Part IV - Part 02

It was Christmas day by the old calendar when the rebellions in Skopje Fortress and in Shtip were started on Sunday morning January 7, 1945. At the same time the National Youth of Macedonia was hosting its 2nd Congress at the officer’s home in Skopje Square. Hundreds of armed officers and soldiers disembarked from the Skopje Fortress, crossed over the Stone Bridge and stormed the officer’s home. They carried banners and shouted slogans such as ‘We don’t want to go to Srem, we want to go to Solun’ and ‘No to Berlin and yes to Solun’. Without delay the military police began to arrest these officers and soldiers. (See Focus, p, 24, May 2009.)

Analyzing this problem and knowing what the situation in Greece was like, my view on the slogan ‘No to Berlin and yes to Solun’ meant that this was the final showdown with fascism and with the

occupation. Simply put, the Macedonians wanted to free Greek occupied Macedonia for themselves. Unfortunately if they did go to Solun they would have faced a large British force which would have been disastrous for them. It meant that the Macedonians would have to go to war with the British troops already stationed in Solun. Churchill wanted his troops to be there to secure Greece, that is why even ELAS was not allowed to go there before the British troops had secured Solun.

Knowing that Britain was in Greek occupied Macedonia and that there was no way that it would have agreed to ‘let go’ of Greek occupied Macedonia to be united with the Republic of Macedonia, why then did Tito, two months later, allow the creation of NOF, AFZH and NOMS? Why did he agree to send these organizations to Greek occupied Macedonia to prepare the Macedonian people to start a new struggle to unite Greek occupied Macedonia with the Republic of Macedonia? Can anyone see anything wrong wit this picture?

So, if this was not manipulation then what is? It was not just pure manipulation; it was the beginning of the end for us Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia.

Now we have sufficient facts that allow us to reveal our past. If these facts are sacred then let us now, at the beginning, say that the five-year Greek Civil War period was no Macedonian revolution… Outside of the fact that it was a perpetrated war, it was an ‘anti-Macedonian war’ which lacked everything that was Macedonian… It had no Macedonian elements, no Macedonian symbols and no Macedonian flags. And the fact that NOF was a National Liberation Front with no indication that it was a ‘Macedonian National Liberation Front’ speaks volumes… Why not MNOF as in ‘Macedonian National Liberation Front’?! Every liberation organization has its ‘national’ origins; otherwise whose liberation organization is it? And on top of that we have our historians, the likes of Kiriazovski, who not only say that the Greek Civil War was a ‘Macedonian Revolution’ but give tribute to it as if it was ‘a continuation of the 1903 Macedonian Ilinden Uprising’. He says it was a ‘continuation of the struggle for survival and for political and national equality and freedom…” (215, 216)

Did the Greek Civil War have any elements that can be called a ‘Macedonian Revolution?’ Or did we, over the last 70 years, delude ourselves and our new generations into believing that it did? As far as I know, as a participant in this war, through all the cruelty that I have been through, the only Macedonian mark I have seen was the 20,000 Macedonian men and women who gave their lives for what they believed in. That was the only Macedonian thing I have seen. I would have liked to have seen one Macedonian national symbol that belonged to our people and that was our sacred flag, but that too was absent from this struggle.

We did not even have a flag! It is well known that a flag embodies the spirit of society and is very important for the allegiance not only of our soldiers but of our entire population. It is a connection between the people and their country that nourishes them. In ancient times during a war the ruler stood underneath the flag, which connected him to his army and to the protectors of his people and kingdom. During peace time the flag stood next to the throne, carefully guarded by the king’s soldiers.

This reminds me of the ‘victory parade’ in Moscow in 1945 on Red Square when the Germans brought in their flags and, under beating drums, threw them under the Kremlin walls.

Around 1950, just a little after DAG was liquidated, I remembered Greece was still refusing to recognize the Greek Civil War and insisted on calling our fighters ‘bandits’. We were in the USSR when I realized that there was something not right about us Macedonians. What kind of revolutionaries were we leaving our country like a bunch of war refugees? It seemed to me we were more like victims of a war than fighters in a war who were capable of controlling their own destiny. But that was that. Then, my worst fears were again confirmed when I returned to the Republic of Macedonia and found out that all the Macedonian fighters who fought in the ranks of DAG had to go through UDBA trials in Idrizovo prison and then were sent to shelters. What kind of revolutionary would be treated in this manner? Meanwhile all NOF and AFZH officials were met with state honours, placed in

comfortable apartments and given jobs in government offices. There and then I realized that there was something ‘not right’ about this!

But then I ask you: ‘Why is our mainstream history, I mean the history of the Macedonian people from Greek occupied Macedonia, treating our struggle like it was a revolution while we the fighters who fought in it are treated like criminals?’ I don’t know why, do you? And why do we not have the courage to face the truth; that we were manipulated in a conspiracy to get rid of us from Greece!

We hid from the truth for over six decades. Now we have left it to a future generation of historians to search for it. Why? I believe because those who participated in the conflict refuse to see it for what it was… genocide! Time has to pass, for their sake, so that we can, once and for all, understand the Macedonian tragedy and exactly what happened to us during that war (1945-1949) and what is happening to us today with our name and identity. Maybe there are forces out there that want all of these activities to remain a secret… the secret of the century…

And another thing: We still have not accepted the fact or understood the Greek fascist and genocidal actions and policies in the century-long war they have waged against us to drive us out from our homeland in Greek occupied Macedonia. To this day we have failed to comprehend the meaning of our mass expulsion from our homes and lands, especially in the years 1945 to 1949. It was a Macedonian tragedy of biblical proportions which as a nation we have not yet understood or processed…

The Greek Civil War was a perpetrated and destructive war. It was meant to create hatred, greed, ambition and hurt feelings… negative forces to frighten us and drive us apart… To make us fight one another… It was also an ideological war with aims at destroying the Macedonian family… And as Giovanni Manzini said: ‘The family is the homeland of the heart…’

The Greeks and their patrons expelled and destroyed thousands of Macedonian families, and in some regions they destroyed a large part of our Macedonian centuries-old culture, language and everything that was Macedonian. It was a violent destruction full of

blood and tears… and that is all that today remains in the minds of the survivours… It was a time of universal deceit...

And as the English journalist and writer George Orwell said: ‘In our age there is no such thing as avoiding politics. All issues are political, and politics itself is a set of lies, evasions, antics, hatred and schizophrenia’…”

Suvogorski paused for a moment and with a serious look on his face, looked around, giving the impression that he was about to say something very important. He then tapped his finger on the pile of books and papers on the table and continued:

“Here, this pile of documents is witness to our mystery. There are many piles of documents like these in many secret archives worldwide, compiled by people who have authentically followed the genocidal processes committed against the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia. Just because we don’t know about them does not mean that they don’t exist. On a diplomatic level the world has been secretly watching the Macedonian people for many centuries and has written about them, including about what has been done to them in Greece. Today the ringleader in this drama, to drive the Macedonian people out of their homeland in Greek occupied Macedonia, cannot be any other than the Greeks themselves, who today rule Greek occupied Macedonia. It was their personal choice to employ genocidal goals against the Macedonian people. Our conclusions about this are drawn not only from our own observations but also from several aspects based on source and check materials. The plot of who directed the strategy for the genocide against the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia, after WW II, has been revealed with facts and arguments.

The Greek Civil War ended with 20,000 Macedonian casualties and mass persecutions that continue to this day, and yet the ‘Macedonian Question’ in Greece has not been decided, leaving us to remain hostages of the past… Greece must believe that, if left alone, this problem will be forgotten and will disappear forever on its own… But I don’t think so.

After the Greek Civil War ended we, the Macedonian participants of the Democratic Army of Greece (DAG), have been treated like a confused generation, especially after we returned to the Republic of Macedonia and when all the ordinary soldiers had to pass through the sieve of the military police (OZNA), while the NOF and AFZH leaders were greeted with honour like war heroes. The rest of us, I mean the DAG fighters, as confused as we were seen to be, were left alone, for time to slowly, slowly erode us. We represented a frightened generation with no credibility to talk about its past and about the historic events it lived through… We were the guilty party… the guilty fighters who ‘failed’ to win the Greek Civil War. This is how we stand to this day…

When Tito decided to abandon the Macedonians from Greek occupied Macedonia, by passing them to Zahariadis, they received a new lesson from Kolishevski who said:

‘Now you will go down there (to Greek occupied Macedonia). Your leader in the struggle will be the CPG. The CPG’s line is the correct line... Place your confidence in the CPG. Fight with all available means against chauvinism, separatism and local trends.’

The leaders of the Macedonian organizations NOF and AFZH were now made to stand before their new master, the CPG with Zahariadis at the helm, with eyes looking down. This is how the Macedonian people, who until yesterday were told they were fighting for a ‘United Macedonia’, would continue to fight in order to defend the battles they had lost.

Now let me put this into perspective… The Macedonian organizations NOF, AFZH and NOMS, which until yesterday were telling the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia that they were fighting to ‘create a united Macedonia’, were now telling them that they were fighting to ‘install socialism in Greece’.

And what happened? Why were the essential aspirations of the Macedonian people not realized, even after we lost more than 20 thousand Macedonians? Who is to blame for this, for the inability to deliver as promised? More precisely, what kind of interests did the Greek Civil War serve for the Macedonian people?!

After Tito sold us out to Zahariadis, General Markos Vafiadis began to massively mobilize Macedonian fighters from the so-called ‘free territory’. He practically emptied the Macedonian villages of all able bodies and threw them at the front… The result was a disaster for the villages which lost most of their population as war casualties. Markos Vafiadis emptied the Macedonian villages of their population and felt like a master while doing it…

After Tito abandoned the NOF and AFZH Macedonian leaders, they became the greatest propagators of illusion ‘assuring’ the Macedonian people that they ‘needed’ to fight in order to achieve their freedom, which pushed them further and further into the abyss of oblivion and turned them into victims of their own making.

No doubt, in no time NOF and AFZH became General Markos’s servants and delivered to him whatever he wanted, especially the souls he desired to sacrifice for the ‘cause’. But the consequence of such a massive mobilization, which led to such an unfortunate situation, made many ask: ‘How was it even possible for so many people to die from one Macedonian village alone?’

There were villages which lost more than half of their population during the war and by the time the war was over more than 90% of the population was gone! How was that even possible! Yet it was true!

This is the kind of future we planted for ourselves, the kind that plucked us from our centuries-old hearth and tossed us out into the four winds… The kind of freedom we blindly sought only damaged our Macedonian nucleus… and led us to our genocide. It was an evil imposed on us… which we have yet to recognize and reconcile… What we also have to ‘reconcile’ with is ‘how and why’ is Macedonia’s true history still hiding in the shade?

Oh, the tragedy of it all! What happened to us from the moment Tito surrendered us and turned us into Zahariadis’s slaves until August 1949 when the Greek Civil War ended under the CPG’s leadership? How many wrong turns did we take?

Also, why have we forgotten about the ethnic composition of Greek occupied Macedonia? Why have we forgotten about the 660,000 Christian Turks from Asia Minor and other places who were deposited in Greek occupied Macedonia since 1913? What was supposed to happen to them while we were seeking to unite our Macedonia? Do you think they would have stood silent and inactive while we were trying to get back what was ours? Don’t you think they would have violently objected to what we were about to do?

Zahariadis and Markos were Christian Turks. They led the Greek Civil War! They led us on our quest to gain our independence! To gain our independence from whom?! From them?! And not once did we ever question their motives? Why would they help us gain our independence from them?! So that we could drive them out of our and now their Macedonia?! Or were we planning to keep them there among us? Or, perhaps we never thought about it and blindly went on doing our business… being told what to do! We blindly followed their lead and in the end they kicked us out… And they are now the masters in possession of our heritage while we roam the world as permanent refugees and wanderers… This all was done nice and legal, from right under us but, for some reason, we failed to see the tragedy of it:

A / The Neuilly Convention was signed on November 27, 1919 by Greece and Bulgaria. By this Convention, until 1925, Greece forcibly expelled 86,571 Macedonians from their homes and sent them to Bulgaria.

B / Then there was the Lausanne Peace Treaty, signed in 1923, that called for compulsory exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. The Turkish-Greek War (1919-1922) was Greece’s last historical, but ambitious, attempt to impose itself on other countries in order to realize its ‘Greater Greece’ policy and a Greece populated by pure Greeks. By this Treaty Greece forcibly expelled 354,000 Macedonian Muslims from Greek occupied Macedonia and in their place brought 660,000 Christian Turkish colonists and settlers from Asia Minor.

If inheritance is identity then these Christian Turkish Asia Minor colonists and settlers could build their identity out of our indigenous

centuries-old Macedonian heritage?! By calling us, the indigenous people in Greek occupied Macedonia, ‘Slavo-Macedonians’ the communists in Greece left the door open for these ‘Christian Turkish’ colonists and settlers to become the ‘Macedonians’ and inheritors of our heritage. And behold today, half a century later, they say THEY are the Macedonians!

Today they say they are the modern Greeks, descendants of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Macedonians as well as descendents of the Spartans, Thracians, and Byzantines… and so on… and proud of it! But at the same time the modern Macedonians cannot have their own identity. But from our own experience and from published statistics we know that in our part of Macedonia these people are neither Greeks nor descendants of the ancient Greeks, they are Turks, Armenians, Vlachs, Albanians and of course Macedonians.

Greece is lying to the world and to itself if it thinks that the people living there are pure Greeks, descendants of the ancient Greeks. But regardless of the lies, Greece is adamant about one thing; getting rid of us, the indigenous Macedonians. Irrespective of the contradictions of what kind of people live in Greece and how Greece likes to define them, it appears there is no room for Macedonians in Greek occupied Macedonia. The Greek experiment defies logic and yet here it is disregarding the needs of its people and transplanting fictional needs into them as it defines their mythical identities.

The question is: ‘Why the hatred for the real Macedonians?’

Greece has demonstrated a fierce strategy in its quest to create a new nation and believes it has to use extreme measures to keep it together but has found the Macedonian people, a separate ethnic group well aware of its own history and existence, very difficult to tame. Even if it could, Greece believes that Macedonians cannot be trusted and will never be loyal to the Greek state. So instead of trying to incorporate them into the Greek core, it has endeavoured to find legal ways of ‘getting rid’ of the Macedonians by any means possible. Here are some of the means Greece has used in the past to ‘get rid’ of the Macedonians and everything that is Macedonian:

a) Forcing the Macedonian population to permanently leave its homeland by expulsions.

b) Renaming all people’s personal and place names from Macedonian to Greek. This was exclusively done in Greek occupied Macedonia by legal means (‘Efimeris tis Kiverniseos’ no. 332, November 21, 1926). Let me put it this way; there is no one in the civilized world that has the right to rename people or places in existence. Only the people themselves have that right, the right to call themselves, their lands, their territory, their objects, their language and so on, what they choose. The Macedonian people had those personal and place names for many generations and for many centuries. Only Greece in all of Europe has changed the Macedonian people’s names… and without consequences.

We are talking here about changing the entire Macedonian topography which has been the soul of the Macedonian people in Greek occupied Macedonia for many centuries. This was a very cruel and crude strategy and threw the Macedonian people into oblivion, not only with their cultural identity but disconnected them from their historic past. They suddenly became a people living in an alien world without connections to their familiar lands, disconnected from their past. Overnight they found themselves speaking Greek, an alien language and living in villages and towns whose names they did not recognize and with people whose alien names they did not know. The entire Macedonian civilization that took centuries to shape had been literally erased overnight. At the same time they were prohibited from speaking Macedonian and from using their Macedonian names.

c) Then there was the Metaxas dictatorship which came into power on August 4, 1936 when General Ioannis Metaxas declared Greece a dictatorship. This regime especially opposed the Macedonian identity and severely punished the Macedonian people for speaking the Macedonian language, the only language they knew. Many Macedonians ended up in the cruelest prisons in the Greek island camps for being Macedonian.”

Suvogorski paused for a moment and looked around. There was silence… They all waited for him to speak so that they would hear what he had to say next. He continued:

“Does anyone here not see the irony that the all mighty Macedonian organizations NOF, AFZH and NOMS, by some fate, had become servile to the very people who have been trying to ‘get rid’ of us for some time now? By some ironic fate these organizations became Zahariadis’s slaves who did his bidding to ‘get rid’ of us from our homeland. Many Macedonians trusted NOF, AFZH and NOMS and that is why they were prepared to follow them to hell, if necessary… Unfortunately they all made a huge mistake and we all paid a huge price for it. In addition to the 20,000 Macedonians we lost in the battle fields, the Greeks ‘ethnically cleansed’ most of our Macedonian population from our homeland and sent it packing, with no hope of ever returning…

You can clearly see what happened here, right? Tito created these organizations… these ‘liberation’ organizations and sent them to Greece. He then put them under the command of the Greek communists. He did this by lying to them and telling them that there was a ‘radical’ change in the Greek attitude towards the Macedonians and that the Greek communists were actually now working for our interests and that we should do what they say. And we did exactly that!

In no time at all NOF and AFZH became General Markos’s servants doing exactly what he ordered, seemingly without thinking of the consequences. Marko’s first order of business was to mobilize every single able-bodied Macedonian man and woman, especially from the so-called free territories, and send them to the front to be killed for ‘the cause’ which by this time had evolved into ‘installing socialism in Greece’, an impossible feat at the time. Is it any wonder so many people were killed from every single Macedonian village? We Macedonians in DAG had to now fight for ‘democratic values’ but on the orders of our new masters who never once used democratic methods, especially towards us Macedonians. Every villager and every civilian was constantly under the gun of brutal threats and dictatorial methods, and yet here we were expected to die for ‘democracy’. The recruitment process unfortunately did not end

with the able bodies, soon afterwards they began to massively recruit older men and women, decades past their prime, and they too were sent to die for a democratic and socialist Greece.

What is the truth? What happened to the Macedonians who were lured by NOF and AFZH to fight for a ‘United Macedonia’? Did the CPG ‘recognize’ any of their commitments? Did it agree to any of this with NOF and AFZH who until yesterday manipulated us and later became the CPG’s servants? Now NOF and AFZH were preaching to us that we were fighting for ‘brotherhood and unity’ together with the Greeks! What happened to our fighting for a ‘United Macedonia’ and for our political identity? Did we all just contract amnesia or were our organizations suffering from chronic lack of principles? They convinced us to fight and die for a ‘principle’, for a ‘fundamental truth’, a starting point for building a foundation of a system… So, what happened? We went from fighting for uniting our Macedonia to fighting and dying for what… for a shifting political ideology that was impossible to implement? Did any of our leaders even know what we were fighting for now?

If we look back at the agreements made between Tito and Zahariadis we will discover that, under the new program orders issued to NOF and AFZH, we were fighting to save ourselves. This is what the program order said: ‘NOF and AFZH will fight in alliance with the Greek people in order to save the Macedonian people from physical extermination…’

In other words ‘fight for our lives!’ So, what happened in between ‘uniting our Macedonia’ and ‘fighting for our lives?’ Where is the explanation? Did we (NOF and AFZH) make this decision or did ‘others’ (Tito and Zahariadis), our enemies, make it for us?”

Suvogorski suddenly stopped talking. He again looked around at his audience and, with a stern look on his face, said:

“You can all see what this looks like. How we and the world were manipulated to look like we the Macedonians were the villains in this war? Right?! They told us we were fighting to ‘unite our Macedonia’ and we accepted to fight to ‘unite our Macedonia’. The only reason they said that, after we ran to the mountains and picked

up guns to protect ourselves from the Greek terror unleashed on us, was so that they could convince the Greek public and the rest of the world that we were fighting to ‘break off’ a chunk from Greece and give it to Yugoslavia. We were made to look like ‘bandits’ stealing land from Greece and giving it to Yugoslavia. So now that this was in the open and everyone was convinced that we were the ‘bad guys’ trying to break up Greece, the Greek government was left with no other choice but to fight back to protect its integrity. Why do you think the Greek government invited the UN Inquiry Commission to investigate? It was not done for our benefit. It was done to prove to the world that the fighters in Greece were ‘outsiders’, bandits sent to Greece from the outside, from Yugoslavia, to break it up! We picked up guns to protect ourselves… we fought for ‘uniting our Macedonia’ which we believed was a noble cause! But how was this interpreted by the outside world? To them it sounded and looked like we were ‘breaking away a chunk from Greece and giving it to Yugoslavia’ and we were now going to pay for our indiscretions with our lives. This was the final act of the fraud perpetrated against us by Tito, Zahariadis and their patrons…

We were convinced we were fighting to ‘unite our Macedonia’ the rest of the world was convinced we were ‘breaking up Greece’ and that made it legal for the Greek government to declare war on us… to ‘get rid’ of us from our own homeland under the guise that we were ‘bandits’ and outsiders… And there you have it… And this is exactly what happened to us! Why would Greece now take us back when it convinced the world that we were not Greeks but outsiders, brought into Greece from the outside to cause trouble for it…?

Our patriotism and our long desire for freedom as Macedonians were used against us… We fell for it and we paid the ultimate price… we lost the one thing we love the most… our homeland!

There was every indication in every act that ‘our cause’ was never supported by the CPY or by the CPG but we chose to ignore those indications!

Even when we picked up guns and joined DAG we were made to swear an oath, and what was that oath? ‘I son of the Greek people

and fighter of the Democratic Army of Greece will fight to defend the integrity, security and frontiers of our motherland, Greece...’

Where is the part about fighting to ‘unite Macedonia’ or fighting for anything Macedonian for that matter? And here we are swearing to fight for ‘our motherland Greece’!

And then out of nowhere, through the great ideological system, they told us that we were fighting for ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ with the Greek people. We accepted that task too without question. They offered us ‘false hope’ and we took it without looking back and asking ‘what happened with uniting our Macedonia’ or looking forward to see where this ‘human right’ and quest for ‘equality’ was going to take us…

Then, paradoxically and en masse we all marched to join DAG and fight for Tito and for Zahariadis. But when there were no ‘human rights’ to be seen anywhere and the value of Macedonian life became worthless, when our families were torn apart, we were given the boot out of our homeland and we became lifelong wanderers of the world. It was the price we had to pay for being Macedonians.

The very humanity in us, our divine desire to live as free Macedonians, a desire we shared for many centuries, unfortunately, we must admit, was what destroyed us… what caused the Greeks and their patrons to drive us out from our grandfather’s hearth… only because we could not be trusted to be loyal Greeks…

Both Tito and Zahariadis were well aware that they took us down a blind alley… They were both well aware that the war they involved us in could not be won… We could neither ‘unite our Macedonia’ nor ‘bring socialism to Greece’. Yet they both chose to lead us through this catastrophe… One needs to not only ask why but also what was the true role of NOF, AFZH, or NOMS in all this?

Most things that needed to be asked have been asked!” concluded Suvogorski and then looked around and raised his right index finger up, pointing towards the sky, and said:

“The NOF, AFZH and NOMS leaderships believed and trusted Kolishevski and the other Macedonian leaders in the CPM. They had no reason not to. They helped the Macedonian people in Yugoslavia to create the People’s Republic of Macedonia, which gave them credibility! And if Kolishevski, one of those ‘trusted’ Macedonian leaders, told them to ‘start taking orders from Zahariadis’ what would have been their reason not to trust him? We were played, my friends… we were well played…!” and with those words, Suvogorski concluded his last lecture.

Suvogorski then stood up and said: “This is my last lecture. But it feels to me like we will remain in the fog about our past for many more years to come… The war and Siberia may have taught me many things… but still I don’t know so many more things... All I want to do now is go back home just to light a candle at the graves of my ancestors…” There was pain in Suvogorski’s face as he bent forward to pick up the scattered pages of his lecture notes. Even after giving so many lectures he still was unable to reveal all the traces that gave him so much pain.

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