BELGRADE WAS DEAF TO REACTIONS FROM SKOPJE

BELGRADE WAS DEAF TO REACTIONS FROM SKOPJE

“The Inform Bureau postponed the Macedonian question in Greece for ‘better’ times,” admitted Lazar Kolishevski

According to British diplomats, Yugoslavia’s Tito and Edward Kardeli were pressured to give up pursuing the Macedonian Question in Greece. In the beginning they hesitated but in time Tito and Edward Kardeli, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, remained silent especially during the discussions for normalizing Yugoslav-Greek relations. After that they completely forgot about the Macedonian Question in Greece.

Charles Pick, a British ambassador serving in Belgrade at the time, was one of the main diplomats from London who constantly pressured Tito and Kardeli to give up on Macedonian interests in Aegean Macedonia in favour of good relations with Greece. Reactions from the Macedonian leadership were not favourable…According to British sources, after Edward Kardeli defined the Macedonian Question as “secondary”, Lazar Moisov declared that the Macedonian people cannot peacefully accept a decision that will suffocate the basic rights of the Macedonian national minority in Greece and promote policies of denationalizing and the expulsion of Macedonians from their homes.

This is what Moisov said, “How the Greek Government treats the Macedonian minority next will be a basic principle from which we can examine the honesty in the statements made by the Plastiras government. The Plastiras government has shown a desire to normalize relations with Yugoslavia, which should put an end to the brutal and barbarian policies of previous Greek governments toward the Macedonian population. The real test, however, will be what the Plastiras government does in the future. Will it release the Macedonians it is holding in its prisons and concentration camps without reserve? Will it take back the tens of thousands of Macedonians that Greek governments have deported? Will it recognize the Macedonian people’s basic minority rights so that they will be able to freely speak their language and have schools in their own language? Will the Plastiras government provide a minimal guarantee for the national minorities in Greece like the rest of the civilized countries…?”

This is what Lazar Kolishevski, top Macedonian politician at the time, said about sacrificing Macedonian rights in favour of improving Greek-Yugoslav relations, “We should have opened the Macedonian Question in 1948, but instead we postponed it because at the time we were dealing with too many other issues…”

This is what Dragan Kliaik wrote in his book “The Time of Kolisevski”, about what Kolishevski said, “We Macedonians found ourselves in delicate circumstances wondering how to deal with the new situation; the Inform Bureau, the danger on the border and the disagreements… So, we decided to postpone the Macedonian Question for ‘better times’. We waited until 1955, when relations between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union normalized and Krushchev came to visit Belgrade. Then during a communist Party forum we asked the Yugoslav authorities why they were ‘indifferent’ to the Macedonian minority in Greece and why they were publicly asking ‘what the Greeks say’, but never ‘what the Macedonians say’?

But, thanks to our caution in making sure we didn’t mess up our good relations with our neighbour Greece, we tolerated what a self-respecting country would not tolerate…” In other words Lazar Kolisevski admitted that the Yugoslavian authorities ‘never’ defended the Macedonians in Greece.

So no matter what the Macedonians in Yugoslavia said or did, the Yugoslav political leaders continued to ignore their opinions and the Question regarding the Macedonian minority in Greece kept being placed on the side without allowing it to be closed.

This is what was said in a telegram sent on November 9, 1950 from the British Embassy in Belgrade to the Foreign Office in London, “The Yugoslavs are not asking for territorial changes but they think

that minority rights should be given to the Macedonians in Greece, the same kind of rights the Yugoslavs gave their minorities in Yugoslavia. They also suppose that the Macedonian minority should not be forced out…”

This is what Hilary King, the British Consul in Skopje, wrote (according to British diplomat transcripts found in the Embassy in Belgrade) after he had many meetings with Macedonian refugees from Aegean Macedonia asking for Australian visas, “Please be advised not to use the words ‘Macedonian minority’ in discussions with the Greeks. Even though they openly admit in their documents that the Macedonians are a separate national identity, the Greeks do not want that emphasized. Also be advised that the Macedonians in Greece speak a language that is easy and understandable to all the people here in Skopje. But even though this language is thought of as being Bulgarian, there are many clear differences between this language and the Bulgarian language (this language is more musical than the Bulgarian language). Most interesting is that the people here are all literate (even the older women from the smallest villages) but only in Macedonian...”

British Consul King continued, “There is no doubt that these people see themselves as Macedonian and the Greek language for them is a foreign language. Sometimes they have difficulty pronouncing their own official Greek personal names and the names of their villages…” In the letter to the Belgrade authorities King said that he was informed that the Greek Government refused to give passports to the Macedonians from Greece. This is what he said, “I don’t know if this is true or not, but if it is the Greek Government shouldn’t expect the Aegean Macedonians to be loyal Greek citizens…”

According to King, one important thing the Yugoslav and Greek Press should do is avoid offending both sides and both Governments. The governments too should not offend each other from what is published in the Press. Both sides should ask the Press to keep things under control, especially the newspaper in Skopje (here they were thinking of the newspaper ‘Nova Makedonija’). Also they should not pay too much attention to the local media. The Greeks too should not be taken seriously.

This is what King wrote to his associate in Athens, “I believe that Tito is telling the truth when he says, as he did on several occasions, that it is very difficult for him to keep the local Macedonian Press silent. According to Tito, Macedonia was the most successful of all the federal republics because the Macedonians have the most powerful communist minority. Should someone travel through the country they will find that the Macedonians appreciate the regime the most. For this, amongst other things, Tito values the Macedonians and is trying to please them. I do not suppose the Macedonian leaders put much credit in that but still ask for as much as they can for their loyalty. There are also other things but Tito won’t do anything to give the Bulgarians the excuse to say that he gave up the fight for Macedonia and that the Bulgarians are the only ones to be their saviours…”