SIBERIA FOR “TITO’S AGENTS”

SIBERIA FOR “TITO’S AGENTS”

“Thirty-three years ago, a group of Macedonians, leaders of NOF for Aegean Macedonia, were blamed by the CPG Central Committee Stalinist politburo for being responsible for the defeat of the Democratic Army of Greece (DAG) in the Greek Civil War 1946-1949.

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Accused of being ‘Tito’s agents and international reactionaries’, ten of them were sentenced to death. At the request of CPG Secretary General Zahariadis and his group, which followed Informburo views ‘on the CPY situation’, the sentenced were deported from Port Durres in Albania to the Soviet Union where their crimes were investigated. In Moscow their death sentences were replaced with life imprisonment to be served in exile in Siberia. After Stalin’s death and after the communist party of the Soviet Union held its Twentieth Congress, all prisoners wrongfully convicted were rehabilitated and allowed to leave. Eventually all of them went to Yugoslavia, Skopje, where most still live.” (See: Dragan Kliakich, “DUGA”, January 15, 1983.)

In other words, instead of getting this historic information, about the evil done to our NOF, AFZH and NOMS leaders, from our own Macedonian mainstream history, we are getting it from foreign sources. Of course, now we also have Pavle Rakovski’s Autobiography “My Sufferings…”, Published by “AEA Publishers” in Skopje in 2000, which provides many details of his experience in the Siberian camps, how he got there and how he was eventually released. Rakovski was one of the NOF leaders who was sentenced to death by Zahariadis.

What bothers me the most about all this is that I found no official protests made about the Soviet involvement! In other words no one said: “HEY YOU THERE! WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO PROSECUTE OUR REVOLUTIONARIES AND SEND THEM TO SIBERIA? WHAT KIND OF CRIMES DID THEY COMMIT AGAINST THE SOVIET UNION!? And this voice of protest should have come from us Macedonians.

I can only imagine the trauma our people, the so-called NOF, AFZH and NOMS “revolutionaries”, underwent in Zahariadis’s hands. With his power over their lives, Zahariadis held them tight in his hands. It is obvious that they suffered terrible human rights abuses, psychological trauma and physical violations through his powerful ideological mechanisms. His ideological propaganda had a fiercely destructive effect on the human psyche.

So, in that global chaos, in that messy and brutal war, the question that comes to mind is: “How should we Macedonians interpret and understand all this?”

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ON THE PATH OF HUMANITY

What is the basis for “I” in the individual consciousness of each person? Looking for the human “I”, for an individual self-consciousness is an inexplicable phenomenon, but it is precisely by this search that we will find the particular characteristics of our (NOF, AFZH and NOMS) leaders.

Let us follow what they went through: (See: the novel “Nebeska Timianovavna” by Petre Andreevski, 1989 / p. 297.)

“…We yelled out Comrade Khrushchev, comrade Khrushchev while jumping up and down and falling on the floor to be noticed. The sound in the dome of the theatre echoed. Khrushchev paused, took a step towards the front of the carved stone, turned, and looked at two women scuffling with a number of policemen.

‘Let them go, let the women go!’ Khrushchev yelled.

The policemen turned around, I got free and I hit the one holding me. I hit him right in the stomach. I gave him a donkey kick in the stomach and maybe lower. The man screamed and took his hands off me.

We ran over to Khrushchev, but we could not catch our breath. We stood in front of him shaking trying to speak. We did not know what he looked like, except from his pictures. We both started talking at the same time. Our words were getting mixed up.

Comrade Khrushchev we said, we are communists from Yugoslavia, we are revolutionaries and fighters from 1941, from Greek Macedonia. We were arrested and rehabilitated, we said, and we have visas from Yugoslavia, but we do not have visas from you yet. We can’t go back, we said, and shrugged our shoulders. Our legs were shaking and our veins were pulsing. I felt like I was losing consciousness.

‘Relax, relax,’ said Khrushchev as I kept looking at his shiny egg-shaped bald head covered in sweat. I said thank you and handed him a letter.”

And this is how the revolutionary activities of our people sent to Siberia (Katarza) ended.

The question now is: “Did these politicians of ours, now proclaimed as “Yugoslav Communists” who yesterday deceived our people,

young and old, to sacrifice themselves for the revolution, truly work for our national interests?

Did they really do this for our salvation or did they do this to pursue the CPM/CPY political platform? Because in their propaganda they were calling on the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia to rise up and fight in a revolution and continue the Ilinden tradition.

There is nothing wrong with admitting guilt to being victims of foreign manipulation and apologizing to the Macedonian people. At the same time they cannot continue to make claims that they were a military and political factor in the Greek Civil War and not take responsibility for what they did. They were at the forefront urging the Macedonian people to join DAG en masse. They were at the forefront of the child collection program that ended in disaster. They were the ones who called on the Macedonian people to become involved in a war that not only turned them into casualties but caused them to lose their ancestral hearths forever.