Noose – Chapter 2

Noose – Chapter 2

From the arms of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) into the arms of the Communist Party of Greece (CPG).

Based on the October 14th, 1946 agreement to make changes to NOF (National Liberation Front) between Tito (CPY) and Zahariadis (CPG), CPY representative Karaivanov and CPG representative Ioannidis quickly came to the following decision: “The Macedonian organizations NOF, AFZH (Women’s Anti-Fascist Front) and NOMS (People’s Liberation Youth Union of the Aegean Macedonians) were to completely fall under the leadership of the CPG and the armed NOF units were to join DAG (Democratic Army of Greece) and fall under the command of General Markos.” (Karaivanov was a Special Intelligence Officer working for Tito, an agent of the NKVD (Committee of State Security of the USSR) and a Comintern instructor.) (Included among General Markos Vafiadis’s immediate associates and instructors were: Gjuza Radovikj, Obrad Trninikj, Misho Vrbitsa, Velimir Dotsnikj, Svetislav Stojanovikj and Petar Lutskj, all of KOS of Serbia. (See KOS and UDBA – Actions and documents of the Secret Services.)) Again, dictate obedience and a bent spine.

1.

It rained hard in May 1946. Heavy rains came and flooded the village pathways and streets. One day a torrent of water ran like a horrific bitter river, sweeping away the smaller and weaker livestock and forcing the villagers to wade through tons of mud. This was the first major spring flood to take place in a long time. After that, frightening water demons appeared and, with their gruesome shadows and creepy screams, ate away the May nights, as though they wanted to demolish and ruin the homes of the villagers, to erase their memories and darken their minds before God.

2.

Based on what people believed, the Village Rudino was divided into two camps and that’s when discord and conflicts began. The pre-war sense of collectivity, friendship and generosity that was shared among the villagers was gone. The sense that someone was in need of something more than someone else was lost. The sense that a soul belonged to two bodies was also gone and replaced with personal “instinctive feelings.” It seemed like the majority of people were born with insufficient curiosity, even about their own fate. New developments with the advent of NOF and AFZH brought both joy and fear. Everyone was in pursuit of their own dislocated place. When a problem surfaced contradictory solutions were applied, expecting that with ideological problems there would always be new problems. In those days the villagers talked about the same things over and over. There were days when those around you, those who you could greet and look at, had a different expression on their faces, happy or sad. And it was a great wonder that from then to this day the Rudino villagers, as well as the villagers from the surrounding villages, did not change one bit. But from them were born informers, traitors, hypocrites, petty profiteers, bootlickers and all kinds of miserable traitors, who, for some unknown reason, acted as foreign agents and represented foreign interests. The majority of the people that the villagers called “tainted by communism” participated in all the village boards and newcomer Organizations. They felt like they were national institutions. All this was like a festival to them, with some kind of amusement park type nationalist consciousness. The idea of calling people to join the revolution was meaningless and empty because such an idea was strange to them. The cynicism that CPY would truly care for the Macedonian people can be expressed in the following words: “In 1944-1945 Yugoslavia wanted to solve its own internal problems” and used the opportunity to do it. But there were also other categories of people who were “careful and untainted” and who removed themselves from the world of politics. One Good Friday evening, in the spring of 1946, we sat on wooden benches in the village square in Rudino under the large tree, singing old Macedonian revolutionary songs. I noticed Sotir Gaidov’s intelligent, dark eyes circling around and then stop on my face. He looked at me and smiled gently, maybe because I was the youngest of the village bachelors. He had just returned from the island Makronisos, where he was imprisoned after being sentenced to death. There he spent a long time in solitary confinement. Makronisos was a place of pain and suffering, where convicted people were sent to suffer before being put to death. The reason that the Greek government sent people to Makronisos was to make them give up their political and national beliefs, denounce the Communist Party and lead them into physical and mental exhaustion so that they would feel hopeless and would reach a point where they would no longer want to live. Prisoners remained in solitary confinement until dawn, until after the executions took place. One time they asked Sotir, “What kind of execution do you prefer?” Sotir told them, “I want to be beaten to death so that while I think about it I can write my last song for the woman of my heart…” The executioners then asked: “Let’s hear your song.” But clever Sotir said, “Sorry, I can’t do that because I am afraid you will burn my lips…”

* * *

Sometimes Sotir sang songs loudly about Ilinden and wrote letters to the woman he loved: “... My desire for you my dear is not to wear black, not to cry for me and not to wail when you hear the bad news.” Each prisoner was repeatedly interrogated and tortured and then asked to sign a statement of repentance, declaring that he no longer cared for their ideals and beliefs. These methods were introduced before the Metaxas dictatorship (1939-1940). Prisoners could be released and sent home and even avoid the death penalty if they gave up their ideals. Sotir Gaidov did exactly that but after that he was no longer trusted; not even by his closest friends. Everyone became suspicious of him so the man lost his self-confidence. In his statement of repentance Sotir wrote: “I declare that I denounce the Communist Party and that I am ashamed of being its follower. I also call on all the misguided young people not to trust the Communists...” Now they say that Sotir Gaidov is a man who, in such moments, does not share his thoughts or his facial expressions with others. This man is not like other people and now he doesn’t even believe in God and has given up on the church and on crossing himself, just like all us ambitious people full of ideological activism. Sotir said: “My generation was shaped by protests, by the policemen’s rod, by hope generated by Communist ideas and by the 1903 Ilinden Uprising. I gave up religion, because I was very sad and to this day I carry guilt towards my father, Pop Gligor Gaidov, who was very devout to the end of his life. My idea of God was that: God should be flawless and uniquely perfect and as we Communists used to say; God is not perfect. Only the communist leaders, born of the people, could have flawless and perfect qualities. But the worst thing about many villagers was not that they no longer wanted to believe in God, but that they had recently begun to lose faith in their communist leaders; the ‘new gods’.” Sotir had long ceased to believe in such gods. If I ever had the chance, I would ask him: “What do you think it means to have unhappy people? Wanderers!” We Macedonians still did not have such a great man who understood our needs, the misery of our people and who knew how to properly establish programs and national priorities for our nation. Later I was convinced that the communist movement (CPG) possessed such strategies, and most of those strategies converged with our national traditions (had the same purpose) but then the same CPG, after the Second World War, showed us Macedonians a different and very ugly face... Now, after the Belgrade agreement was concluded between Tito and Zahariadis, the Macedonian organizations NOF and AFZH were no longer relevant to the CPY or to the CPG. It seems that both wanted them crushed and made incapable of creating a “new national consciousness” outside of their Parties. The CPG continued to invent problems with the Macedonians creating arguments and counter arguments pushing the Macedonian people to falsify their own history and to gradually discard significant fragments from their centuries old national heritage. For example, all Macedonians who were mobilized in the ranks of DAG, the CPG called “Slavo-Macedonians”. But the frightening thing about that was that the CPG expected these so-called “Slavo-Macedonians” to speak only Greek and only use their Greek names when they were sent to Headquarters in southern Greece. These people in the CPG had slowly become “our” gods and the “bosses” of our NOF and AFZH Organizations in all of our Macedonian villages. These people were asking the Macedonian people to become disciples of Marx. These same people, through NOF and AFZH, convinced us that religion, ethnicity and myth were pre-industrial forces which would lose their importance as factors of historic change. They used propaganda against the basic principles of conservatism, perfectly placed by William Faulkner who said: “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”

Now these very same people preached SOVIET-IZATION, a strange idea, given that Macedonia and the Macedonian people were divided and that their unifying factors were the CPY and the CPG, which were based on...? “God help us all!” Were they now implementing ideas born of Tito and Stalin? It seems that they were manipulating thoughts and feelings and creating double creatures and double faces out of the Macedonian villagers and slowly making them do things that had nothing to do with our interests.

3.

One day Sotir Gaidov was sitting alone under the big tree in the village square looking at its grandiose branches. He had an expression of wonder and disbelief on his face; looking like he had been cheated. He sometimes sat under the old tree until it was dark, scrolling through his notes and searching for recollections of what he had already read and feeling as if history had just thundered by his side: Ilinden was so heroic, so great, yet so little was known. But now, years later, he looked at allegiances and loyalties with bitterness. He felt pain in his soul and he could not believe the actions of the AFZH activists, always eager to recruit more Macedonian women so that they could push them into the fire of a most disgusting type of war. The kind of war that would leave the Macedonian house desolate, the Macedonian family and its traditions of matriarchate disfigured. And this was not done by Greeks. The Greeks didn’t have the desire to form such organizations that would push Greek women into hatred and into a murderous war. Sotir Gaidov thought about this a great deal. He thought about how Tito’s Yugoslavia had pushed us into an undesirable situation; a situation not chosen by the will of the Macedonian people but a situation that would slowly and slyly push us into genocide. Sotir stared at me coolly without saying a word. He looked very tired. Obviously he had endured a lot, all those years, closed in and isolated in those dry rocky Greek islands. I looked at him and respectfully asked: “Is there something you want to tell me?” Silently he shook his head and then said: “Nothing boy, I have nothing to tell you…” as though he lacked the words and the energy to speak, he continued to look at me with grace and confidence, as an old friend of my father’s and of our family. He and my father were baptized in the same water when they were babies. I went closer to greet him and said: “It looks to me like you want to say something…” Sotir went deep into thought. I then said: “Will you at least allow me to ask you something I have wanted to ask you for a long time?” “Okay,” he said, so I continued: “Do you think that we Macedonians, with NOF and AFZH in place, will be able to determine our own future or will their actions make us disappear and be uprooted from the land of our great grandfathers?” Sotir shook his head and began to talk: “Ah, I see that you too are feeling the same? Politics are a really cruel thing, you’re here today gone tomorrow. It is sad that now, after the Second World War, we are being cheated with NOF and AFZH. We are being cheated because, as you know, the world is polarized, divided by large forces and the Iron Curtain has been lowered. It should be clear to us Macedonians, that by what NOF and AFZH are doing we could end up starting a new war for which, I am afraid, we will be sacrificing ourselves for foreign interests. Today the whole world knows that Tito (CPY) and Zahariadis (CPG) got together in Belgrade and made plans to start a Civil War in Greece but where were the Macedonians while these plans were made? Worse than that is that after Tito and Zahariadis made these plans, Kolishevski (CPM) in Skopje gathered all the NOF and AFZH leaders and told them: ‘Now you can go back to Aegean Macedonia and take orders from the CPG and please trust them because their policies regarding Macedonian issues are clear. Any question that may arise will be decided by the leadership of the Party. Be careful not to splinter as a faction within the Party and always stay under the leadership of the CPG. Work hard towards strengthening your unity with the Greek people and fight any and all forces against chauvinism, separatism and localized tendencies.’ This is exactly what was placed around our necks and how the ideological noose of communism was then tightened. This noose or slave chain was created by the CPY and bound around our necks by Kolishevski and the CPM, plunging us into this cruel, bloody and Godless Greek Civil War which, why it took place, is unclear to this day.

Would you or anyone believe that Lazo Kolishevski did not know what he was doing? Did Kolishevski not know that all the ideological leaders of the Greek Civil War were Greeks? Did Kolishevski really believe that more than 70% of the war participants were colonists (Pontians or Madzhiri) brought to Macedonia in 1924? Or did he really not know that we Macedonians did not participate in CPG policy making, or that there was not a single Macedonian in the politburo or sitting on the CPG’s Central Committee? How could Kolishevski not have known that there was not a single Macedonian in the list of senior personnel (generals, colonels and political commissars) at General Headquarters that led DAG? I am sure Kolishevski knew all of these things! Why then did he give NOF and AFZH instructions to ‘induct’ the entire Macedonian nation en masse under his slogan: ‘Not a single Macedonian must be found outside of the Organizations NOF and AFZH!’ And the basic message passed on to the Macedonian people: ‘WHO, IF NOT US?’ And ‘WHEN, IF NOT NOW?’ By doing this under Kolishevski’s directive, we, the Macedonians under Greece, gave the Greeks and the CPG reason to commit “soft ethnic cleansing” against our organizations and against our people. Was there no one among us able to see what was happening there? I guess we were too busy running to the CPY and to the CPG for answers! It seems to me that this was one of the worst and deadliest ideological frauds committed against us in the history of our existence. What do you think?” Sotir looked at me curiously and before I had a chance to answer, he said: “Ever since the world came into existence, there existed a type of people whose main preoccupation was allegiance. They were a congenial element regardless of their gender. Well, now we have the people of AFZH. But among the activists of NOF and AFZH there are also those who are intoxicated with their own power and those who have forgotten what was done to the Macedonian people and who have lost contact with reality. The power that these leaders possess, regardless of the level they are at or the leadership role they play comes from their supporters, in whose basis lays the character of distribution of power which, among other things, is self regenerating the moment they profit from it, especially those who do not directly possess any power. These types of personalities have little concern for whether they have real friends, sincere partners, close people with whom they can share sorrow, pain, or joy. People who talk about things usually talk about things that concern them, that bother them. They talk about things that hurt them, make them anxious and insecure and disappoint them. Now, after this, there will be new ways to communicate between us Macedonians. We will be saying to each other: Who are you and to whom do you belong? And with whom have you been so far? And above us there will be those who

will fight for a new order and demand a servile attitude from us Macedonians. To understand the causes and Tito’s motive for involving himself in Greek affairs after the Second World War, requires thorough research. To assume that the Yugoslav leaders acted on internationalist impulses alone is not very convincing. Why? Because most problems began to intensify in the fall of 1948, just after Yugoslavia started to lean more towards the Western powers. For us Macedonians, this new world is a big aggressive arena, or perhaps it was always like that, but now for the first time I see things up close and I understand that the stronger you are the more aggressive you appear, the bigger muscles you have the more intimidating you look. A new world is being created in which there is no place for small nations, no place for honesty and innocence and no place for principles. Wars are now managed by the great powers and small nations have to adapt or be left out of the ring. That is exactly what I wanted to say, which directly applies to our NOF and AFZH. If they do the right thing and give up this ‘adventure’ perhaps they may save our people and preserve our fatherland. History has taught us that many such people played key roles in the fate of the Macedonian people, of course, always with negative consequences. As times change they too need to adapt, to take a particular form, but remain essential in order to survive in the stinking armpits of foreigners. Circumstances may have been different in other times, but nonetheless, they present themselves during wars as they have today, after this war. Today, it seems, circumstances appear to manifest themselves periodically, as required. This, it seems, is done in turbulent times, when the world is divided into spheres of influence by the great powers. Many key decisions have been made and important events have taken place that have affected the fate of many European people, all this done in the interest of the great powers in a world in which it would be difficult to see what future there is for the Macedonian people. I am saddened by NOF’s and AFZH’s lack of attention, naivety and mindlessness. They are drunk on someone else’s power and propaganda and are unable to see the brutal and the painful side of what they are doing. The principles of dominance of the bullies are again coming to the surface. Belgrade and the CPG have put a lot of pressure on the weak NOF and AFZH activists to join DAG and to make fundamental changes to Macedonian national programs. Today’s scum, coming out of the bowels of the Rudino villagers, are part of the Macedonian people and are disguised in various forms ranging from “quasi-revolutionaries” to old “political figures”. They are predominantly led by local Balkan centres of power and work in local Party centres similar to those of NOF and AFZH.

Such people work from the inside and understand the mentality of our people, they know their habits, ways of thinking. This makes them very dangerous. They know how to influence and wait for the signal, the red light, and upon receiving the signal they immediately go into action doing their part. They deliver blows from the inside because they know where it hurts the most. Their goal is to exhaust our people and bring them to their knees. Those were the instructions given, particulary to those who had come from Yugoslavia, to open the doors for the Greek reactionaries so that they could take bloody revenge against ordinary and innocent Macedonian villagers. And that is exactly what they did!

4.

With victory over fascism, the Varkiza agreement was signed, which called for ELAS to surrender its arms and for the installation of a new Greek government in Athens. A police force and units of the national defense force were installed throughout Greece. The British installed a new government in Greece and gave its security forces the authority to liquidate what they considered to be ‘enemy elements’. The new gendarmes started arresting people and charging them with murder. Soldiers and gendarmes continued to seek and destroy communist paraphernalia and pictures of Stalin and other communist leaders. The National Guard went on various military expeditions harassing villages, beating people, arresting without warrants, pillaging and burning houses and killing people. Frightened by these sudden and unprovoked attacks, many villagers fled their villages and took to the mountains to hide; abandoning their jobs, homes and families. A great and inhuman terror against the population was initiated in Greece particularly against ELAS, against Macedonian organizations and especially against those Macedonians who wished to maintain their Macedonian identity. The terror was mainly carried out by the special units brought to Greece from Cairo along with the King and the dictator Georgios Papandreou. The special units were trained to fight against guerrillas and as such were named “Mavroskufides” (Black Hats) who persecuted the population without mercy. Many people were beaten and shot and many more were imprisoned without trial. They did this to make it easier for the state apparatus to consolidate its power over the people. This great “tromokratia” (national terror) was especially aimed against those who participated in the so called “SNOF” movement who were hunted down and murdered without mercy. It was this “national terror” that sparked the so-called Greek Civil War which divided our people, destroyed families, kinship and friendships and ultimately pushed us onto the brink of extinction, making many of us permanent wanderers of the planet. One side of our divide, people said the communists were the real patriots and “saviors of our nation” and the other side said that these people were just “commie” traitors. The villagers caught in the middle were always disillusioned, always looking behind their shoulders, always being careful not to say anything that might be misunderstood. One word out of place and they might lose their head or their house may be burned down. It was exactly at those times when they needed help from NOF and AFZH. Unfortunately at exactly those times NOF and AFZH were unable to help them.