THIRD REVIEW

THIRD REVIEW

With a personal view of the manuscript “Идеолошкиот активизам над Македонците под Грција” (Ideological Activism -Macedonians under Greece 1945-1949) by Stoian Kochov.

Reviewer: Iagnula Paskal Kunovska M.A.

Revolution or fraud! This is the dilemma that Stoian Kochov had the courage to tackle. He was the first author that dared to put it in written words; to place it before the consciousness of the people; in front of all us who, in the last long fifty years of history, kept silent, behaving like hypocrites, keeping our eyes closed over our own destiny and over the abyss at whose edge we are still hanging.

Back – following the historical footsteps of our destruction, Kochov has returned us to our past, to the facts which clearly have brought us standing before the Macedonian people of that period, before the Macedonian people under Greece and before the Greek Civil War of 1945-1949. Kochov has helped us gather our forces, alone by ourselves to recognize and to admit to ourselves that we are the people who suffered this tragedy, we are the people who were

victimized and driven out of our ancestral homes as a direct consequence of the past. Today we are facing the truth and gaining courage to stand up and mention that Solun, Kostur, Lerin, Voden… are our cities and we have no right to abandon them because that’s where our homes are, built and left there for us by our Macedonian ancestors… built on our own soil.

The tireless and truth-seeking Kochov, who himself has experienced this tragedy, cast aside the set dilemma and offered us incontrovertible historical and political facts about the Greek Civil War and its tragic effects on the Macedonian people under Greece. He explicitly chose to research the Greek Civil War and DAG because of his own suffering and because of the many sacrifices, or (self) sacrifices as he calls them, that were made of so many Macedonian people. In that sense Kochov calls for casting out the forged historical lies, which have plagued us until now and which have turned us all into victims.

This labour, which is an elaboration on the Macedonian literature with content the author is particularly interested in, because it relates to the history of the Macedonian people from the Aegean part of Macedonia, in the first part, through reviews, emphasizes not only the value of literary works with Aegean topics, but especially stresses his love and grief as a first hand witness in the tragedy of his own people. He presents a mature historical commentary of facts with documents that he tirelessly researched and collected, in order to place them before the public. His passion for this work is a result of personal pain. He has a need to expose us all to the documented actions of our past. He wants us to know that, contrary to the strategy directly related to the process of self-destruction of the Macedonian nation - a nation that has experienced genocide and manipulations which have stayed with him to this day. It is a fact that the consequences of the Greek Civil War have been exploited politically and twisted to fit in our historiography and literature that was been written for those motives.

The author pays special attention and appeals to everyone to toss aside the “revolutionary pride” of the Macedonian people that have been lied to; of the Macedonian people that have been manipulated and sacrificed in an unspeakable tragedy which, up to now, has been

shamelessly promoted as “History of Aegean Macedonia”. This was done by people who used our tragedy for their own gains, who prospered from them for more than 50 years. There is nothing for us, the victims of this tragedy, of which to be proud!

Appalled by this incomprehensible deception, the author asks: -How is it possible? - Referring to the political manipulation of the sufferers. In that sense, the second part of his book is a pictorial history, a whirlwind of claims that politics can proudly manipulate human destiny. So consequently processed by the rise and fall of activism, which as a battle cry, sought justice with fire and sword and took us all to hell, to the evil that we call self-extermination.

Where was the national strategy? - asks the author, more for the sake of our readers, fearing that many still find “cosmopolitanism” charming despite the havoc it left us in, not only in our homeland, but also in the minds of all of us who were permanently exiled.

Stoian Kochov, like the Bible, has reminded us that time is an objective judge and that the silence must soon come to an end… because the universal maxim is - to start talking, we owe it to our history, to our case and to our tragedy.

The genocide which we experienced in the name of some option for Macedonian national interests does not exist for the author! We thought, said Kochov, that we fought for our national interests and option but without a strategy, therefore we only fought and gave our lives in defense of the Communist ideology, for someone else’s interests.

Who activated and for what purpose was the “Macedonian syndrome” of self-destruction activated, asks the author. And as the champion of truth, Kochov, in a loud and clear voice discloses his findings before the present and future generations. We have been the victims of alien ideological ploys and the CPM was just a bridge between the CPY and the CPG, which wittingly or unwittingly played a role in the destruction of its own people. Oh, is there a greater evil?

If we were blind and deaf for the last 50 years, and if we are still the same today, then what will we offer our future generations? Asks the author with a tone of fear.

As dramatic as his well-founded fear may be, Kochov points to the fact that the Macedonian fighters who fought in this war were never led by Macedonian generals - there were none. The Macedonian fighters were entrusted to Markos, not a Macedonian but a Madzhir dog, a settler and colonist, a Turkish Christian immigrant from Asia Minor, planted in Macedonia to turn Macedonians into Greeks. And did we expect him to solve our age old Macedonian national Question in our favour? As the leader of the armed struggle his plan, unfortunately, was to bring us our destruction. He waited 50 years and, just before he died in 1992, he told us what his true role was in that conflict. He said: “My role in that struggle was to drive the Slavo-Macedonians out of the northern parts of Greece. We were killing Slavs (Macedonians) in order for Macedonia to remain Greek.”

And this is how this Madzir dog, or Greek by birth, General Markos was prepared to solve the Macedonian national Question. And we, the Macedonian army, gave ourselves to him to lead us to our death.

Do you need more evidence of this? Then just pick up Kochov’s book and read on. You will find out it was strangers and outsiders that led the said struggle and that their objectives had far reaching consequences - to exterminate the Macedonian national potential, to destroy a lasting testament to a people who have lived in their ancestral homes for centuries.

But where were the Macedonians…, our own leaders? The author openly asks this in order to emphasize the fact that they were nowhere to be found because there were none. The strategists who planned this conflict did not want Macedonians at the helm. There was no place for Macedonian leaders in this Macedonian tragedy. And those who were supposedly “leaders” had no power to act and operated as someone else’s obedient, deaf and dumb servants... After the Greek Civil War they too were collected and cast out and, when they eventually returned to the Republic of Macedonia, took it

upon themselves to write “the heroic history of the winners...” in which they hid our national curse and our genocide.

All those strong leaders of ours, in the name of their simplicity, never did find the strength to name, to call the uprooting of our people from their fatherland for what it was, a genocide which began with the Greek Civil War and lasted to this day; the same as the half century of silence and hidden truth.

No one – said author Stoian Kochov - to date has asked – until when are we going to maintain silence about our tragedy. No one has asked what to call the evil that befell the Macedonian people under Greece, the evil that is still ongoing, thanks to our false pride, silence and absence of self-awareness.

It is easy to say “I am proud that I was a Communist...” But what would be decent for this proud communist is to admit that she was wrong and to bear responsibility for her mistakes. Their actions had consequences and they had the opportunity all these years to correct their mistakes from which an entire nation, an innocent population, had suffered.

The author remembers with bitterness the pain from his own words saying that there was no longer a need for silence. There was no need to forget the fact that the Macedonians have taken our own children from the arms of their mothers in the name of the revolution. We sent them to the mountains to fight for socialism. And without morals and scruples, like complete fools without conscience, we allowed our own children to be taken away from us and sent away to roam the world with no chance of ever returning home. We sent them away to grow up like orphans in foreign countries, to never be embraced and comforted by their mothers. And this is how our homes became empty, says the author, and this is how life and our century old voices were extinguished in our villages… This is how we helped the Greeks to keep the spoils they so easily won in 1913 via the Bucharest Treaty, when 51% of our Macedonia was handed to them and again in 1919 in Versailles. We in fact struggled for our own destruction, we sent our own children to an early grave… and for what? For the freedom of Greece… and

so that the Greeks could bulldoze all those graves and remove all traces that we ever existed…

All we have now, thanks to our “proud” people, are only the memories and shame of “defending” our Macedonia dressed in DAG uniforms. And this exactly is the truth about the proud upstanding Macedonian! - says author Stoian Kochov whether you like it or not. Even if this hurts someone’s “pride”, which the Siberians called “a shameful end”, then so be it!

Regardless of the fact that many people may find it difficult to understand; i.e. that they did bad things when they were called to do good things for their people in the name of the truth of the Macedonians from Aegean Macedonia, for the simple reason that they should not only have be there physically, present among their people, but they should have been there psychologically and should have helped prevent our tragedy. They should have foreseen that our genocide was planned and should have done everything in their power to prevent it. They should have realized that only the Macedonian people rightfully can resolve the Macedonian Question and that a solution could not be imposed, especially by the unreliable Greeks… Unfortunately this is what happened and who is to be blamed for that? That is why today we need to be brave and face our tragedy – says the author – to learn from it so that it is never repeated. This is why we need to present to our people an impartial history, not a suppressed version of it...

The author feels beholden to himself and to his people despite the unfounded attacks on him as a writer and historian and on his brilliant book “(Self) sacrifice of the Macedonians under Greece”, which have caused him personal pain. He is forgiving and continues to work, free from influence and from the political interests of the day. His aim is to make his work, the archival material he has uncovered, available to the public and as such his work is invaluable.

The author has personally suffered immensely as a participant in DAG, which gives him the right to openly speak about his experience and voice his concerns. The pain and grief he feels has motivated him to not only become familiar with that part of our

history for himself but to also put his findings onto paper for us all; for our benefit.

Kochov does not want to hide the fact that we, the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia, have been driven out of our own country, from our ancestral lands, with our help, by being misdirected and manipulated. He also does not want to hide the fact that when we returned to the Republic of Macedonia, after the Greek Civil War ended, we were treated as second-class citizens and placed in ghettos...

His views – his facts and his analysis of the evil that was committed during the historical years of the Greek Civil War, are loud and clear. He adamantly disagrees with previous stated positions on our national historiography. The author, with his knowledge as a fighter of DAG, is telling us that the “class struggle” he fought in was never about liberating Macedonia and the Macedonian people as a nation, and therefore it makes no sense for us to be proud of a lie, a scam and what was perpetrated against us!

In the end, after 50 years of silence and untruths, the author openly welcomes historical corrections which provide a different light to what actually happened; the Macedonian syndrome of self-destruction.

Thanks to the daring move of this author, today the “white” pages of our history are open and as he himself says - like it or not – we will face the truth of our history – of our own destruction… this is the only way we can understand our age-old wish about a United Macedonia… which is not uprooted and it never will be…

Skopje, April 30, 1995

Sincerely, Iagnula Paskal Kunovska M.A.