TO THE EDITORIAL BOARD “COMMUNIST” - SKOPJE - Part 02

progress, failure and decay... Why? These are not “minor” and forgivable mistakes that the CPG leadership made… These are calculated treasonous acts that took place on purpose…

And what about the Macedonians and their struggle for free national existence? The CPG was very afraid that Greece was going to lose Macedonia if the Macedonian people in Greece were allowed to develop their own free struggle. This fear was further compounded right after ASNOM and the creation of the Republic of Macedonia in the Yugoslav Federation.

The CPG leadership said nothing, not a word, about the rights of the Macedonian people in its XII plenum or during its VII Congress. It did not want to say anything because if it did it was afraid it would only intensify the Macedonian revolutionary struggle. The CPG leadership behaved as if there were no Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia while, at the same time, it fought fiercely against the Macedonian national liberation movement.

But as the Macedonian movement began to strengthen, the CPG was pressured to “say something” about the Macedonians and, in its usual anti-Macedonian spirit, it did... At its II plenum held in February, 1946, the CPG managed to squeeze the words: “The Slavic speaking population that lives in Greek Macedonia, inside the Greek state…” (134), and at the same time, with a relentless boldness, the CPG continued its hostile campaign against the Macedonian communists and other patriots, activists, and bearers of the Macedonian national ideal.

Failure forced the CPG to change tactics.

Failing to destroy NOF from the outside, the CPG decided to recognize it giving itself the opportunity to try to destroy it and the Macedonian liberation movement from the inside. The CPG did this by gradually infiltrating NOF and replacing its governing bodies with “Grkomani” (Supremacist Macedonians loyal to the Greek cause), and in various ways “removing” and “neutralizing” all active bearers of the Macedonian ideal, both inside NOF and outside.

But, as it turned out, they were unable to destroy the Macedonian ideal by simply “neutralizing” its active bearers because the entire Macedonian population was and remains to be the main bearer of the Macedonian ideal. BUT THAT WAS NOT ALL!

In other words, after General Markos and his deputy General Kikitsas were removed from DAG Supreme Command, and Zahariadis decided to change DAG’s strategy from acting as a rapidly mobile hit and run partisan army, to acting as a stationary army taking “defensive positions” at a front, the CPG implemented plans to mobilize every single person from the Macedonian villages in the liberated border zone. This total mobilization of all remaining women and girls (135), in fact, was the next CPG maneuver to destroy the entire Macedonian population… and all bearers of the Macedonian ideal. And how better than to make them a stationary target for the Greek army to pulverize… And that is exactly what happened!

To do this the CPG used unprecedented never before seen demagogy. After stripping the villages of their children, who in the spring of 1948 were removed from the war zone and sent to various Eastern European counties, the CPG Central Committee, through its V Plenum and through the NOF Central Council II Plenum, ordered the formation of a separate Macedonian battalion and the creation of an all Macedonian communist party organization known as KOEM. During NOF’s II Congress it made an announcement letting the Macedonian people know that it had formed KOEM out of the actives in NOF and the Provisional Government of Greece. Now that the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia had their own Party, they in effect qualified to be a nation. This meant that the CPG had recognized the rights of the Macedonian people and with that recognition they had the right to self-determination with the right to secede from Greece (136). If true, this would have been huge for the Macedonian people. It would have meant that they could now unite all the Macedonian people in all the Macedonian regions in divided Macedonia IN THE FRAMEWORK OF A NATIONAL AND DEMOCRATIC BALKAN PEOPLE’S FEDERATION (137). But it was yet another ruse… The CPG maneuver, however, worked:

The Macedonian villages around the border areas in Lerin, Kostur and Voden Regions were emptied of their people. The entire population found itself in DAG’s ranks at the front. And, while the Macedonians were fighting to earn those “promised rights” that the CPG had promised them, they were exposed to total destruction. They were used as cannon fodder for the Greek army… This is what happened and this is how the CPG and its Greek “patriots” attempted to remove the Macedonian ideal out of the Macedonian people.

BUT THAT, APPARENTLY, WAS NOT ENOUGH FOR THE CPG. It also had to get rid of the very young and the very old Macedonians by creating the right conditions for them to flee across the border, along with remnants of the beaten down DAG units. Here the CPG got help from the government in Athens which showed great determination to burn down every Macedonian village in its path of destruction. In other words, by burning and destroying everything that was Macedonian in the villages, the Greek government opened up space to settle the Macedonian villages with Greek colonists from Epirus and the south of Greece.

After the Macedonian population was driven out of its homeland and forced to flee across the border to save itself, the CPG began to ferociously attack the Macedonian people, particularly the NOF leadership, for losing the war, i.e. for its own failures… In other words, the Macedonian organization which organized the Macedonian fighters and people, the core military power in DAG and the uprising in the north (138), according to the CPG was a “crypto-fascist” and “reactionary” organization, which supposedly tried “to turn the Macedonian liberation movement from a revolution into a counterrevolution” (139). NOF was immediately dissolved and its leaders were arrested and sentenced to death. Was this done to get rid of witnesses? Of people like me who would eventually find out what they were up to? What do you think?

After the CPG got rid of NOF it formed “Ilinden”, another organization for the Macedonians. A letter, written by Zahariadis and read at the “Ilinden” founding congress by Vainas, was full of verbal “revolutionary consistency”, i.e. of demagogy, both in

relation to the Macedonian national revolutionary tradition, as well as in relation to national democratic rights and freedoms.

“Ilinden”, of course, was staffed with carefully selected Grkomani, or “Slavophone” Greeks loyal to the Greek cause. The CPG created “Ilinden” as an organ to struggle against the Macedonian national ideal. It was created to wipe out the Macedonian alphabet and replace it with an “alien” form. And it did exactly that. Instead of using the existing Macedonian alphabet it introduced another alphabet especially created for the “Slavophone” Greeks. The existing Macedonian literary language and Macedonian grammar were also rejected because they were allegedly imposed by “opportunists” for profit. They were then replaced with a mutilated version of the Macedonian language as was spoken by Kotsopoulos, Gousiopoulos and all the other “Opouloses”. On that basis a new Macedonian grammar and new Macedonian literary language were created and every effort was made to publish material that encompassed the familiar old and new literary values of the language.

This was part and parcel of the famous Greek-Bulgarian anti-Macedonian policy of not recognizing the existence of a single Macedonian nation, a single Macedonian language, and a single Macedonian culture. And this latest anti-Macedonian act, by the way, was perpetrated by the CPG in the socialist countries, a fair distance away from the Greek state.

Apparently it was not enough for the Greek “patriots” in the CPG leadership to have Macedonia divided by its territory and the Macedonian people’s economic life and development, they also wanted to have them divided by language and culture, with the sole aim of:

Making Macedonia and the Macedonian people’s disintegration permanent, and hence preserving and strengthening the Greek position and interests in the north...

Apparently it was not enough for the Greek “patriots” in the CPG leadership to have Macedonians in Greece. And, in the name of Greek “national interests” all those Macedonians who survived the

Greek-bourgeois genocide, that is, the Greek-bourgeois policy of denationalization and assimilation, could not be allowed not exist as Macedonians except as “Slavophone” Greeks, a complimentary addition to the Greek people. Otherwise they would have to be assimilated or gotten rid of by any other means possible to the last one…!

But, despite the CPG’s grand effort to achieve this with false promises and deceit, there was strong influence and positive developments in Macedonian affairs, which the CPG could not overcome with words alone. This time the Greek CPG leaders were forced to remove their communist mask, of being “friends of the Macedonian people”, and openly emerge as the self-appointed architects of the Macedonian people’s fate.

The ASNOM decision and the emergence of the Republic of Macedonia had a lot to do with bursting the CPG ulcer with regards to the “Macedonian disease” from which the CPG was suffering from. But, unfortunately, I must say that our historiography has taken the wrong track in relation to this...

I received the following letter from MANU in regards to this:

MACEDONIAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES Number 12-6/171-74 10. II 1975 SKOPJE

TO PAVLE RAKOVSKI Skopje, Resenska 38/1-4

The organizing committee of the symposium held in October 1974, dedicated to ASNOM, reviewed your report submitted to the Academy on December 5, 1974.

Because your report was submitted after the Symposium was held and was not part of the program, the organizing committee, in accordance with its rules, cannot publish it in the journal as part of the proceedings.

Please contact the Institute of National History (INI) or some other interested authority.

BOARD PRESIDENT Academic Mihailo Apostolski

INI did not respond at all...! They responded by being silent...

5) As I pointed out earlier, the affairs between those who left the movement in Greek occupied Macedonia and fled to the Republic of Macedonia and those who remained home to fight, were not sorted out even after three decades had passed, even though all those people were communists. I addressed a letter regarding this to the president of the CKM Central Committee.

Yes, I was isolated, ignored and written off, but I could no longer keep silent. Here are the contents of that letter:

Comrade President,

The accompanying text referring to the works “Aegean Storms” published by INI in Skopje is not for publication. It is for your information and to point out a couple of unpleasant facts:

a) Surely you must know what is happening amongst our people – among the protagonists of the extraordinary revolutionary effort of our people in the Greek (occupied) part of Macedonia, who fought in the period from 1941 to 1949.

Surely you must have known and have found it strange that the mutual relations between the various former leaders of the struggle in Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia are not good? Is it a normal phenomenon to see people quarrel and disagree over events that took place so many years ago? This has been happening everywhere with all the leaders of the movement without exception. There is always a breakthrough and reconciliation. But the strange thing about these people, the leadership from Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia, is that, thirty years later there is bad blood between them, even though all these people are communists. Why is the Party absent in all this...?

b) Unfortunately all of this is inevitably reflected in our historiography of that period. Bias, prejudice, sympathy, antipathy… towards one person or another is increasingly widespread in our historiography. While people are criticized and the history of events is being altered, some people remain silent, while others... well, they invent things… You will find evidence of this in the attached text. This, of course, can be anything except for history. I would like to inform you that the Institute for National History (INI) in Skopje, has been unknowingly or perhaps knowingly, publishing these kinds of works. So, in this case too, the Party seems to be absent. Why…?

Sorry. I could no longer keep silent...

Skopje, April 19, 1976 With much respect, Pavle Rakovski Retired

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