CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE

LEAVING THEIR BIRTHPLACE

The child refugee evacuation program was well-planned, well-organized and even better executed when it came to ethnically cleansing the Macedonian refugee children from Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia.

EVACUATION OF THE CHILDREN

In one of his manuscripts, Macedonian historian Dr. Risto Kiriazovki, among other things, wrote about the evacuation of the refugee children from Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia and described the reasons for it. As an expert of historical events in this period of time in Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia, he attributed the following to the children’s exodus and uprooting from their homes:

“In the spring of 1948 the two warring parties: DAG on one side and the Athenian government on the other, had it in their plans to have a mutual showdown in 1948, by which they were going to take tens of thousands of children from their parental embrace, mostly from the Aegean (Greek occupied) part of Macedonia, and send some over the borders and the others into Greece and the Greek islands.

Both sides were claiming that their actions were motivated by humanitarian reasons and that they would yield poisitive results. They were claiming that the children would be rescued from the throes of the civil war and would be evacuated to conditions that had been created to gain all levels of vocational education. The evacuation was not an exodus, as it was purported to be, but a well-planned, well-organized and even better implemented act.

There is no question that the children were rescued from the horrors of the civil war but their removal from their home, in the end, contributed to the ethnic cleansing of the Macedonians from Aegean (Greek occupied) Macedonia.”

In addition to the above, Dr. Kiriazovski wrote:

“One of the essential reasons for the evacuation of the children was to create conditions for solving the problem of DAG reserves and new fighters. Exempting the parents from child care allowed them to be mobilized in the war effort and in the upcoming tough and decisive battles in Western Aegean Macedonia. And that is exactly what took place. Immediately after the child evacuation, new mobilizations took place and all those citizens who, up to this point, were not mobilized were sent to DAG’s ranks and to its auxiliary units. During the great Gramos offensive, in the summer of 1948, the entire free territory was turned into a workshop in which all people incapable of carrying a weapon were put to work for DAG. Women’s teams were formed to transfer the wounded, deliver weapons and ammunition to the fronts, dig trenches, make bread, fish in Lake Prespa and so on.

In 1948, while preparing its calculations and implementation plans, the CPG leadership spoke about evacuating the children. On January 30, 1948 Petros Roussos, a CPG representative, was tasked in seeking help from the Yugoslav authorities. He requested that Yugoslavia accept some of the children from the Aegean free territory who, unfortunately, suffered from hunger and lack of clothing. Telegrams with similar requests were also sent to other people’s democratic countries.

On February 15, 1948 Yiannis Ioannidis, Vice President of the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece, arrived in Belgrade where he discussed the children’s evacuation with Yugoslav authorities. After Ioannidis received consent from the Yugoslavs and from other people’s democratic countries, on February 21, 1948 the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece decided to evacuate the children, particularly from the hot areas where fierce fighting between DAG and government forces was most likely to take place. The CPG leadership’s position and motivation for the evacuation was explained as a need to rescue the children from the horrors of war and this, the CPG claimed, was done at the request of the parents.”

Dr. Kiriazovski also wrote:

“On March 7, 1948 the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece Ministry of Internal Affairs issued the following statement: ‘The people and the organizations that provide care and protect the children in free Greece, as well as thousands of parents and guardians, have long addressed the aid organizations and the people’s democratic countries with appeals urging them to provide care and protect the Greek children who are in danger of starvation and barbarism from the Monarcho-Fascists. Aid agencies, organizations for the protection of children, as well as youth organizations in these countries, with extraordinary joy and satisfaction, have accepted these pleas and have decided to look after the Greek children for as long as they need it’.”

The Provisional democratic government seeing that a disastrous policy had been put in place in Greece, since 1945 by foreigners and local exploiters, and that this policy had been systematically enforced and implemented by the Monarcho-Fascists, which had become a burden on the people and their property, and which had reduced opportunities for adequate nutrition for their children, decided to organize a broad campaign among the general population with aims at convincing parents to not only accept the idea of the evacuation but to make it look like it was their idea. This resulted in parents sending written requests to have their children evacuated.