IN DEFENSE OF THE MACEDONIAN LANGUAGE

IN DEFENSE OF THE MACEDONIAN LANGUAGE

Here is what Dr. Risto Kiriazovski said, not only about the care the children received but also about their education:

“Of the total number of evacuated school age children, 60% were illiterate, 17.5% had completed the first grade, 14% the second grade, 5% the third grade and only 3.5% attended school past third grade.”

After they were evacuated, the children were allowed to attend primary, secondary, high school and higher education. All the children’s homes operated Macedonian schools and taught subjects such as Macedonian grammar, reading and writing, Macedonian literature, Macedonian history, Macedonian songs and dances and Macedonian and Greek geography.

Instruction in Macedonian schools was conducted in the Macedonian language or, more accurately, in the Macedonian literary language applied to the People’s Republic of Macedonia. However, following the clash between the CPY and the Inform attempts were made to politicize the language. Namely, in 1950, the CPG leadership, influenced by Bulgaria, decided to suspend the use of the Macedonian language claiming that it was strongly influenced by the Serbian language.

This however led many Macedonians, especially intellectuals, to fight a determined and persistent fight against the CPG decision and as a result managed to restore the use of the Macedonian literary language in the schools. It was a long fight but ended in success creating the right conditions for developing Macedonian national culture and literacy abroad.

The textbooks, the educational materials, the printed literature such as prose, drama, poetry and other valuable material were all written in the Macedonian literary language.

And finally one more thing. Although the Macedonian children did nothing to be blamed for what happened in Greece during the Greek Civil War, or for having been sent far away from their parents and homes, the Greek authorities, as part of their policy in dealing with the Macedonian national minority, refused to repatriate them and deprived them of their inherited property rights through the application of anti-democratic laws including law no. 1068841 of December 29, 1982, which allowed repatriation of only “Greeks by genus” political refugees and law no. 1540 of October 5/10, 1985 for the return of confiscated properties to only political refugees who are “Greeks by genus”.

The Athens government implemented a similar program to collect children. According to Queen Frederica’s memoirs, the Athens child collection program (Pedomazoma) was unleashed in July, 1947 shortly after the Royal voluntary Society was founded. However, the planned mass gathering of children did not begin until March 1948 when the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece started its mass evacuation. The Athens child collection program was personally led by Queen Frederica in which she included the army, local authorities, police, schools and other institutions and organizations. Her plan was to collect 10,000 to 12,000 children. She collected 6,000 children in March, 1948. The American mission to help Greece and the UN Special Committee on the Balkans were well-aware of the existence of this campaign.

In early March 1948 the government in Athens announced that it had made preparations to evacuate 14,000 children from Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia and from the Peloponnesus.

According to claims made by Queen Frederica about 24 thousand children were collected, while others claimed that only 14,494 children were gathered, mainly from the Aegean (Greek occupied) part of Macedonia. The children were moved to Leros, Kifissia, Solun and other places in 54 organized homes, in “children’s towns” and in shelters where they were exposed to severe denationalization and assimilation programs.

REASONS FOR EVACUATING THE CHILDREN

In searching for reasons for the uprooting of the Aegean Macedonian children from their homes, in her monograph entitled “We are children of mother earth”, Dr. Fana Butskova wrote:

“The main motive for evacuating the children from the free and half-occupied territories under the control of the Democratic Army of Greece, as has been written by many Greek and Macedonian historiographers, was for humanitarian reasons. We may accept this as a fact but not as the only motive, because events that developed during the course of the struggle point to other reasons. Prior to this most often emphasized component, i.e. ‘the humanitarian component’, there was another motive and that was the unresolved

problem of DAG fighters and reserves, which the CPG leading the movement had failed to solve, as well as the mass terror which the nationalist forces committed against the Democratic and Macedonian people in Greece.”

Given this situation, the Greek nationalists seized the opportunity to ethnically cleanse the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia. This was evident from the demands that they threw around, such as the one stated by the Weekly Republican Newspaper “Eleftherios” number 28, which on January 1946 wrote: “The Slavo-Macedonians must disappear from here. They should be expelled… let them go to any neighbouring country…”

The Monarcho-Fascists, through their paramilitaries, began a consistent policy of exterminating the Macedonian population. Patrolling through the Macedonian villages, they threw slogans around calling for the extermination of Macedonians. They threatened the population with expulsions and even death, saying that when the king comes to Greece there will be not a single Slav (Macedonian) to find. These were not just slogans and empty threats but actual acts perpetrated against the Macedonian civilian population. In Kostur, Lerin, Voden and Enidzhevardar Regions, from February 1945 to May 1947, 278 Macedonian people were put to death without a trial, 297 Macedonian women were raped, 6,456 people were detained, 4,200 were tried, 3,215 were sentenced to multiple years in prison, 1,449 were jailed, 13,449 were tortured and abused, 1,191 houses were burned, 13,938 villagers were expelled and displaced from 45 villages.

To achieve their aims, with respect to the Macedonians, both the Greek nationalists and the Greek Communists were calling on their forces to join the campaign to expel the Macedonian people from Greece. The CPG, on the other hand, opposed these actions based on the fact that: “The Macedonians along with all anti-fascist forces were at the vanguard in the fight against Metaxas, fought heroically on the Albanian front and played an important part in the national resistance against the Hitler-fascist occupation and against the domestic traitors…” So the CPG was against the policy to expel the Macedonians from Greece.

On account of the terror acts committed by the political right, many Macedonian families were forced to seek safe haven in neighbouring countries, mainly in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria but some left for overseas. Many of those refugees who left together with their children followed a path of uncertainty. These waves of parents and children leaving together lasted throughout the entire civil war period, unlike the organized evacuation of more than 20,000 children, which lasted through March and April 1948, conducted under the initiative of the CPG.