FACTS AND ARGUMENTS ABOUT THE MACEDONIAN WARRIORS IN DAG - Part 02

the nose…? The CPY and the CPG! And when NOF was no longer needed its membership was discarded in the ideological waste basket… More precisely, the top leadership of NOF was sent to the Siberian prison camps… and not on vacation!

There was also a “third period” for NOF which lasted from the time it was disbanded on December 23, 1947 until DAG was liquidated on August 30, 1949. This was the time when NOF accepted the program of the Interim Democratic Government of Greece, a government that was not recognized anywhere in the world. A self-recognized government desperate to continue the struggle by further committing the Macedonian people to war and by offering them: “Equal rights as national minorities and freedom to carry out national activities!” if they won the war. (See: AE: 179/47.)

Even if NOF wanted to be independent, and there is no reason why it wouldn’t want to, both the CPY and the CPG carried big sticks. Those who had desires to stray from the CPY or CPG pre-prescribed path tended to disappear and were never seen or heard from again. So NOF closely followed the instructions given to it by the communist parties. And from what we found out from our research, there was also the carrot for those who “did as they were told”. The communists tended to reward those who were loyal to them with “Party perks” and “nice gestures”… for as long as they were useful. And of course when they were needed the most, these Parties invented new ways to keep them in line, like the CPG for example. When the CPG was in need of NOF it adopted the philosophical line: “… let them sleep for now and give them some attention to show that we care for them…” This, of course, was done intentionally in order to collectively silence the Macedonian consciousness. The communists also used other kinds of manipulation. Zahariadis was a master at creating mistrust between the various members of NOF… by telling one person what “bad things” another person had said about them and naming that person.

During this period of uncertainty the Macedonian people were played so well and so often that they had lost their sense of reality and had fallen into a state of exhaustion and despair. They lost many lives, they lost their children to the so-called “save the children program” and eventually they lost their homes and lands, the very

things they rose up and joined the struggle to protect… What was done to them was a disaster of national proportion… it left them scarred for life… They were made to feel guilty for what they had done, which threw them into a long silence… suffering in silence…

The “save the children program” or “pedomazoma” (children collection) as the Greeks called it, was another disaster that befell the Macedonian family.

“… Certainly one of those famous works referred to as rescue the children in conditions of war and all dangers and suffering. Both sides cannot ignore the human beliefs and arguments that the children were intentionally displaced. For the andartes (partisans) the children were considered a future human source to supply the military service. Since March 1949, UNSCOB had received many notifications and complaints that the children taken away were forced by the andartes to return to fight in their ranks. In 1948 there were expectations that the war was going to last a long time and the children would be needed for future recruitments. There were also numerous reports and credible evidence that many of these children were already returned to Greece to fight.” Lars Boerentzen.

Unfortunately the “real reasons” or the “whole story” behind the “save the children program”, is still “unknown” to us. Our memory and our “mixed up” history is “fussy” regarding this subject and we tend to believe only the propaganda that this was “truly a program to save the children” and not some “insidious” plan to use them for cannon fodder at some future time… even though some us saw some of these children with our own eyes, returned and killed in the battlefields…

If we look back into our history and if we understand what our predecessors stood for we would understand the meaning of the words “you can bend us but we will not break”. This is how we survived six centuries of Ottoman rule and managed to remain intact as a nation. But somehow all that changed when, during the Greek Civil War, we adopted the attitude that “you can break us but we will not bend”. This is how we lost many lives and were eventually driven out of our ancestral homeland and turned into eternal wanderers.

This “change of attitude” however was not by coincidence. We experienced national defeat and became eternal victims because we took the “easy” path chosen for us by those who wanted to do us harm. We were just “too proud” of what we were doing and failed to see where this pride was taking us. We only realized what was happening to us after DAG lost the war. We were told to expect victory; it was a matter of time and even after we gave it our all and everything we had, we still failed… unfortunately for some of us pride still stood in the way of seeing the truth…

Every DAG warrier since then has raised the question: “What communist party in this world has turned against its own members who died fulfilling its own objectives?”

What generals abandon their own army, leaving it to roam the world, and they return home as heroes?

Even today, why are the heirs of the old CPG afraid of telling the Greek people the truth about DAG and that a Macedonian identity exists in Greece?

But what is most tragic about this is that these people who were called DAG fighters, who were mobilized in the Greek Civil War by NOF and who were kicked out of their homeland, remained in limbo while the people of NOF who actually mobilized the fighters were allowed to return to Yugoslavia, i.e. to the Republic of Macedonia. And of course they were honoured when they returned. The fighters themselves and the thousands of refugees, including the children, the elderly, the infirm, the parents who lost their sons and daughters to the war, remained out there in the world under the collective status of “Greek political immigrants” stationed in various camps awaiting the end of their lives... Why were the leaders of NOF praised and treated honourably for their dismal failure to deliver what they promised the Macedonian people? And why were the fighters, the people who actually put their lives on the line for NOF abandoned and made to feel guilty for what they had done?

There is one plausible explanation for all this and the events that took place prove it, and that is that NOF did deliver on its

objectives. It delivered on the objectives of those who perpetrated the Greek Civil War, whose goal was to rid Greek occupied Macedonia of its Macedonian population… And that is exactly what happened!

I would agree with the “guardians” of the “History of the Aegean Macedonians”, only after they answer my questions instead of criticizing me for asking them. My intention here is not to use my research to judge these people, but as a learning document in search of the truth, no matter how bitter it might taste.

I believe that my two books “(Self) Sacrifice” and “Ideological Activism - Macedonians under Greece” are a modest contribution to future generations for better understanding the history of the Macedonian people. My intention for writing these books was simply to search for the truth about my people. One of the most important questions in my mind is to find out why, in the absence of an integral factor, did we allow the Greek Civil War to swallow us whole?

For example:

1. Why did the families of those who fought and lost their lives in this War end up being driven out of their homes en masse?

2. Why were the so-called Macedonian leaders of this alien ideological trap allowed to enter Yugoslavia and most of the active ordinary fighters found themselves in limbo all over the world?

3. We seem to know a great deal about the Jewish genocide in Srebrenica but almost nothing about our Macedonian genocide in Greece?

4. Why did the majority of ethnic Macedonians, referring to geographic and historic Macedonia, remain observers for the last half century and do nothing to stem the tide of our space becoming smaller?