Macedonians (ethnic group)

This article is about the Slavic ethnic group; for the unrelated people of ancient Greece, see Ancient Macedonians. For other meanings, see Macedonian.

In 1893 the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) was established. This organization advocated the creation of an independent Macedonia within a Balkan federation.Atlas of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century, Page 17, by R J Crampton, ISBN 0415066891 Before 1902, in theory only Bulgarians could join, but afterwards, it invited anyone who feels Macedonian, whether Greek, Slav or Jew to join together. On August 2, 1903, IMRO led the locals in the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising, named after the festival of the Prophet Elijah on which it began. That was one of the greatest events in the history of the people in the region of Macedonia. The high point of the Ilinden revolution was the establishment of the Krushevo Republic in the town of Krushevo.

By November 1903, the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising was suppressed.The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World, Page 51, by Loring M. Danforth, ISBN 0691043566 The uprising was led by the following activists of the IMRO: Jane Sandanski, Nikola Karev, Dame Gruev, Pitu Guli, etc.

The Balkan Wars

The Balkan Wars resulted in drastic changes to Macedonia's demographics after the Ottomans were defeated and forced out of the region. What we may call Ottoman Macedonia, was divided between the Balkan nations, with its northern parts going to Serbian, the southern to Greece, and the northeastern to Bulgaria.

The territory of the present-day Republic of Macedonia came under the direct rule of Serbia (and later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and was sometimes termed "southern Serbia", and, together with a large portion of today's southern Serbia, it belonged officially to the newly formed Vardar banovina (district). An intense program of "Serbianization" was implemented during the 1920s and 1930s when Belgrade enforced a Serbian cultural assimilation process on the region. Between the world wars in Serbia, Macedonian dialects were treated as a Serbian dialects (UCLA Language Material Sources, [1]). Only the literary Serbian language was taught, it was the language of government, education, media, and public life; even so Macedonian literature was tolerated as a local dialectal folkloristic form. The Serbian National Theatre in Skopje even performed some of the Macedonian language plays (now the classical drama pieces) (UCLA Language Material Sources, [2]).

Greece adopted strongly repressive policies towards the Slavic population in its northern regions, mainly due to its experiences with Bulgaria's expansionist policy during the Second Balkan War. Many of those inhabiting northeastern Greece fled to Bulgaria or Serbia after the Balkan wars or were exchanged with native Greeks from Bulgaria under a population exchange treaty in the 1920s.

The Slavophone Macedonians that stayed in northwestern Greece were regarded as a potentially disloyal minority and came under severe pressure, with restrictions on their movements, cultural activities and political rights; many emigrated, for the most part to Canada, Australia, USA and eastern European countries like Bulgaria . The Greek names for some traditionally Slavic or Turkish speaking areas became official and the Slavic speakers were encouraged to change their Slavic surnames to Greek sounding surnames, e.g. Nachev becoming Natsulis. A similar procedure was applied to Greek names in Bulgaria and Serbian Macedonia (eg. Nevrokopi becoming Goce Delchev [3]). In Greece, there was a government sponsored process of Hellenization [4]. Many of the border villages were closed to outsiders, ostensibly for security reasons. The Greek government and people have never recognized the existence of a distinct "Macedonian" ethnic group, as the term "Macedonian" is already reserved for the ethnic Greek population that has traditionally inhabited Greece's northern-most region (Macedonia (Greece)).

On August 10, 1920, upon signing the Treaty of Sèvres that "measures were being taken towards the opening of schools with instruction in the Slav language in the following school year of 1925/26". Thus, the primer intended for the "Slav-speaking minority" children in Greek Macedonia to learn their native language in school, entitled "ABECEDAR" [5], [6] [7] was offered as an argument in support of this statement. This primer, prepared by a special government commissioner was published by the Greek government in Athens in 1925, but was printed in a specially adapted Latin alphabet instead of the traditional Cyrillic, since Cyrillic was the official alphabet of neighboring Bulgaria and Serbia. After fears from Serbia and Bulgaria that the minorities in their countries might demand the same rights, the Abecedar schoolbooks were confiscated and destroyed before they got into the reach of the children HRW pg.42.

Second World War

During Second World War (1941-1945), some inhabitants of Vardar Macedonia took part in the anti-fascist coalition. The uprising began in 1941 in the cities of Prilep and Kumanovo. In Greece, it has been estimated that the military wing of KKE �" DSE (Democratic Army of Greece) had 14 000 soldiers of Slavic Macedonian origin out of total 20 000 fighters. Given their important role, the KKE's General Secretary Nikolaos Zachariadis proceeded to change his party's policy on Greek Macedonia. At the fifth Plenum on 31 January 1949, a resolution was passed claiming that the Macedonian people are distinguishing themselves, and that after the liberation they will find their national restoration as they wish it. In August 1949 the DSE was defeated in Grammos and Vitsi. Greece in the Twentieth Century, Page 144, by Theodore A. (EDT) Couloumbis, Theodore (EDT) Kariotis, Fotini (EDT) Bellou, ISBN 0714654078

Macedonians after the Second World War

Refugees from Greek Macedonia fleeing across the border during the Greek Civil War

The People's Republic of Macedonia was proclaimed at the first session of the Antifascist Assembly for the People's Liberation of Macedonia (on St. Elia's Day �" August 2, 1944). Later, by special Act, it became a constitutive part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In the next 50 years Republic of Macedonia was part of the Yugoslav federation.After the Second World War, the Communist Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito decided that the policy of Serbianization in Macedonia had failed - it had led to strong resentment of Belgrade. In addition, many Macedonians had been supporters of Tito's Partisan resistance movement, fighting the occupying Bulgarians, Germans and Italians as well as opposing the Serbian royalist Chetniks, who were, until midway through the war, the West's favorite rebels in Serbia.. Although the inhabitants of Vardar Macedonia initially supported the Ivan Mihailov led Bulgarian occupation as "liberators from the Serbian occupation",Mahon, M., "The Macedonian question in Bulgaria". Nations and Nationalism, volume 4, 1998, pp. 389-407. the Macedonian resistance at the end of the war had a strongly nationalist character, not least as a reaction to Serbia's pre-war repression. It was clear well before the end of the war that Tito would seek major changes to the region's political balance .

Following the war, Tito separated Yugoslav Macedonia from Serbia, making it a republic of the new federal Yugoslavia (as the Socialist Republic of Macedonia) in 1946. He also promoted the concept of a separate Macedonian nation, as a means of severing the ties of the Slav population of Yugoslav Macedonia with Bulgaria. Although the Macedonian language is close to and largely mutually intelligible with Bulgarian and to a lesser extent Serbian. The differences were emphasized and the region's historical figures were promoted as being uniquely Macedonian (rather than Serbian or Bulgarian). A separate Macedonian Orthodox Church was established, splitting off from the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1967 (only partly successfully, because the church has not been recognized by any other Orthodox Church). The ideologists of a separate and independent Macedonian country, same as the pro-Bulgarian and pro-Serbian sentiment was forcibly suppressed .

Tito had a number of reasons for doing this. First, he wanted to reduce Serbia's dominance in Yugoslavia; establishing a territory formerly considered Serbian as an equal to Serbia within Yugoslavia achieved this effect. Secondly, he wanted to sever the ties of the Macedonian population with Bulgaria as recognition of that population as Bulgarian could have undermined the unity of the Yugoslav federation. Thirdly, Tito sought to justify future Yugoslav claims towards the rest of geographical Macedonia; in August 1944, he claimed that his goal was to reunify "all parts of Macedonia, divided in 1915 and 1918 by Balkan imperialists." To this end, he opened negotiations with Bulgaria for a new federal state, which would also probably have included Albania, and supported the Greek Communists in the Greek Civil War. The idea of reunification of all of Macedonia under Communist rule was abandoned in 1948 when the Greek Communists lost and Tito fell out with the Soviet Union and pro-Soviet Bulgaria.

Tito's actions had a number of important consequences for the Macedonians. The most important was, obviously, the promotion of a distinctive Macedonian identity as a part of the multiethnic society of Yugoslavia. The process of ethnogenesis gained momentum, and a distinct national Macedonian identity was formed. There have been numerous accounts from northern Macedonia from the late 1940s that the policy of Bulgarisation during the Bulgarian occupation (1941 - 1944) was as abhorrent for the ordinary Macedonian as the policy of Serbisation until then. IMRO's leader in exile, Ivan Mihailov, and the renewed Bulgarian IMRO after 1990 have, on the other hand, repeatedly argued that between 120,000 and 130,000 people went through the concentration camps of Idrizovo and Goli Otok for pro-Bulgarian sympathies or ideas for independent Macedonia in the late 1940s., which has also been confirmed by former prime minister Ljubco Georgievski [8]. The critics of these claims question the number as it would implied roughly a third of the male Christian population at that time; and the reasons of imprisonment, they argue, were multiple as there were Macedonian nationalists, Stalinists, Middle class members, Albanian nationalists and everybody else who was either against the post war regime or denounced as one for whatever reasons. Unlike the time before WWII, when Macedonia was hotbed for unrest and terror and about 60% of the entire royal Yugoslav police force was stationed there [9] [10], after the war there were no signs of disturbances comparable with pre-war times or post war times in other parts of former Yugoslavia, such as Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. [11] [12] [13]. Whatever the truth, it was certainly the case that most Macedonians embraced their official recognition as a separate nationality. Even so, some pro-Bulgarian or pro-Serbian sentiment persisted despite government suppression; even as late as 1991, convictions were still being handed down for pro-Bulgarian statements.

In Greece, they faced considerably tighter restrictions as its government saw them as a potentially disloyal minority. Greeks were resettled in the region in two occasions, firstly following the Bulgarian loss of the Second Balkan War when Bulgaria and Greece mutually exchanged their populations (1913), and secondly in 1923 as a result of the population exchange with the new Turkish republic that followed the Greek military defeat in Asia minor. After the Second World War many of the slavophone Macedonians who lived in Greece either chose to emigrate to Communist countries (especially Yugoslavia) to avoid prosecution for fighting on the side of the Greek communists (see: Greek Civil War), or were forced to do so . Although there was some liberalization between 1959 and 1967, the Greek military dictatorship re-imposed harsh restrictions. The situation gradually eased after Greece's return to democracy, but Greece still receives criticism for its treatment of some slavophone Macedonian political organizations. Greece, however, recognizes the Rainbow political party of the slavophone Macedonians who canvas during elections.

The Macedonians in Albania faced restrictions under the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, though ordinary Albanians were little better off. Their existence as a separate minority group was recognized as early as 1945 and a degree of cultural expression was permitted.

As ethnographers and linguists tended to identify the population of the Bulgarian part of Macedonia as Bulgarian in the interwar period, the issue of a Macedonian minority in the country came up as late as the 1940s. In 1946, the population of Blagoevgrad Province was declared Macedonian and teachers were brought in from Yugoslavia to teach the Macedonian language. The census of 1946 was accompanied by mass repressions, the result of which was the complete destruction of the local organizations of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and mass internments of people at the Belene concentration camp. The policy was reverted at the end of the 1950s and later Bulgarian governments argued that the two censuses of 1946 and 1956 which recorded up to 187,789 Macedonians (of whom over 95% were said to live in Blagoevgrad Province, also called Pirin Macedonia) were the result of pressure from Moscow. [14] Western governments, however, continued to list the population of Blagoevgrad Province as Macedonian until the beginning of the 1990s despite the 1965 census which put Macedonians in the country at 9,000. The two latest censuses after the fall of Communism (in 1992 and 2001) have, however, confirmed the results from previous censuses with some 3,000 people declaring themselves as "Macedonians" in Blagoevgrad Province in 2001 (<1.0% of the population of the region) out of 5,000 in the whole of Bulgaria.

During this period, ethnic Macedonians living in the region continue to complain of official harassment. This was confirmed in 2005 by the European Court of Human Rights with a judgment whereby Bulgaria was sentenced to pay damages amounting to 6800 euros for a violation of Article 11 (freedom of assembly and association) of the European Convention on Human Rights for its refusal to give court registration to "UMO Ilinden" and "UMO Ilinden-Pirin", the two Macedonian political parties in Bulgaria.

A similar judgment was passed against Greece for also violating Article 11 in regards of the members of the Greek far left Rainbow party, also the registered political party of the slavophone Macedonians living in Greece.

Symbols

{| align=right|Image:Grb.gif|The official Coat of ArmsImage: Flag of Macedonia.svg|The flag of the Republic of Macedonia