A. PRIOR TO AND DURING THE NATIONAL LIBERATION WAR

A. PRIOR TO AND DURING THE NATIONAL LIBERATION WAR

“National minorities should not be a border problem. They should be a bridge between neighbouring states… they should not be a hindrance in relations with neighbours...

The people who would today treat Macedonia like it’s a non-historic community... would actually accept the bourgeoisie thesis of the past. They would deny the Macedonian people the ability to judge and decide for themselves. In other words the Macedonian people must be for the second time in one of the neighbouring nations -whether it is the Serbian, Bulgarian or Greek nation...

It has come out so that, for the Macedonians, others know more than the Macedonians themselves know, especially for that - what they need, and what they should not be doing...

There were times when Macedonia was seen only as a geographical term, a space to which all neighbours were entitled, which was to be filled with some other national content – but not Macedonians...”

Veliko Vlahovich

1. Macedonia and the Macedonian people have been a political illness for the CPG since the day it was formed. The Macedonian phenomenon has been a characteristic symptom of the “CPG affliction” since the day the CPG was created.

Let us briefly look at some of the more characteristic events in this relationship:

The CPG Founding Congress, in November 1918, in its program principles accepted the people’s right to self-determination. The CPG then called for the recognition of the Greek population living outside of Greece, in Albania (North Epirus) and on some of the islands.

But, at the same time, it ignored the Macedonian people, the non-Greek Slavic speaking people, who, only about five years ago (after the Balkan Wars), fell under Greek rule. The Party’s adopted program did not foresee any rights and freedoms for the Macedonian people living inside the Greek state. In fact, the CPG leaders took the same position as the domestic bourgeoisie whose slogan was “There are no Macedonians in Macedonia. No Macedonians exist in Greece as a non-Greek nation...”

2. Towards the end of 1924, during its CPG Third Congress, while aligning itself with the Comintern and with the Balkan Communist Federation line, in the presence of delegations from these forums, the CPG leadership recognized the Macedonian people’s right to self-determination and secession from the Greek state. The CPG agreed to the creation of a separate united Macedonian national state that included the parts of Macedonia that was occupied by all the Balkan bourgeoisie states…”

But, on November 7, 1926, during the next Greek parliamentary elections, the CPG leaders, led by Elefterios Stavridis, in their pre-election campaign, unveiled their official CPG program in which there was not a single word about any democratic rights and freedoms for the Macedonian people. Namely, they referred to the Macedonian voters as Greek people.

3. During the 1924 so-called renowned initiative to establish a united Macedonia by combining the three parts of Macedonia, it was decided to form a minority organization under the name “Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (United)” abbreviated as “IMRO (United)” whose purpose would be to help the Macedonian people, as well as other nationalities living in Macedonia, to advance the struggle for their liberation. The CPG leadership, unable to formally reject this proposal decided to accept it. Namely, they accepted to create an “IMRO (United)” organization in the Aegean (Greek occupied) part of Macedonia.

But, even many years later, the CPG still kept quiet about it and never did take any action to implement what it had promised.

4. Almost a decade later, and after some criticism and pressures from the Comintern and the Balkan Communist Federation, the CPG leadership was forced to create IMRO (United).

Nikos Zahariadis became CPG leader in the early 1930’s during which time he entrusted the task of forming IMRO (United) to Stelios Sklavenas, member of the CPG Central Committee Politburo (then publicly known as a renegade and provocateur). For as long as he was in Macedonia (Solun, Ber, Voden), from time to time, Sklavenas called formal but unproductive meetings with activists from the local population, mostly Macedonians. Then, when the CPG Central Committee Fifth Congress was convened, in March 1934, delegate K. Veriotis from Western Macedonia, where the Macedonian population was preserved in compact masses, announced the following:

“The CPG membership, here in Western Macedonia, felt that there should not be a ‘Macedonian question’ for the Party in Macedonia because apparently Macedonians do not exist as a self-recognized, non-Greek nation, that is, they have been immersed among the Greeks, and now feel they are Greek…” (see: “Μαρξιστικη βιβλιοθηκη”, no. 4/1934.)

This statement was well-calculated to give a false idea of the situation in the Aegean (Greek occupied) part of Macedonia, especially for the foreign delegates attending the Congress and for those abroad, that is, to explain why the CPG had not created the organization IMRO (United) for a whole decade. The CPG basically said: “Why create a Macedonian minority organization for a Macedonian minority that does not exist?!”

Of course, even today, and even more so then, all one had to do was visit one or more of the Macedonian villages in Lerin, Voden, Meglen or Kostur Regions and see if Macedonians existed or not. By visiting these places people could see for themselves the non-Greek people who wore non-Greek traditional folk costumes and spoke a non-Greek language. Even those people, who did speak

Greek, spoke it with an accent, like foreigners. All these visitors would need was five minutes to be convinced that these people were Macedonians and could not possibly be Greek...

All these things that were happening: the sharp condemnations from the Congress, keeping silent on the Macedonian question, parallel with Sklavenas’s unwillingness to create IMRO (United) were patterns the Zahariadis CPG leadership followed to blur and conceal the true state of affairs regarding the national question...

Given these conditions it is no wonder that IMRO (United) not only was not created in the three parts of Macedonia but disappeared almost without a trace, like water in sand, in the Greek (occupied) part of Macedonia. IMRO (United) was created in name only and remained an imaginary and fictional organization without a statute or program, without a political line and without any political involvement. The stillborn IMRO (United) Central Committee was based in Solun and remained idle with nothing to manage. Nothing depended on it and nothing was left of it. The people who constituted this committee, headed by Andrea Chipov, on their own initiative organized (see: Andrea Chipov, “Notes”, manuscript, INI, Skopje) an illegal Macedonian printing press in Solun but, “in the interests of the workers movement and revolution”, the CPG forbid them from using it. Their aim was to publish their own newspaper and other propaganda materials, in the Macedonian language using Cyrillic letters, but they were not allowed. They then tried and succeeded in organizing the introduction and spreading of other Macedonian publications such as the “Balkan Federation” and “Macedonian Works”, published abroad, but again they were quickly shut down.

And so, today there is hardly any information about the formation of IMRO (United) in the Aegean (Greek occupied) part of Macedonia. With no information of its existence then one can easily conclude that IMRO (United) never existed here...

5. One year after the CPG Sixth Congress took place, the Zahariadis CPG leadership fiercely attacked the Macedonian people’s democratic rights. Namely, during the CPG Central Committee Third Plenum, held in March 1935, Zahariadis took away the

Macedonian people’s right to self-determination and secession from Greece, and replaced them with minority rights.

In December 1935, during the CPG Sixth Congress, the CPG confirmed this as follows:

“Making such a change does not mean that we are abandoning the Marxist-Leninist principle of self-determination for nations... The population in the Greek part of Macedonia, however, is Greek in its majority today, and the Marxist-Leninist principle of self-determination requires that the old slogan and line be replaced to reflect today’s conditions…” This, of course, was only done in the interest of the workers movement and revolution (according to the official interpretation). And so:

a) The CPG did not give up on the principle of self-determination for the occupied and oppressed people to secede from the oppressing nation, but recognized the Asia Minor colonists instead, i.e. it recognized the alien population deposited in Macedonia as Greek. The CPG decided to forget Macedonia’s annexation to Greece and forgo the Macedonian people’s rights to self-determination and succession from Greece in favour of recognizing the colonists as Greeks (annexation under the Marxist mask).

b) Being occupied and annexed by a foreign country and by foreigners, the Macedonian people from the Aegean (Greek occupied) part of Macedonia, in their own historic homeland, were then treated as part of the Greek homeland and as a minority in this Greek homeland, without the right to self-determination.

c) From recognizing the historical reality that the Macedonian people and their homeland Macedonia constitute an ethnic whole, occupied by neighbouring bourgeois states, the CPG reversed direction and actually went to ignoring the Macedonian people’s national existence and accepting the Balkan bourgeois imperialist thesis that Macedonia is only a geographical term, that is, a space where all its neighbours have the right to fill it with some other, non-Macedonian, national content.

d) From an open and unequivocal condemnation of the domestic bourgeoisie imperialist policy, which proclaimed that the occupied part of Macedonia was an indisputable part of Greece, in which the Macedonian people were persecuted and driven out of their homeland, and Macedonia was re-populated with colonists in an effort to artificially alter the national composition in favour of the Greek ethnic element, the CPG leadership openly and unequivocally adopted the domestic bourgeoisie’s imperialistic policy in the interest of “the labour movement and the revolution in Greece...”

6. In an effort to obscure and conceal their true motives, i.e. to paralyze the Macedonian revolutionary movement, the CPG leadership, during its CPG Sixth Congress, chose its words carefully when it said:

“The Party has not stopped declaring that the Macedonian question will finally be resolved fraternally after the Soviet government becomes victorious in the Balkans, which will tear down all dishonest agreements regarding the exchange of populations and take all practical measures to eliminate all imperial injustices. Only then will the Macedonian people achieve their complete national establishment…”

In effect, the CPG Sixth Congress did recognize the Macedonian people as a special and unique nation which, finally, should achieve its full national establishment. This remained the official CPG line in the coming years, that is during the fascist occupation, during the national liberation war and a little further on.

But the only reason why the CPG made this statement was to further motivate the Macedonian people to fight against the fascists in the newly emerging critical conditions. In reality the CPG had no intention of ever solving the Macedonian question in favour of the Macedonian people and continued to implement the bourgeoisie policy which did not recognize the existence of a Macedonian nation and claimed that:

- The Macedonian people are “Slavophone Greeks”, and

- Macedonia has a Greek character like Attica.

At the same time the CPG kept attacking the Macedonian anti-fascist liberation movement frontally in at attempt to stifle and crush it in an effort to hide its existence. The CPG did this so that it could maintain that no other anti-fascist movement, other than the Greek people’s movement, existed during the liberation struggle. In fact, what the CPG was doing was no secret to anyone. Outside of the many documents that point to these events, today there are still thousands of living witnesses that can testify to that effect...

This was how things were conducted up to the end of the fascist occupation and up to the end of the national liberation war...