X. AS ALWAYS “THE EARTH WILL CONTINUE TO REVOLVE” - Part 02

- It was difficult to get arms. However, we quickly managed to train the second unit to fight. Its success was talked about and celebrated far and wide. But then another order arrived and the second unit was ordered to leave for Karakamen Mountain where it was going to be placed under the disposal of the Sixteenth Regiment!

There were no armaments for the four remaining units. Only those fighters who brought their own weapons were armed. Altogether, about two hundred fighters were without weapons. I told Dzhodzho: “I believe they were lying to you when they told you that you would be at the helm of a Macedonian battalion. We are only here to attract Macedonian fighters for someone else to command. You, as a

member of the CPG Bureau for Macedonia and Thrace, deserve better. It looks like they are punishing you. But the most unacceptable thing about all this is that we Macedonians are given the role of idiots: We are luring Macedonian fighters into the ranks of the Macedonian army and sending them to fight as a Greek army. In fact, the right of our people to fight for themselves, for their own sake, for their freedom, has been taken away. The Macedonians fighters who have taken on the lion’s share of this fight, and have suffered immensely as a result, are being represented as Greeks!”

Dzhodzho did not answer me. A bit later he said: “For what they failed to do in Voden about two months ago, last May, they are doing now through us in Karadzhova, Meglen Region!” He then explained to me in detail how and why the formation of the “special unit” in Voden did not work out.

We decided to act openly and resolutely as Macedonians in Voden. We also informed Foundoulakis about this and he agreed. The result is well-known: The second unit never left for Karakamen. But:

- It received a new order: Do not accept new volunteers… The new volunteers were to be sent to the ELAS Greek units and, if they refuse… send them back to their villages... This was an unequivocally anti-Macedonian act, undertaken with an obvious goal - to prevent the further growth of the Macedonian military force. And as is well-known, the Lerin-Kostur Macedonian Battalion received the same order. And the worst of it is:

After the Macedonian battalions quickly and efficiently broke up the autonomist movement and its organized military force - the counter-bands, they themselves were dissolved. According to Markos:

“The CPG Central Committee Politburo, with a confidential letter to the commissar of ELAS 28th regiment, ordered the Macedonian battalion to be moved to the south, and to ultimately be disarmed because it posed a danger to Greece!” (From Markos’s biography, p. 75.)

This, of course, is not true. The two Macedonian battalions posed no military danger to ELAS or endangered Greece in any way. What

worried the Greeks was that the Macedonian battalions going through the Macedonian villages and interacting with the Macedonian people brought such joy and boldness into the hearts of the oppressed Macedonians and ignited their revolutionary spirits. This, the Greek leaders interpreted as “leading nationalist propaganda” and “awakening nationalism among the Macedonian people”, which was severely interfering with the image of the “Greek character” of Macedonia. This was a strong development of the Macedonian liberation movement, as the Greeks later openly admitted during the CPG Central Committee Twelfth Plenum, held in June 1945, when they declared that the territorial integrity of the Greek state was threatened (ΤΟ ΚΚΕ ΑΠ ΤΟ 1931-1952, p. 110). Later, the CPG Central Committee, at its September 12, 1951 meeting, confirmed that the CPG leadership was afraid that “Tito wanted to join Aegean Macedonia to Yugoslavia” through NOF (p. 271). The CPG also spoke about this publicly during its 6th Plenum held in October 1949 when it said that it had discovered that “Tito was making war plans against Greek Macedonia…” This, according to the same Greeks, would have jeopardized the Greek positions and Greek “national” interests in Macedonia. The battalions had to be disbanded as soon as possible and this mass Macedonian revolutionary movement had to be extinguished… This, however, was in direct contradiction to the EAM and ELAS official program, which now ignored the existence of the Macedonian people and did not foresee any democratic rights for them…

This was also in direct contradiction to CPG Central Committee’s statements made through its central organs, the magazine KOMEP and the newspaper Rizospastis in which, a while ago the CPG declared to the world through its Tenth Plenum and through the Lebanon Agreement, that today Macedonia is as Greek as the district of Attica... (See COMEP, No. 16, August 1943, p. 331-332.) Let us also not forget the famous thesis that appeared in the summer of 1943 in “Rizospastis” which proclaimed that: “After the exchange of populations, Macedonia is as Greek as Attica…!” And in Attica, of course, one cannot even imagine finding a single Macedonian or non-Greek person. So, according to the CPG, there were no Macedonians in Macedonia…!

The Lerin-Kostur Macedonian Battalion managed to survive in the field barely two months, from August 2, 1944 (when Renos created it) until the beginning of October 1944. The Voden Macedonian Battalion lasted from June 16, 1944 to October 12, 1944. To avoid colliding with Greek forces, which had aims to dissolve them, the Macedonian battalions were forced to retreat to the other (Yugoslav) part of Macedonia...

These are the facts…