TIME FOR DESIRE AND LOST ILLUSIONS - HUNGRY FOR OUR NATIVE LAND

TIME FOR DESIRE AND LOST ILLUSIONS - HUNGRY FOR OUR NATIVE LAND

After the Greek Civil War ended the Macedonian people who left Greek occupied Macedonia were left with nothing except their desires. But as it turned out, life soon taught them that even that was too much to ask. No wonder they became so unhappy.

Many Macedonians have pondered: “I fought to the end of the war but without knowing why. Nobody recognized my contributions, not my history and not the Greek history which the communists wrote…”

The burden is heavy and hard to bear but we carry this burden and we bear it every day.

NEWS: THE NEWSPAPERS “POLITIKA” - BELGRADE AND “NOVA MAKEDONIJA” – SKOPJE

(August 23, 1992)

Tito put a “freeze” on the Aegean Macedonians.

In order to have a secret and lasting union with Greece, 42 years ago Tito ordered Yugoslavia not to raise any questions regarding the fate of the Aegean Macedonians in northern Greece; a practice which lasted many decades.

Explanation: “In the summer of 1950, Tito decided to solve his problem with Greece and benefit Yugoslavia immensely. This was done through an agreement with his old military contact Fitzroy McLean. McLean arrived in Brioni in June 1950 as an unofficial representative of the British government, prepared and empowered to make Tito an offer if the results of his talks with him were favourable. The talks went better than expected and an agreement was reached but was kept secret. The British promised Yugoslavia 30 million pounds worth of aid and a loan of 11 million pounds…”

FROM THE MACEDONIAN ARCHIVES

In February 1953 talks took place in Ankara between Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey with aims at forming a tripartite Balkan Pact of Friendship.

In August 1954 the tripartite pact was amended, signed in Bled, Yugoslavia and put into effect as a military alliance between the three signatories.

The 1953 Balkan Pact was put in place in support of Yugoslavia because of threats directed against it by communist countries. The pact did not last long. In 1961 the three countries agreed that the Balkan pact was dead in the water.

Unfortunately the signing of the Balkan pact had undesirable consequences for the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia because, in order to placate Greece, Yugoslavia

dissolved the “Association of Macedonians from Aegean Macedonia” and shut down the newspaper “Voice of the Aegeans”.

News: “Utrinski” newspaper – Skopje

CIA Facsimile of a document disclosed: CONTINUING SATELLITE AID TO THE GREEK GUERRILAS. CIA HISTORICAL REWIEW PROGRAM RELEASE IN FULL -central intelligence agency:

Secret CIA documents about Tito, Yugoslavia and the Greek Civil War

Title: - Clash between Tito and Stalin left the Macedonians in Greece in a lurch.

What were CIA impressions about Macedonia and about Belgrade-Sofia relations?

Title: - Independent Macedonia major threat to Tito during Inforburo days.

Deportation: According to a 1949 CIA report about Macedonia, if Tito was faced with a serious threat in 1949 by the establishment of an independent Macedonian state, Tito was prepared to organize mass deportations of Macedonians to other parts of Yugoslavia…

“… There are CIA documents relating to the Greek Civil War, dating from 1946 to 1949 that give new meaning to events from that period. U.S. intelligence information clearly shows that the then Yugoslavia and Macedonia, as part of the federation, actively participated in and aided the rebel movements in northern Greece. The subsequent withdrawal of Yugoslav support and the defeat of the communist guerrillas, the CIA attributes largely to the conflict between Tito and Stalin.”

(August 8 and 9, 2005)

Who should answer for the history of the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia, a country of unhappy people with a

dark fate? We are people, victims without a history; no history in the Republic of Macedonia and no history in Greece. We also seem to have a long amnesia among ourselves because we continued to keep silent for more than half a century allowing strangers to manipulate us and take over our lives! The world changed many times over the past 60 years and yet to this day we remain silent…

For more than half a century now I have asked myself the following questions: Why did the Communist Party of Macedonia allow both the CPY and the CPG to sacrifice the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia? Why have we allowed official history to claim that we do not exist! How is that even possible? Why have we allowed our enemies to drag us through the mud without reacting! Are we that incapable? Are we, the brave warriors who threw ourselves into the fire and fought like lions, actually afraid to speak up when it comes to our identity?

Why did the CPM allow NOF to fall into the CPY and CPG’s vice grip and find itself in a position of having to walk along the razor’s edge?

Did the CPM not know what NOF was doing for the CPY and later for the CPG? Because the more we look at this the more we realize that the “meaningless chaos” in Greek occupied Macedonia was planned well in advance and that in order to do what the planners wanted, they needed NOF and AFZH to fulfill their strategic interests and objectives. That is why NOF and AFZH were created on April 23, 1945 and their objectives were dictated by outsiders until October 16, 1946!

In other words, we do not need great wisdom and analytical skills to arrive at the conclusion that the “conditions for legal persecution and expulsion of the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia” were created and organized through NOF and AFZH. This crime cannot be hidden and is very difficult to forget.

We cannot believe that the CPM, standing between the CPY and the CPG, was totally unaware of what was being done to the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia and neither can we dismiss the idea that that CPM was not party to it!

Was the CPM leadership blind and deaf to the ideological activism of strangers, spreading propaganda like a malignant disease of the soul, in the years 1944-1950 or was it simply stupid...?

Why did we discard the alternative of having not to fight at all? It would have been “less glorious” but at least we would have preserved ourselves and our homes. Today our villages would have been full of Macedonian people. It seems that every time we are pushed by outsiders to “do something” we end up losing more and more of ourselves and of our home! Today we are being pushed to change our country’s name! What disasters will await us tomorrow if we do that? So the pushing from the outside by outsiders, as it turns out, is not done only in war times, it is done all the time. That is why it is “very important” for us to learn from our history and from our own experience “not to trust outsiders and do things suggested by them” before thinking of all the consequences. We need to learn to think for ourselves and do only what is right for us and do only things that we are capable of tackling on our own…

In the end, I know that “we” were responsible for our own defeat because we did not resist against those who we truly needed to resist. To trust maybe a noble thing but it can often get you into trouble because those you trust may not be trustworthy, even if they are your own kind! There will always be scammers and extremely unscrupulous people out there who look for ways to gain advantage over us and, as history has shown, they will gain advantage over us if we allow them to. So you see the victim too has a role in this and the victim’s role is to “not” allow themselves to become a victim and for that, one has to be wise and far seeing. When will we wise-up as to what has been happening to us over the years? Well, I would have to say that that depends entirely on us! I can tell you one thing; there will always be scammers “buyers for our souls”… We need to learn to recognize them before they get us into trouble… The answer is in our history… We just have to start paying attention…