BREAK UP OF TITO-STALIN RELATIONS AND THE END OF THE GREEK CIVIL WAR

BREAK UP OF TITO-STALIN RELATIONS AND THE END OF THE GREEK CIVIL WAR

“... The meeting that took place with Tito on May 5, 1949 was a prerequisite to McLean’s mission. It was a dinner meeting during which many issues and layers of issues were discussed concerning Yugoslavia and its position, i.e. relationship with the West. Some of

these issues applied to Greece. Tito did not hide the fact that he was of great help to the Andartes (DAG) in past years. But now the situation had changed and he said that Yugoslavia could not by itself refuse the right of asylum to political refugees. But those refugees were now kept deep inside the country and beyond the borders. It was understood that Tito could promise that in future he would not allow these people to return to Greece to resume fighting. And he would no longer provide any help to the Andartes (DAG). He also said that this information must not be revealed to the public because it would result in a very complex situation…” FO371/78716/R4691.

The Greek Civil War experience taught us to conform to the Party’s ideological orientation and that the “attitudes of the stronger are always better for us!”

Calling the people to join a national uprising is a virtue but it can also be a trap. It is a fact that NOF and AFZH did call on the Macedonian people living in Greece to massively fight in a national front for implementing their strategic goals. So the question is did NOF and AFZH have any guarantee that their goals were legitimate and supported by anyone? Did they consult with the Security Council or the United Nations or did they just leave that up to Greece and Yugoslavia? Did NOF and AFZH know that they were strictly controlled by the Balkan communist parties and could do nothing to achieve their own goals without CPY and CPG permission?!

There is no way they could not have known. Their directives came directly from the CPY and the CPG and did not necessarily align with Macedonian interests or with the Macedonian strategy (if there truly was a genuine Macedonian strategy). The Macedonians were basically used by the CPY and the CPG to benefit their own interests.

Since our Macedonian leaderships in NOF and AFZH did very little to escape the clutches of the CPY and CPG, perhaps because they were in no position to do so or because they didn’t want to try, means that they were willing to be ruled and be subservient souls. This proved to be true given the outcome of events which led the Macedonian people to their national defeat and genocide.

Which means that after the Second World War ended, and fascism and Nazism were defeated, people began to look forward to living in peace in a time where bloodshed would no longer be allowed. But by becoming involved in the Greek Civil War, a risky adventure, the Macedonians paid a heavy price and experienced ethnic cleansing and genocide. The Macedonian people, especially the Macedonian communists, should not have engaged themselves in this high-risk adventure. There would have been no Greek Civil War without the Macedonian participation. Had we not fallen under CPY and CPG control, things would have turned out differently. In defending the communist ideology, we lost four identity and our ancestral hearths forever. And because we did become involved we accepted blame for what happened to us. 23 This tragic affair unfortunately permanently entered the Macedonian consciousness…

What kind of people were these political strategists who planned all this, especially in the Balkans where historical fanaticism and various accumulated deadly ideologies existed? The Balkans were and have remained to be the region of conflict in Europe, especially

23 During World War II, when the Western Great Powers thought no Macedonians existed in Greek occupied Macedonia, English spies and military personnel dispatched to Greek occupied Macedonia to monitor the war situation discovered that Greece had been lying to them. Contrary to Greek claims that no Macedonians existed in Greece, a sizable Macedonian population, speaking the Macedonian language and aware of its Macedonian consciousness, was living in its territory. When the British found this out they again resumed their policy of extermination. Some people say the English must have panicked because of fear of Russian influence and the possibility of these people wanting to carve out “Greek territory”, but the truth is England never wanted a Greek Macedonia with Macedonians in it. So the English, as they had done in the past, decided that the Macedonian people had to go by any means possible. This information was later discovered in declassified British diplomatic dispatches in which the English wanted to expel 120,000 Macedonians en masse from their homes in Greek occupied Macedonia. In doing this the English requested the assistance of the fascist Yugoslav government before the communists came to power and received a positive response. The fascists agreed to take the Macedonians and resettle them on Yugoslav territory but Yugoslavia fell to the communists before this could happen and WW II ended. So, it would appear that the plan to rid the Macedonians from Greece was continued after WW II by instigating the so called Greek Civil War during which the CPG was led by Nikos Zahariadis, an English agent and Josip Broz Tito, head of the CPY.

the Western Balkans which have always been simmering potential trouble spots. What is even more bizarre is the fact that while these same strategists and politicians were engaged in building new “civilizations” in Siberia and in the Goli Otok, we, the Macedonians, in those same 55 years could not even assess if these people did more good or more evil to us? No! We all kept silent like dummies! There was safety in silence, especially after the 1953 Balkan 24 Agreement. There was a wall of silence after that for certain!

In every ordinary person exiled, there was only a small primordial desire: to remain Macedonian no matter how much suffering it took, just so that one day they could return to their own country and speak their own language and see their own family.

Unfortunately, those who physically divided Macedonia and the Macedonian people also wanted them spiritually divided and made sure that these people would never return and never have their desires fulfilled. This, unfortunately to this day, has been a problem for the Macedonian people not only in Greek occupied Macedonia but also outside.

Macedonia’s enemies, particularly Greece and Bulgaria, over the last century, have vilified the Macedonian people and are making sure “no one” is sympathetic to them! In fact the spiritual division of the Macedonian people is also an attempt at eliminating the Macedonian people’s integrated desires and vision of a single Macedonia.

24 In February 1953, tripartite talks on forming a Balkan Pact of Friendship between Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey were led in Ankara. In August 1954 the Pact was amended and put into effect after it was signed in Bled (Yugoslavia). The Pact was a military alliance between the three signatories. Unfortunately the 1953 Balkan Pact was a spur of the moment thing in support of Yugoslavia against threats directed against it by the communist countries and that is why it did not last long. In 1961 the three countries agreed that the Balkan Pact was dead in the water. But the Pact did have undesirable and lasting consequences for the Macedonian people. When Yugoslavia signed the Balkan Pact it made the following concessions to Greece: It dissolved the “Association of Macedonians from Aegean Macedonia” and shut down the newspaper “Voice of the Aegeans”.

A great number of arguments investigated in this write up are not part of the “official” history written about the “Aegeans”. Greece has completely omitted the Macedonian contribution on both sides of the war. In addition to Macedonians being mobilized in the resistance movement, the Greek government also drew on the Macedonian population by drafting Macedonians into its armed Greek government forces. That too was not mentioned in history. In fact all sides in the Greek Civil War today deny that Macedonians even existed! Macedonians on one side were deceived into joining a struggle which promised them freedom and self-determination; Macedonians on the other side were then forced into a draft to fight against the struggle; brother fighting against brother; husband fighting against wife; sister fighting against brother. When will all this come out? When will we wake up to the reality of what truly happened to us? This is what happens when you allow strangers to control your destiny and use and abuse you! All the things stated in this write up “did” happen to us Macedonians from Greek occupied Macedonia because we allowed ourselves to be placed in the hands of those who wanted to control our fate. We placed our trust in them, we placed our fate in their hands and they did what they wanted to do; destroy us! This is exactly what happened! Deeds speak for themselves!

The conflict between the two warring sides was supposedly a class struggle which had little meaning for the ordinary Macedonian who was living a self-sufficient life in the village, working for himself. So, how was this global project called socialism going to improve his life? Would the ordinary villager have been better off surrendering his grandfather’s fields to the state and working for the state? And what villager, if he had known this, would have willingly agreed to give up his meager ancestral possessions to a strange Greek or Yugoslav institution? So, you can see how the Macedonian people were lied to and duped into joining the struggle during the Greek Civil War. The ordinary Macedonian was told and believed that they were fighting for freedom and justice. He believed he was fighting to free himself from the injustices of the Greeks and the Greek state. Greek injustices pushed the Macedonian people into this war which began even before Macedonia was invaded, occupied and partitioned during the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. Attempts by Greek authorities to extinguish everything Macedonian and the

prejudices of Greek society against the Macedonians pushed the Macedonian people into this war because they were looking for a way out! They had had enough of Greece and the Greeks and took their chance to unshackle themselves from the Greek yoke, being totally unaware that all this was a ruse and that they were being set up for a big fall! If you don’t believe me then take a look at who was at the top leading this struggle and ask yourself, if not to get rid of the Macedonians then what were Markos and Zahariadis, both colonists from Asia Minor, fighting for? Were they fighting to help the Macedonians achieve their rights? What was their interest in that and how would they have benefited “helping” the Macedonians gain control of their territory, especially after they had colonized their lands? Or, to ask the question another way, what would have been more beneficial for the colonists, to drive the Macedonians out or to allow them to regain their lands which they lost to the very same colonists in the first place? I think the answer is obvious! Even Markos, on several occasions, had told the Macedonians not to be such dreamers!