation.
The conversion of landholding was partly a response to western Europe’s growing demand for products such as cotton and corn that grew in the Ottoman empire. Landowners could see financial benefits from exports.”
The 19th Century
“In the aftermath of the 1878 congress, the Ottoman empire retained sovereignty in the Balkans only over the center of the peninsula, between newly formed Greece, Montenegro, Novi Pazar, Serbia, and Bulgaria — lands that stretched from the Adriatic in the west to the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea in the east. The area included Epirus, Albania, and Kosovo in the west, Macedonia in the center, and Thrace in the east.
Bordering Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, the Macedonian lands were the most important and desirable. All three neighbors chose to claim them and their people, and already by 1870 competition for the hearts and minds of the Slavic-speaking majority there was under way. The struggle, which began as a war of propagandas, of educational, cultural, and religious institutions, became before 1900 a war of armed bands and, during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, a war of standing armies. Its main victims were the Macedonians themselves, and its inescapable outcome was conquest and partition of their land by force of arms in the Interallied, or so-called Second Balkan War in 1913.
For various reasons, the national awakening of Macedonia’s Slav-speaking majority, who adopted their land’s name as a national name and symbol, lagged behind that of their neighbors.”
“Unlike other nationalisms in the Balkans or in central and eastern Europe more generally, Macedonian nationalism developed without the aid of legal, political, church, educational, or cultural institutions. Macedonian movements not only lacked any legal infrastructure, they also lacked the international sympathy, cultural aid and, most important, benefits of open and direct diplomatic and military support accorded other Balkan nationalisms. Indeed, the nascent Macedonian nationalism, illegal at home in the theocratic Ottoman empire, and illegitimate internationally, waged a precarious struggle for survival against overwhelming odds: in appearance against the Ottoman empire, but in fact against the three expansionist Balkan states and their respective patrons among the great powers.
The development of Macedonian nationalism under Ottoman rule reached its high point with the ill-fated Ilinden Uprising (2 August, St. Elias’s Day) of 1903, which became and remains the focal point, the most cherished source, of national mythology and pride. A decade after its bloody suppression, Macedonian patriotism and nationalism suffered their most devastating blow: partition of the land and its people, which Macedonian patriots and nationalists sought so desperately to prevent, and from which they would never entirely recover.”
“A small, autonomous Serbian state emerged after the second Serbian uprising in 1815, and by the 1860s it was virtually independent. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 recognized it as an independent kingdom. The Greeks rebelled against their Ottoman rulers in 1821, and, after a nine-year struggle that involved all the great powers, a small kingdom of Greece came into being in 1830. By the 1840, the Bulgarian national movement could challenge Greek domination of religious and cultural life. With the aid of Russian diplomacy, the Bulgarians triumphed and in 1870 secured their own national church, the exarchate.”
“Needless to say, the constant interference of outsiders, particularly the institutionalized nationalist interventions by Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria, was destabilizing Macedonia and damaging its interests. It divided the small educated elite as well as the population at large into opposing camps. And this more than any other factor weakened the Macedonian movement.””
“The Macedonians referred to themselves by a confusing and changing mixture of names. To the extent that they transcended local, regional labels (Bistolkani, Kosturdani, Prilepcani, and so on), people identified themselves as Orthodox Christians and Slavs. Another popular term was giaur (infidel), the demeaning name that the Ottoman authorities applied to them. But they sometimes used the names of the neighboring peoples whose medieval dynastic states ruled Macedonia.
The label “Greek,” more or less the official one for Orthodox Ottoman subjects, came from the Greek-controlled Patriarchist church. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most affluent Macedonians tended to regard themselves, especially abroad, as Hellenes, for reasons of both prestige and material gain and well-being.
With the Slav awakening in Macedonia, however, “Greek” began to lose some of its glamour and went into a gradual but continuous decline. “Serbian” was common among individuals and small groups in certain regions. Until adoption of “Macedonian” as a national name and symbol in mid-century, “Bulgarian” seemed to predominate, especially in religious and monastic institutions. According to Krste P. Misirkov, the ideologue of Macedonian nationalism about 1900, “Bulgarian” was a “historical relic.” Byzantine Greeks first applied the term to them, the Ohrid archbishopric preserved it, and Macedonians adopted it to differentiate themselves from Greeks. It did not imply unity or community with the real Bulgarians: between the 1820s and the 1840s, the Macedonians had very little contact with them, knew even less about them, and called them “Sopi.” In any event, except for “Slav” (a self-identification, and national name, self-ascription), these labels came from other people, had no roots in popular tradition, and did not denote and carry any sense of national consciousness.”
“The Crimean War, which reactivated the Eastern Question, also renewed interest in the future of the “sick man of Europe.” This was true of the great powers, but even more so of the Balkan peoples, who, to prepare for partition of the Ottoman empire, began to organize and to work more systematically in the empire’s Orthodox areas, which centered on Macedonia. The long-standing and solid Greek presence was now facing a vacillating challenge from Serbia and a much more determined approach by the Bulgarian national movement. The latter was becoming confident and strong at home, as well as in Constantinople, Romania, and Russia, and had the backing of Russia’s diplomacy.
The intensified general interest — no longer just educational in Macedonia — put educated Macedonians in closer contact especially with their Slav neighbors and awakened their interest in themselves and concern for their future. Since they knew of the weak Slav awakening in Macedonia, they tended to join forces, as junior partners, with the Bulgarians in a common struggle against well-entrenched Hellenism. Such a united effort seemed only natural: the two peoples shared linguistic affinity, some historical traditions, and Greek cultural domination, and they were the only Orthodox Christians still under Ottoman rule. As a result of this situation, the Bulgarian national idea made major inroads in Macedonia. Many formerly Greek positions went to Bulgarian patriots or to Macedonians who studied in Bulgarian schools in the Ottoman empire or in Russia. There was an influx into Macedonia of Bulgarian schoolbooks, newspapers, and teachers, and use of the Bulgarian language started in schools and churches.”
“The problem was not new, it had been around for well over a decade, and the Bulgarians had not taken it seriously; as late as 1870, he himself had tended to underestimate the force of the ideas of the Makedonisti. However, more recent contacts withMacedonians “showed to us that we are dealing not merely with empty words, but rather with an idea that many wish to turn into life.”
Three years later, the exarch sent Slaveikov to Macedonia to inquire about growing sentiment against his church. In February 1874, Slaveikov reported from Salonika that the Macedonians believed that answers to the Macedonian question favored only the Bulgarians; they insisted that they were not Bulgarian, wanted their own, separate church, and resisted the “east” Bulgarian language in their literature.”
“In this post-1870 situation, the ethnically homogeneous, Orthodox Slavic Macedonians experienced an artificial division into three “faiths,” attending variously a Bulgarian (Exarchist), Greek (Patriarchist), or Serbian church. And such church affiliation split them into Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian “nations,” or rather “parties.” This situation, of course, did not necessarily represent assimilation, the acquisition of a particular national consciousness. It only reflected Macedonia’s peculiar political reality.
Most Macedonians attended religious services in a language they did not understand, as well, in the 1880s most were illiterate or semi-literate, and into the interwar years many Macedonians would remain so. The vast majority of students at foreign majority (propaganda) schools received only one to three years of elementary schooling — insufficient even to grasp Bulgarian and Serbian, let alone Greek.”
The Early 20th Century
“The revolution broke out in the evening of 2 August at Ilinden in the Bitola (Monastir) vilayet, which remained its focal point. The insurgents attacked estates and properties owned by Muslim beys, destroyed telephone and telegraph lines, blew up bridges and important official and strategic buildings, and, in some places, attacked local garrisons. One of their earliest successes was the capture on 3 August of Krusevo, a picturesque mountaintop town 1,250 meters above sea level, with a largely Macedonian and Vlach population of about 10,000. There, under socialist Nikola Karev, the rebels established a provisional government, issued a fiery manifesto reiterating the revolution’s aims, and declared the Krusevo Republic.
Large-scale revolutionary actions took place elsewhere in the Bitola vilayet, in the counties of Kastoria (Kostur) and Florina (Lerin); in various localities in the counties of Ohrid, Kicevo, and Prilep, revolutionary authorities emerged. The vast majority of the non-Muslim inhabitants of the Vilayet supported the revolution. As Henri Noel Brailsford, а British journalist who was in Macedonia in 1903 and 1904, wrote: “there is hardly a village [in the Monastir vilayet] which has not joined the organization.”
“After defeating the insurgents at Krusevo, the Ottoman army moved systematically against the other centers and gains of the revolution in the Bitola vilayet and elsewhere in Macedonia. They faced faced vigorous and stubborn resistance, and the conflict continued throughout September and well into October, until the final suppression of all traces of the uprising.
For nearly three months, Macedonia writhed in the throes and flames of Ilinden. The immediate consequences were disastrous for Macedonia and its people, especially the Macedonians and the Vlachs. Data concerning death and destruction vary greatly, but it appears that as many as 8,816 men, women, and children died; there were 200 villages burned, 12,440 houses destroyed or damaged, and close to 70,836 people left homeless. The Ottoman army and police and armed bands of Muslims continued a terror campaign against Christians even after the uprising ended.”
“That prolonged struggle culminated in 1913 with the forceful partition of Macedonia after the Second Balkan or Inter-Allied War between Bulgaria, on the one side, and allied Greece and Serbia, on the other.”
“Encouraged by the outbreak of the Italo-Turkish, or Tripolitan, War in September 1911 and citing growing violence and instability (which they helped create) in Ottoman Europe, the Balkan states decided on war too. They called on the great powers to force the High Porte to implement reforms in Europe in accordance with article 23 of the Treaty of Berlin. On 13 October 1912, they handed a collective note, or rather ultimatum, demanding the same to the Ottoman representatives in Athens, Belgrade, and Sofia. As they hoped and expected, the empire rejected both the powers’ demarche and their own collective note, and on 17 October Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia broke off all diplomatic ties with the empire. The declaration of war and the opening of hostilities followed the next day, starting the First Balkan War.
The allies’ swift and decisive victories, which soon terminated Ottoman rule in Europe, transformed the war into a European crisis. The winners, especially Serbia and Montenegro, now needed and expected Russia to safeguard their gains against Austria-Hungary. The fate of the alliances, which were so important to Russia, depended on this.”
“In the course of the great powers’ deliberation on the peace settlement in southeastern Europe, St. Petersburg endeavored alone with whatever support it could muster from its Triple Entente partners, Britain and France, to uphold Balkan states’ aims. However, facing determined opposition by the Triple Alliance led by Austria-Hungary, Russia surrendered on the central issues: first, the Albanian question and the Serbian exit on the Adriatic and, second, Scutari (Shkodär). By so doing, Russia avoided a possible European war for which it was not ready and thus attained one of its major objectives. But it jeopardized its primary aim: preservation of the Serbian-Bulgarian alliance and thus the entire Balkan system.
Even while the allies were fighting the Ottoman empire in the First Balkan War of 1912–13, and long before the climactic Treaty of London of 30 May 1913, differences over Macedonia were undermining the Balkan alliances. The Greeks and the Serbs engaged the Ottoman forces primarily in Macedonia, occupied most of its territory, and claimed most, if not all, the areas under their military control. The Bulgarians, who carried the brunt of the fighting in the east in Thrace, near the center of Ottoman power, occupied only a small part of Macedonia but claimed most if not all of it on the basis of the alliance with Serbia.
A deadlock ensued, lines became rigid, and a negotiated resolution was not possible. For with the collapse of Serbia’s pretensions in Albania and on the Adriatic, Belgrade sought recompense in Macedonia, where it met Sofia’s unyielding opposition. The consequent territorial conflict intensified the dispute in Macedonia between Bulgaria and Greece, which in turn exacerbated rivalry between Bulgaria and Serbia. Greece and Serbia drew closer together and on 1 June 1913 signed a defensive treaty of alliance against Bulgaria. They also began to curry favor with Romania, the only nonalliance Balkan state.
The secret Greek-Serbian Treaty of Alliance on 1 June 1913 in effect ended the Serbian-Bulgarian alliance and the Balkan System of Alliances. Its primary aim was to subvert the territorial settlement in Macedonia to which Bulgaria and Serbia agreed in 1912 and to impose on Bulgaria, if necessary force, the new arrangement. It left no room for debate or for a negotiated settlement and virtually ensured another conflict: the Inter-Allied, or Second Balkan War in the summer of 1913, which finally destroyed the Serbian-Bulgarian rapprochement and with it the Balkan system.
The summer war violated the territorial integrity of modern Macedonia, which comprised a natural economic and, in the main, ethno-cultural unity. Bulgaria and the allied Greece and Serbia forcibly partitioned their neighbor. Greece acquired Aegean Macedonia, the largest territory, and Serbia, Vardar Macedonia, with the largest Macedonian population. The defeated Bulgarians, whose influence in Macedonia had grown steadily since 1870 and who wanted desperately to annex it all and thus create a Great Bulgaria, ended up with the smallest part, Pirin Macedonia. The Peace Treaty of Bucharest of 10 August 1913 sanctioned this arrangement and ended the Second Balkan War.”
“The Bucharest treaty in August 1913, however, only set the stage for yet another war over Macedonia, which erupted during the First World War. The 1913 settlement was not acceptable to the Macedonians, and Bulgaria was keen to overturn it. Sofia moved into sphere of influence of the Central Powers (Austria-Hungary and Germany) and probably saw the Great War as mainly a continuation of the Second Balkan. In September 1915, Bulgaria intervened on the side of the Central Powers by attacking Serbia primarily because of its frustrated ambitions in Macedonia.
The Serbian army was active on the Austro-Hungarian front, and the Bulgarians quickly overran the newly Serbian part of Macedonia. They reached the Greek-Serbian border, which, with brief exceptions, was until 1918 to separate the two belligerent sides in the Balkans, on the so-called Salonika, or Macedonian front. To the north of this line, the Central Powers had deployed 600,000 troops, and over time the Allies — Britain, France, and Russia — concentrated a similar force to its south. For three years, Macedonia and its people suffered under these huge forces of occupation and war.
The Central Powers handed over to Bulgaria the area of Macedonia under their control. The Bulgarians treated it as their own: they imposed martial law and declared general mobilization. They sent Macedonians to the front or forced them to perform military duties on the home front. Aegean, or Greek Macedonia, which the Allies controlled, was nominally under Greek administration but in fact under the various national forces of occupation. This situation led to frequent conflicts between the Greeks and the Serbs, who had their own designs even on this part of Macedonia.
This divided and competing administration made life worse for the Macedonians than that under the Bulgarians. In any case, both parts of occupied Macedonia suffered terribly: exploitation of material and human resources, requisitioning, martial law, and forced mobilization. Cities and towns such as Kastoria (Kostur), Florina (Lerin), Bitola, Dojran, and Edessa (Voden) near to and on both sides of the front lines experienced daily air and ground bombardment. Many villages in the heart of Macedonia, in the fertile area between Florina and Bitola, underwent total destruction.”
“The three partitioning states denied the existence of a distinct Macedonian identity ethnic, political, or territorial. Greece and Serbia claimed the Macedonians within their boundaries as Greeks and Serbs, respectively; Bulgaria continued to claim all Macedonians as Bulgarians. Hence the Macedonians in all three areas constituted unrecognized and repressed minorities. They found themselves in much more oppressive circumstances after their “liberation” from Ottoman rule. Under the latter they had communicated and prayed freely in Macedonian, could declare who they were, and could choose their political-church affiliation. Under the Balkan ‘liberators,’ they had to accept the national identity of the ruling nation or face excommunication and its political, economic, social and cultural consequences.”
Yugoslavia
“The ruling elite in Belgrade officially declared and considered Vardar Macedonia a Serbian land, an integral part of Serbia, and the Macedonians, Serbs or South Serbs. However, since Macedonians rejected this designation, Belgrade treated their land as a Serbian colony and its inhabitants as objects of Serbianization. Thus the new Serbian rulers initiated policies that would have been inconceivable even under the old Ottoman regime and aimed to destroy all signs of regionalism, particularism, patriotism, or nationalism.
They acted on several fronts, totally controlling political life and repressing any dissent, deporting “undesirables” or forcing them to emigrate, transferring Macedonians internally in Yugoslavia, assimilating and denationalizing others by complete control of education and cultural and intellectual life, colonizing the land, and practicing social and economic discrimination.”
“All Bulgarian signs gave way to Serbian; all Bulgarian books, to Serbian. Various Serbian social and cultural clubs, societies, and organizations replaced Bulgarian counterparts. The government Serbianized personal names and surnames for all official uses and, whenever possible, inserted Serbian equivalents in place of local Macedonian place names. In September 1920, the Orthodox churches of the new state united, and the Macedonian Orthodox community in Vardar Macedonia transferred to the Serbian Orthodox church.
Most important, Yugoslavia did not recognize the Macedonian language and forbade its writing and publishing. It declared Serbian the official language of Vardar Macedonia and the maternal tongue of Macedonians there. Serbian became the language of instruction at all levels of the educational system, from kindergarten to the Faculty of Philosophy in Skopie — a branch of the University of Belgrade and Vardar Macedonia’s only interwar institution of higher learning. Serbian was also compulsory for all official purposes and in all official dealings.”
“Yugoslav (Vardar) Macedonia became a veritable armed camp. Anywhere between 35,000 and 50,000 armed men from the Yugoslav (Serbian) army, gendarmerie, and armed bands of the state-sponsored Association against Bulgarian Bandits, with headquarters in Stip, were active in Macedonia. Over 70 percent of the Yugoslav military police force — 12,000 men out of 17,000 — was there as well.
Moreover, Belgrade had far-reaching plans for colonization: it hoped to settle 50,000 Serbian families and create Serbian oases and bridgeheads throughout the region. It encouraged Serbian speculators to purchase huge tracts of the best land from departing Turkish landowners and make it available to colonists.
For various reasons, however, by 1940 only 4,200 households, many of them families of veterans of the Salonika front in the First World War, had settled. One of their main duties was to help maintain “law and order,” or “pacify,” the restive land.”
“The new, artificial borders severed traditional markets from trade routes and sources of supply and destroyed economic unity that had existed since ancient times.”
“The number of Macedonians in Aegean Macedonia began to decline absolutely and relatively during the Balkan Wars and particularly after 1918. The Treaty of Neuilly, 27 November 1919, provided for the “voluntary exchange” of minorities between Bulgaria and Greece. According to the best estimates, between 1913 and 1928 Greece forced 86,382 Macedonians to emigrate from Aegean Macedonia, mostly from its eastern and central provinces, to Bulgaria.
More important still, under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which ended the Greek-Turkish war of 1920–22, the compulsory exchange of minorities forced 400,000 Muslims, including 40,000 Macedonians, to leave Greece, and 1.3 million Greeks and other Christians to depart from Asia Minor. In the years up to 1928, the Greek government settled 565,143 of the latter refugees, as well as 53,000 Greek colonists, in Aegean Macedonia.
Thus, by removing 127,384 Macedonians and settling 618,199 refugees and colonists, Greece transformed the ethnographic structure of Aegean Macedonia in fifteen years.”
“Greece proclaimed Aegean Macedonians as Greeks or Slavophone Greeks. Denial of their identity and forced assimilation took on institutional form and remains official Greek policy.”
“After 1936, official neglect and oppression gave way to open persecution. The regime deported many Macedonians from their native villages near the Yugoslav border to Aegean islands; interned many on uninhabited islands, where they perished; and tortured tens of thousands in prisons or police stations. Their “crime” was to identify themselves as Macedonians, to speak or be overheard speaking Macedonian, or to belong to or sympathize with the KKE, the only party to take any interest in their plight.”
“The only way out appeared to be emigration, and many of the Macedonians left in search of a better life in Canada and the United States in the late 1920s and the 1930s. Such large-scale emigration undoubtedly delighted Athens, for it facilitated Hellenization of the area that had the most Macedonians.”
“Athens, like Belgrade with Serbianization, “Grecocized” names or replaced them with Greek. In November 1926, a new law ordered replacement of all Slavic names of cities, villages, rivers, mountains, and so on. Athens sought to eradicate any reminders of the centuries-old Slavic presence in Aegean Macedonia. In July 1927, another decree ordered removal of all Slavic inscriptions in churches and cemeteries and their replacement with Greek ones. This campaign reached its most vicious in the later 1930s under Metaxas. The government prohibited use of Macedonian even at home to a people who knew Greek scarcely or not at all and could not communicate properly in any tongue but their own.
As in Serbia/Yugoslavia, so in Greece assimilation failed. Western Aegean Macedonia remained Slav Macedonian, and the Macedonians there stayed Macedonian. As Captain Evans emphasized: “It is predominantly a Slav region, not a Greek one. The language of the home, and usually also the fields, the village street, and the market is Macedonian, a Slav language. … The place names as given on the map are Greek, … but the names which are mostly usedI. . . are . . . all Slav names. The Greek ones are merely a bit of varnish put on by Metaxas….Greek is regarded as almost a foreign language and the Greeks are distrusted as something alien, even if not, in the full sense of the word, as foreigners. The obvious fact, almost too obvious to be stated, that the region is Slav by nature and not Greek cannot be overemphasized.”
“Bulgaria, the third partitioning power, enjoyed the greatest influence among Macedonians, but its defeat in two wars left it with the smallest part, Pirin part, Macedonia, or the Petrich district. The region covered 6,788 square kilometers and had 235,000 inhabitants. According to one source, after the First World War and the various exchanges or expulsions of populations, 96 percent of its residents were Macedonians. Moreover, there were many refugees and émigrés from Macedonia, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who had settled all over Bulgaria, especially in urban centers such as Sofia, Varna, Russe, and Plovdiv, following post-1870 crises in Macedonia. They tended to keep their Macedonian memories and connections alive.”
“The Macedonians’ situation in Bulgaria, where the major nationalist trends thrived in Pirin Macedonia and among the many Macedonians in its capital, was radically different from that of compatriots in Greece and Serbia/Yugoslavia. Sofia assumed a more ambiguous position: continuing paternalism vis-à-vis Macedonians in all parts of Macedonia, toward whom it acted as patron but whom it claimed as Bulgarians. This approach left Pirin Macedonians to do what they wanted. Unlike Athens and Belgrade, Sofia tolerated free use of the name “Macedonia” and an active Macedonian political and cultural life.”
“Except for the brief, abortive attempt to unite the Macedonian left and right in the spring of 1924, the VMRO until 1934 served loyally and was a junior partner of Bulgaria’s authoritarian and irredentist regimes. After Alkesandrov’s murder in August 1924, which Sofia instigated to avenge his rapprochement with the left, the VMRO became even more dependent on the regime. His young, ambitious, and scheming private secretary and successor, Ivan (Vanco) Mihailov (1896-1990), who lacked his charisma and élan, transformed the VMRO into terrorist organization serving Bulgarian irredentism and the interests of its leader and his cronies, who ruled Pirin Macedonia.
In return for its loyalty and services, Sofia rewarded Mihailov’s VMRO with a free hand over the Macedonians in Bulgaria. The VMRO established its rule in the Pirin region and control over the many Macedonian societies, associations, and other organizations in Bulgaria, which served as its legal front and facade and suppressed its opponents. From 1924 to 1934, Pirin Macedonia was the VMRO’s private domain — “a state within a state,” or “a Macedonian kingdom,” within Bulgaria. The presence of Bulgarian institutions and officers was only nominal, for they depended totally on Mihailov’s lieutenants, who exercised power on behalf of the VMRO, which controlled every aspect of the inhabitants lives.
Through its local chieftains, the VMRO oversaw the poor agrarian economy and exploited it, supposedly for “the national cause.” The chieftains collected taxes from everyone, insisted on “donations” (protection payments) from owners of larger estates and representatives of major tobacco firms, and in turn allowed “donors” to exploit the peasants.”
“After the coup d’état in May 1934, the new regime of Kimon Georgiev must have decided that Mihailov’s VMRO was more trouble than it was worth. It outlawed the organization, liquidated its networks, and arrested or expelled leaders who did not escape.
The new government took direct control of Pirin Macedonia. It abolished the Petrich administrative district and split it into two parts: it annexed one to the Sofia province and the other to the Plovdiv. More important, it liquidated the VMRO’s de facto “state within the state” and integrated the region into Bulgaria. The new order was not much better for the residents.”
“Both the masses and the Macedonian recruits pushed the VMRO (ob.) and the Communist parties toward Macedonianism. By the late 1920s, the Balkan Communist parties, after long, heated debates, embraced Macedonianism and recognized the Macedonians as a distinct Slav ethnic nation with its own language, history, culture, territory, and interests. The Comintern’s recognition came in 1934.”
“Just as Bulgaria sought to Bulgarianize the areas under its occupation, Albania aimed to do something analogous for western Vardar Macedonia. And its measures and policies resembled those of the Bulgarians. The school system and education in general were to assist forced Albanization. All Serbian schools gave way to Albanian, and all Serbian or Macedonian teachers who taught in Serbian, to teachers from Albania. All pupils — Macedonian, non-Albanian Serbian, and so on had to attend these schools, and their instruction inculcated Great Albanianism and fascism. All jobs in public service required Albanians speaking the language. All signs, even on private buildings, had to be in Italian and Albanian. The names and surnames of non-Albanians had to take on an Albanian form. Even telephone conversations in a language other than Italian or Albanian were illegal.”
“Conscious of Germany’s coming, unavoidable defeat, in the summer of 1944 Sofia approached the Allies for separate peace talks. It also toyed with setting up, with German aid, an autonomous Macedonia under Bulgarian influence. At the end of August, the Germans dispatched Vanco Mihailov, who had spent the war years in Zagreb, to Macedonia to survey the situation and declare an “Independent Macedonia.” The rugged mountains around Skopje were already in partisans’ hands, and, after a brief sojourn with trusted lieutenants, Mihailov wisely decided to accept defeat and departed Macedonia for good. Moreover, this capitulation marked the final defeat of Macedono-Bulgarianism in the long struggle for Macedonians’ loyalty. Macedonianism would prevail.”
“Creation in 1944 of the ‘People’s Republic of Macedonia’ in the Communist Yugoslav federation was of great symbolic and practical significance for the Macedonians. It was the first state since the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 168 Bc to bear the territorial name and to carry the ethnic-national name of its Slavic majority.”
“It placed under state control about 55 percent of the country’s industry. In the first half of 1945, a series of financial measures, a special tax on war profits, a drastic increase in general taxes on small businesses, and new price controls crippled or bankrupted all segments of the middle class, whose businesses the state took over.
To appeal to the peasants — close to 80 percent of the population — in August 1945 the provisional government introduced radical land reform. The guiding principle was that land belongs to those who till it, which had been one of AVNOj’s resolutions. The maximum size of a private holding for a farmer cultivating it with his or her family depended on its quality — no less than 20 hectares or more than 35 hectares. All properties that the state confiscated, including those of owners who fled the country, absentee landlords, and foreigners, banks, other private companies, churches, monasteries, charitable foundations, and so forth, entered a state-controlled land fund. Only half of these lands went to needy peasants who had joined or supported the partisans; the rest would go later to the planned socialized sector of agriculture, comprising state, collective, and cooperative farming.
On 11 August 1945, the provisional assembly passed a new electoral law. It gave voting rights to men and women over the age of eighteen and to all partisans regardless of age. It denied the right to vote to a quarter million people, alleged collaborators of one sort or another.”
“On 6 December 1946, the government nationalized most industry. Private enterprise came to a virtual end in April 1948, with nationalization or closing down of remaining small enterprises and workshops.”
“Throughout this forty-year experiment, Yugoslav Communists tried to preserve one-party dictatorial rule and their own hegemony. Otherwise, they showed remarkable flexibility, changing the system and experimenting with new ideas and approaches, but always within a one-party state. Generally speaking, they intended the frequent changes to reconcile the political and economic interests of the six republics and two autonomous provinces and hence the federation’s nations and nationalities. The survival of country, regime, Yugoslavism, and Titoism, or Yugoslav Communism, depended on that strategy.
Titoist Yugoslavia, as it emerged and evolved after 1948, remained a single-party Communist dictatorship. However, for its citizens, especially from the 1960s through the 1980s, it was a much more liberal, tolerant, and open society than the Communist dictatorships in the “Bloc countries.” However, it did not, and perhaps could not, reconcile all of its groups’ conflicting interests.
The collapse of so many Communist regimes in 1989–91 doomed the Titoist variant as well. And the latter’s fall in turn doomed the federation, which had always linked Yugoslavism inexorably with Yugoslav Communism.”
“Reforms, limited economic and political decentralization, and controlled liberalization of everyday life distinguished Titoist Yugoslavia from the Stalinist system elsewhere in central and eastern Europe. It also brought more relaxed political stability and impressive economic growth. From 1952 to 1957, the Yugoslav economy grew at an average annual rate of 8.5 percent, the industrial sector at 12.6 percent, and the agricultural at 5.9 percent. As Singleton has pointed out: “The sustained growth and industrial output during the 1950s was faster than that achieved during the same period by any other country in the world.”
However, the economy, especially industry, grew not by increases in productivity and greater efficiency. Rather, artificial measures protected domestic industries against foreign competition at the expense of agriculture and consumers. This policy could not last forever, and the crisis came in 1961. The rate of growth dropped by half, imports rose dramatically, and exports stagnated. Like the shock of 1948, this economic crisis sparked another heated debate involving federal, republican, and provincial elites. At the start, it focused on economic questions, but a one-party, centralized state cannot change the economy in isolation from the political and social system and life of the country.”
“No significant federal legislative proposal could become law without the approval of all republics and provinces, and so each republic and province could veto important legislation. While remaining a single state and economy, Yugoslavia in effect no longer had a central or federal government. Rather, it was a confederation of eight republican and provincial one-party regimes, most of which would increasingly define and embrace their own interests.
Yugoslavia’s political tranquility in the 1970s derived largely from its prosperity. As long as this situation continued, parties and governments could reconcile their differences. Whenever it was necessary and as a last resort, Edvard Kardeli, architect of Yugoslavia’s constitutions and Tito’s oldest and most trusted confidant, or Tito himself would intervene and resolve the quarrel.
The death of Kardelj in 1979 and especially that of Tito in May 1980 symbolized the passing of this “golden age” of Titoist Yugoslavia. The years of prosperity ended in the early 1980s as a result of internal economic factors and the worldwide oil crisis.”
“Milosevie’s unilateral and unitarist approach crippled the SKJ and Titoist Yugoslavia and destroyed any possibility of compromise and a negotiated solution to the crisis. His tactics, his mobilization of militant Serbian nationalism, and his vision of a recentralized, Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia frightened the ruling elites and people in the remaining four republics. Even though Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Croatia, Macedonia, and
Slovenia had not agreed on a common alternative, they all strongly opposed recentralization, which they equated with Serbian hegemony. The Yugoslav drama had reached deadlock; as Sabrina Ramet observed, “The system had dead-ended. “This hopeless polarization dominated the SKJ’s fourteenth extraordinary congress in Belgrade in January 1990. The Slovenes proposed the framework for an even looser confederation, while Milosevic, as everyone expected, called for something tighter and more centralized. Since neither proposal could win a majority, the Slovenes left. Milosevie now controlled four votes, but the three remaining republics refused to continue without Slovenia. The Croatians walked out next, and their counterparts from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia followed them.
Two weeks later, the Slovenian party formally left the SKJ and reinvented and renamed itself as the Party of Democratic Renewal. So ended, unceremoniously, Yugoslav Communism as organized political party. The SKJ, the party of Tito, did not dissolve itself formally, and others did not terminate it: it just ceased to exist.
The SKJ’s effective collapse also marked the end of federal Yugoslavia. The party founded this state and gave it legitimacy and its legitimizing doctrine. Yugoslav Communism, or Titoism, was not just any ideology; it was the state ideology. Yugoslav Communism, or Titoism, and Yugoslavism were inseparable. They were one and the same; there was no other Yugoslav state idea or ideology. The federation survived for another year and a half, but only in name and as a ticking bomb.”
“The international situation was rapidly changing. The ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and his policies of glasnost and perestroika signaled the beginning of the end for the cold war and for Communism in central and eastern Europe. In this new world, security considerations that helped maintain unity among Yugoslavia’s constituent nations rapidly dissipated. The Macedonians feared their neighbors to the east and south, but the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes faced no external threats.
Even more important, the Croats and the Slovenes no longer deemed Yugoslavia necessary, let alone indispensable for their security and survival. The growing anti-Communist opposition in these two republics was not necessarily calling for destruction of Yugoslavia. Yet it was obvious that these republics would not remain in Yugoslavia on unfavorable terms.”
“Milosevie saw only two choices: a centralized, unitary, Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia or a Greater Serbia, uniting all the Serbs or all the Yugoslav lands that the Serbs claimed as Serbian. His dogmatic insistence on the first doomed Yugoslavia; his equally fanatical determination to create a Greater Serbia in its place devastated all the peoples of Yugoslavia, including the Serbs. He could establish a Greater Serbia only at the expense and against the will of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, possibly Macedonia, and the Albanians in Kosovo — and only by war. Milosevit’s pursuit of a Greater Serbia destroyed any possibility for a negotiated and peaceful dissolution of Yugoslavia. It made unavoidable its bloody disintegration and the Balkan wars of the 1990s.”
“Macedonia was legally an equal partner in the Yugoslav federation but in fact a junior partner. At no point did it have an equal say with Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia, the “big three” of Yugoslav politics and economics, in determining internal or external policies. The respective leaders of all three lacked knowledge about and even interest in Macedonia’s complex national development, and they, particularly the Serbs, who had claimed the Macedonians as their own, were distinctly patronizing toward them.”
“Despite the system’s shortcomings and uneven development, and particularly from 1947 to 1980, it made remarkable economic advances. The improvements amounted to a minor industrial revolution and turned Macedonia into a semi-developed country. The gross national product was nine times higher in 1980 than in 1947, with average annual growth an impressive 6.5 percent.”
Independence
“Once the northern fighting widened to include Croatia and threatened Bosnia-Herzegovina, even the cautious had to agree that the Yugoslav idea was dead. Macedonian sovereignty and independence even within a loose association no longer formed a viable option.
At this point, Macedonians had only two possibilities. First, they could, as Belgrade and Athens wanted them to do, join a third, or “reduced,” Yugoslavia. In a new federation without the Croatians and the Slovenes to counterbalance the Serbs, however, they could have become extremely weak and vulnerable. Consequently, they rejected this option from the outset. Second, they could declare complete sovereignty and independence — the only route acceptable to most of the population, including the Albanians.
The political leaders resolved to give the people the final say. In the referendum on 8 September 1991, 72.16 percent of 1,495,080 registered voters cast ballots; 95.08 percent of voters, or 1,021,981 people, supported independence, and only 3.63 percent, or 38,896, opposed it.”
“Macedonia was the only one of the four republics to withdraw from Yugoslavia and attain independence peacefully — a remarkable achievement and a triumph of Gligorov’s diplomacy.”
“The simplest solution for the Greeks would have been for Macedonia to join Serbia’s reduced Yugoslavia. The most drastic scenario, which the most extreme nationalists advocated, sought to destabilize the republic and to carve it up with Serbia and, if necessary, with Bulgaria, as had happened in 1913. If these options proved unattainable, Athens would force Macedonia to change its name and its people to invent a new national identity. As one Greek diplomat commented, “We will choke Skopje into submission.”
To achieve its aims, Athens resorted to a campaign of intimidation. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks demonstrated in Salonika and in Athens against the “counterfeit nation,” “Skopjans,” and “pseudo-Macedonians.” In early December 1992, dignitaries of church and state led an estimated 1.3 million people at a rally in Athens. The Greek military executed maneuvers on Macedonia’s border and repeatedly violated its airspace. Greece interfered with shipments to the republic, including foreign aid passing through the port of Salonika, and in August 1992 imposed a partial economic embargo, which it lifted early in 1993. In late 1993, however, Andreas Papandreou, the socialist prime minister again, reimposed a more sweeping embargo, which lasted eighteen months. The Greeks closed southward trade, and United Nations (UN) sanctions against Serbia and the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina disrupted trade to the north. Macedonia lost about 60 percent of its trade and approached economic collapse.”
“The transition from a primarily state-owned to a free market economy, which all former Communist states faced, was only part of the problem. Regional instability worsened the situation. The bloody breakup of Yugoslavia took away protected markets for more than 80 percent of Macedonia’s exports, as well as substantial transfer payments from Belgrade. The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and international sanctions on Serbia (1992–96) also hit Macedonia’s trade-dependent economy; Greece’s trade embargoes (1992–95) were equally damaging. The sanctions against Serbia may have cost Macedonia about $2.9 billion, and the Greek embargoes $1.5 billion. The U.S. Department of State concluded that “as a result of these border closures [Macedonia’s] 1995 GDP declined to 41 percent of its 1989 level.”
The 1999 crisis in Kosovo was particularly devastating for neighboring Macedonia. “At the height of the crisis, Macedonia sheltered more than 350,000 Kosovo refugees, straining fiscal accounts and increasing social pressure. Foreign investment dried up, unemployment reached 33 percent, and living standards plunged.”
“In general elections, Albanians have tended to vote as a bloc for ethnic parties and have normally elected about 1/5 of the deputies — roughly corresponding to their proportion of the population. All governments since 1991 have been coalitions and included at least one of the Albanian parties.”
“Extreme Albanian nationalists, mostly in Kosovo and responding to NATO’s military intervention and defeat of Milosevie’s Serbia there, used Albanian grievances as a pretext to launch armed incursions against Macedonia. Their real aim was to destabilize the new state, detach its northwestern Albanian areas, and annex them to Kosovo and eventually to a “Great Albania.” In February 2001, they carried out armed provocations near the Kosovo border, which soon escalated into an insurgency. Claiming to fight for greater rights for Albanians in Macedonia, the rebels seized nearby territory and attacked police and military forces. The insurgency spread through parts of northern and western Macedonia during the first half of 2001. As fighting intensified and tension grew throughout the country, by the early summer there were fears of full-scale civil war.
The tragedy of civil war and possible foreign intervention eased after tardy but firm political intervention by the United States and the European Union, whose mediation led to a ceasefire in July 2001. The same month, Georgievski’s governing coalition had to add representatives of all the major Macedonian and Albanian parties. With aid and under great pressure from American and EU diplomats, the Macedonian and Albanian leaders in this “grand” coalition worked out the Ohrid Framework Agreement of 8 August 2001, which ended the fighting.
The Ohrid accord called for constitutional and legislative changes to expand civil rights for minority groups. Such rights included greater representation in the civil service, the police, and the army; official use of Albanian in districts with an ethnic Albanian majority; and stronger local self-government.”
