World Macedonian Diaspora

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Macedonian Soldiers Bid Canada Farewell

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Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-bearing-bonds-201010?currentPage=all

As Wall Street hangs on the question “Will Greece default?,” the author heads for riot-stricken Athens , and for the mysterious Vatopaidi monastery, which brought down the last government, laying bare the country’s economic insanity. But beyond a $1.2 trillion debt (roughly a quarter-million dollars for each working adult), there is a more frightening deficit. After systematically looting their own treasury, in a breathtaking binge of tax evasion, bribery, and creative accounting spurred on by Goldman Sachs, Greeks are sure of one thing: they can’t trust their fellow Greeks.

By Michael Lewis
October 1, 2010


After an hour on a plane, two in a taxi, three on a decrepit ferry, and then four more on buses driven madly along the tops of sheer cliffs by Greeks on cell phones, I rolled up to the front door of the vast and remote monastery. The spit of land poking into the Aegean Sea felt like the end of the earth, and just as silent. It was late afternoon, and the monks were either praying or napping, but one remained on duty at the guard booth, to greet visitors. He guided me along with seven Greek pilgrims to an ancient dormitory, beautifully restored, where two more solicitous monks offered ouzo, pastries, and keys to cells. I sensed something missing, and then realized: no one had asked for a credit card. The monastery was not merely efficient but free. One of the monks then said the next event would be the church service: Vespers. The next event, it will emerge, will almost always be a church service. There were 37 different chapels inside the monastery’s walls; finding the service is going to be like finding Waldo, I thought.
“Which church?” I asked the monk.
“Just follow the monks after they rise,” he said. Then he looked me up and down more closely. He wore an impossibly long and wild black beard, long black robes, a monk’s cap, and prayer beads. I wore white running shoes, light khakis, a mauve Brooks Brothers shirt, and carried a plastic laundry bag that said eagles palace hotel in giant letters on the side. “Why have you come?” he asked.
How on earth do monks wind up as Greece ’s best shot at a Harvard Business School case study? I work up the nerve to ask.
That was a good question. Not for church; I was there for money. The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007 has just now created a new opportunity for travel: financial-disaster tourism. The credit wasn’t just money, it was temptation. It offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge. Entire countries were told, “The lights are out, you can do whatever you want to do and no one will ever know.” What they wanted to do with money in the dark varied. Americans wanted to own homes far larger than they could afford, and to allow the strong to exploit the weak. Icelanders wanted to stop fishing and become investment bankers, and to allow their alpha males to reveal a theretofore suppressed megalomania. The Germans wanted to be even more German; the Irish wanted to stop being Irish. All these different societies were touched by the same event, but each responded to it in its own peculiar way. No response was as peculiar as the Greeks’, however: anyone who had spent even a few days talking to people in charge of the place could see that. But to see just how peculiar it was, you had to come to this monastery.


I had my reasons for being here. But I was pretty sure that if I told the monk what they were, he’d throw me out. And so I lied. “They say this is the holiest place on earth,” I said.
I’d arrived in Athens just a few days earlier, exactly one week before the next planned riot, and a few days after German politicians suggested that the Greek government, to pay off its debts, should sell its islands and perhaps throw some ancient ruins into the bargain. Greece ’s new socialist prime minister, George Papandreou, had felt compelled to deny that he was actually thinking of selling any islands. Moody’s, the ratings agency, had just lowered Greece’s credit rating to the level that turned all Greek government bonds into junk—and so no longer eligible to be owned by many of the investors who currently owned them. The resulting dumping of Greek bonds onto the market was, in the short term, no big deal, because the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank had between them agreed to lend Greece—a nation of about 11 million people, or two million fewer than Greater Los Angeles—up to $145 billion. In the short term Greece had been removed from the free financial markets and become a ward of other states.
That was the good news. The long-term picture was far bleaker. In addition to its roughly $400 billion (and growing) of outstanding government debt, the Greek number crunchers had just figured out that their government owed another $800 billion or more in pensions. Add it all up and you got about $1.2 trillion, or more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek. Against $1.2 trillion in debts, a $145 billion bailout was clearly more of a gesture than a solution. And those were just the official numbers; the truth is surely worse. “Our people went in and couldn’t believe what they found,” a senior I.M.F. official told me, not long after he’d returned from the I.M.F.’s first Greek mission. “The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn’t even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country.”
As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piņata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe , it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland ’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.
“The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes .... because no one is ever punished. It’s like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.”
Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other. It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes.
Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe ’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.
And They Invented Math!
The morning after I landed I walked over to see the Greek minister of finance, George Papaconstantinou, whose job it is to sort out this fantastic mess. Athens somehow manages to be bright white and grubby at the same time. The most beautiful freshly painted neoclassical homes are defaced with new graffiti. Ancient ruins are everywhere, of course, but seem to have little to do with anything else. It’s Los Angeles with a past.
At the dark and narrow entrance to the Ministry of Finance a small crowd of security guards screen you as you enter—then don’t bother to check and see why you set off the metal detector. In the minister’s antechamber six ladies, all on their feet, arrange his schedule. They seem frantic and harried and overworked … and yet he still runs late. The place generally seems as if even its better days weren’t so great. The furniture is worn, the floor linoleum. The most striking thing about it is how many people it employs. Minister Papaconstantinou (“It’s O.K. to just call me George”) attended N.Y.U. and the London School of Economics in the 1980s, then spent 10 years working in Paris for the O.E.C.D. (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). He’s open, friendly, fresh-faced, and clean-shaven, and like many people at the top of the new Greek government, he comes across less as Greek than as Anglo—indeed, almost American.
When Papaconstantinou arrived here, last October, the Greek government had estimated its 2009 budget deficit at 3.7 percent. Two weeks later that number was revised upward to 12.5 percent and actually turned out to be nearly 14 percent. He was the man whose job it had been to figure out and explain to the world why. “The second day on the job I had to call a meeting to look at the budget,” he says. “I gathered everyone from the general accounting office, and we started this, like, discovery process.” Each day they discovered some incredible omission. A pension debt of a billion dollars every year somehow remained off the government’s books, where everyone pretended it did not exist, even though the government paid it; the hole in the pension plan for the self-employed was not the 300 million they had assumed but 1.1 billion euros; and so on. “At the end of each day I would say, ‘O.K., guys, is this all?’ And they would say ‘Yeah.’ The next morning there would be this little hand rising in the back of the room: ‘Actually, Minister, there’s this other 100-to-200-million-euro gap.’ ”
This went on for a week. Among other things turned up were a great number of off-the-books phony job-creation programs. “The Ministry of Agriculture had created an off-the-books unit employing 270 people to digitize the photographs of Greek public lands,” the finance minister tells me. “The trouble was that none of the 270 people had any experience with digital photography. The actual professions of these people were, like, hairdressers.”
By the final day of discovery, after the last little hand had gone up in the back of the room, a projected deficit of roughly 7 billion euros was actually more than 30 billion. The natural question—How is this possible?—is easily answered: until that moment, no one had bothered to count it all up. “We had no Congressional Budget Office,” explains the finance minister. “There was no independent statistical service.” The party in power simply gins up whatever numbers it likes, for its own purposes.
Once the finance minister had the numbers, he went off to his regularly scheduled monthly meetings with ministers of finance from all the European countries. As the new guy, he was given the floor. “When I told them the number, there were gasps,” he said. “How could this happen? I was like, You guys should have picked up that the numbers weren’t right. But the problem was I sat behind a sign that said GREECE , not a sign that said, THE NEW GREEK GOVERNMENT.” After the meeting the Dutch guy came up to him and said, “George, we know it’s not your fault, but shouldn’t someone go to jail?”
As he finishes his story the finance minister stresses that this isn’t a simple matter of the government lying about its expenditures. “This wasn’t all due to misreporting,” he says. “In 2009, tax collection disintegrated, because it was an election year.”
“What?”
He smiles.
“The first thing a government does in an election year is to pull the tax collectors off the streets.”
“You’re kidding.”
Now he’s laughing at me. I’m clearly naïve.
Fraternal Revenue Service
The costs of running the Greek government are only half the failed equation: there’s also the matter of government revenues. The editor of one of Greece ’s big newspapers had mentioned to me in passing that his reporters had cultivated sources inside the country’s revenue service. They’d done this not so much to expose tax fraud—which was so common in Greece that it wasn’t worth writing about—but to find drug lords, human smugglers, and other, darker sorts. A handful of the tax collectors, however, were outraged by the systematic corruption of their business; it further emerged that two of them were willing to meet with me. The problem was that, for reasons neither wished to discuss, they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. This, I’d be told many times by other Greeks, was very Greek.
The evening after I met with the minister of finance, I had coffee with one tax collector at one hotel, then walked down the street and had a beer with another tax collector at another hotel. Both had already suffered demotions, after their attempts to blow the whistle on colleagues who had accepted big bribes to sign off on fraudulent tax returns. Both had been removed from high-status fieldwork to low-status work in the back office, where they could no longer witness tax crimes. Each was a tiny bit uncomfortable; neither wanted anyone to know he had talked to me, as they feared losing their jobs in the tax agency. And so let’s call them Tax Collector No. 1 and Tax Collector No. 2.
Tax Collector No. 1—early 60s, business suit, tightly wound but not obviously nervous—arrived with a notebook filled with ideas for fixing the Greek tax-collection agency. He just took it for granted that I knew that the only Greeks who paid their taxes were the ones who could not avoid doing so—the salaried employees of corporations, who had their taxes withheld from their paychecks. The vast economy of self-employed workers—everyone from doctors to the guys who ran the kiosks that sold the International Herald Tribune—cheated (one big reason why Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed workers of any European country). “It’s become a cultural trait,” he said. “The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.”
The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.” One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. “The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,” he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe.
The easiest way to cheat on one’s taxes was to insist on being paid in cash, and fail to provide a receipt for services. The easiest way to launder cash was to buy real estate. Conveniently for the black market—and alone among European countries— Greece has no working national land registry. “You have to know where the guy bought the land—the address—to trace it back to him,” says the collector. “And even then it’s all handwritten and hard to decipher.” But, I say, if some plastic surgeon takes a million in cash, buys a plot on a Greek island, and builds himself a villa, there would be other records—say, building permits. “The people who give the building permits don’t inform the Treasury,” says the tax collector. In the apparently not-so-rare cases where the tax cheat gets caught, he can simply bribe the tax collector and be done with it. There are, of course, laws against tax collectors’ accepting bribes, explained the collector, “but if you get caught, it can take seven or eight years to get prosecuted. So in practice no one bothers.”
The systematic lying about one’s income had led the Greek government to rely increasingly on taxes harder to evade: real-estate and sales taxes. Real estate is taxed by formula—to take the tax collectors out of the equation—which generates a so-called “objective value” for each home. The boom in the Greek economy over the last decade caused the actual prices at which property changed hands to far outstrip the computer-driven appraisals. Given higher actual sales prices, the formula is meant to ratchet upward. The typical Greek citizen responded to the problem by not reporting the price at which the sale took place, but instead reporting a phony price—which usually happened to be the same low number at which the dated formula had appraised it. If the buyer took out a loan to buy the house, he took out a loan for the objective value and paid the difference in cash, or with a black-market loan. As a result the “objective values” grotesquely understate the actual land values. Astonishingly, it’s widely believed that all 300 members of the Greek Parliament declare the real value of their houses to be the computer-generated objective value. Or, as both the tax collector and a local real-estate agent put it to me, “every single member of the Greek Parliament is lying to evade taxes.”
On he went, describing a system that was, in its way, a thing of beauty. It mimicked the tax-collecting systems of an advanced economy—and employed a huge number of tax collectors—while it was in fact rigged to enable an entire society to cheat on their taxes. As he rose to leave, he pointed out that the waitress at the swanky tourist hotel failed to provide us with a receipt for our coffees. “There’s a reason for that,” he said. “Even this hotel doesn’t pay the sales tax it owes.”
I walked down the street and found waiting for me, in the bar of another swanky tourist hotel, the second tax collector. Tax Collector No. 2—casual in manner and dress, beer-drinking, but terrified that others might discover he had spoken to me—also arrived with a binder full of papers, only his was stuffed with real-world examples not of Greek people but Greek companies that had cheated on their taxes. He then started to rattle off examples (“only the ones I personally witnessed”). The first was an Athenian construction company that had built seven giant apartment buildings and sold off nearly 1,000 condominiums in the heart of the city. Its corporate tax bill honestly computed came to 15 million euros, but the company had paid nothing at all. Zero. To evade taxes it had done several things. First, it never declared itself a corporation; second, it employed one of the dozens of companies that do nothing but create fraudulent receipts for expenses never incurred and then, when the tax collector stumbled upon the situation, offered him a bribe. The tax collector blew the whistle and referred the case to his bosses—whereupon he found himself being tailed by a private investigator, and his phones tapped. In the end the case was resolved, with the construction company paying 2,000 euros. “After that I was taken off all tax investigations,” said the tax collector, “because I was good at it.”
He returned to his thick binder full of cases. He turned the page. Every page in his binder held a story similar to the one he had just told me, and he intended to tell me all of them. That’s when I stopped him. I realized that if I let him go on we’d be there all night. The extent of the cheating—the amount of energy that went into it—was breathtaking. In Athens , I several times had a feeling new to me as a journalist: a complete lack of interest in what was obviously shocking material. I’d sit down with someone who knew the inner workings of the Greek government: a big-time banker, a tax collector, a deputy finance minister, a former M.P. I’d take out my notepad and start writing down the stories that spilled out of them. Scandal after scandal poured forth. Twenty minutes into it I’d lose interest. There were simply too many: they could fill libraries, never mind a magazine article.
The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. Individual Greeks are delightful: funny, warm, smart, and good company. I left two dozen interviews saying to myself, “What great people!” They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing. Lacking faith in one another, they fall back on themselves and their families.
The structure of the Greek economy is collectivist, but the country, in spirit, is the opposite of a collective. Its real structure is every man for himself. Into this system investors had poured hundreds of billions of dollars. And the credit boom had pushed the country over the edge, into total moral collapse.
Road to Perdition
Knowing nothing else about the Vatopaidi monastery except that, in a perfectly corrupt society, it had somehow been identified as the soul of corruption, I made my way up to the north of Greece , in search of a bunch of monks who had found new, improved ways to work the Greek economy. The first stage was fairly easy: the plane to Greece ’s second city of Thessaloniki , the car being driven along narrow roads at nerve-racking speeds, and a night with a lot of Bulgarian tourists at a surprisingly delightful hotel in the middle of nowhere, called the Eagles Palace . There the single most helpful hotel employee I have ever met (ask for Olga) handed me a stack of books and said wistfully how lucky I was to be able to visit the place. The Vatopaidi monastery, along with 19 others, was built in the 10th century on a 37-mile-long-by-6-mile-wide peninsula in northeast Greece , called Mount Athos . Mount Athos now is severed from the mainland by a long fence, and so the only way onto it is by boat, which gives the peninsula the flavor of an island. And on this island no women are allowed—no female animals of any kind, in fact, except for cats. The official history ascribes the ban to the desire of the church to honor the Virgin; the unofficial one to the problem of monks hitting on female visitors. The ban has stood for 1,000 years.
This explains the high-pitched shrieks the next morning, as the ancient ferry packed with monks and pilgrims pulls away from the docks. Dozens of women gather there to holler at the tops of their lungs, but with such good cheer that it is unclear whether they are lamenting or celebrating the fact that they cannot accompany their men. Olga has told me that she was pretty sure I was going to need to hike some part of the way to Vatopaidi, and that the people she has seen off to the holy mountain don’t usually carry with them anything so redolent of the modern material world as a wheelie bag. As a result, all I have is an Eagles Palace plastic laundry bag with spare underwear, a toothbrush, and a bottle of Ambien.
The ferry chugs for three hours along a rocky, wooded, but otherwise barren coastline, stopping along the way to drop monks and pilgrims and guest workers at other monasteries. The sight of the first one just takes my breath away. It’s not a building but a spectacle: it’s as if someone had taken Assisi or Todi or one of the other old central-Italian hill towns and plopped it down on the beach, in the middle of nowhere. Unless you know what to expect on Mount Athos —it has been regarded by the Eastern Orthodox Church for more than a millennium as the holiest place on earth, and it enjoyed for much of that time a symbiotic relationship with Byzantine emperors—these places come as a shock. There’s nothing modest about them; they are grand and complicated and ornate and obviously in some sort of competition with one another. In the old days, pirates routinely plundered them, and you can see why: it would be almost shameful not to, for a pirate.
There are many places in the world where you can get away with not speaking Greek. Athens is one of them; the Mount Athos ferryboat is not. I am saved by an English-speaking young man who, to my untrained eye, looks like any other monk: long dark robes, long dark shaggy beard, fog of unfriendliness which, once penetrated, evaporates. He spots me using a map with thumbnail sketches of the monasteries and trying to determine where the hell I am meant to get off the boat: he introduces himself. His name is Cesar; he’s Romanian, the son of a counter-espionage secret-policeman in the nightmarish regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Somehow he has retained his sense of humor, which counts as some kind of miracle. He explains that if I knew anything about anything I would know that he was no monk, merely another Romanian priest on holiday. He’s traveled from Bucharest , with two enormous trunks on wheelies, to spend his summer vacation in one of the monasteries. Three months living on bread and water with no women in sight is his idea of a vacation. The world outside Mount Athos he finds somehow lacking.
“The Greek newspapers, they call us a corporation, but I ask you, Michael, what company has lasted for 1,000 years?” says Father Arsenios.
Cesar draws me a little map to use to get to Vatopaidi and gives me a more general lay of the land. The mere fact that I don’t have a beard will expose me as a not terribly holy man, he explains, if my mauve Brooks Brothers shirt doesn’t do it first. “But they are used to having visitors,” he said, “so it shouldn’t be a problem.” Then he pauses and asks, “But what is your religion?”
“I don’t have one.”
“But you believe in God?”
“No.”
He thinks this over.
“Then I’m pretty sure they can’t let you in.”
He lets the thought sink in, then says. “On the other hand, how much worse could it get for you?” he says, and chuckles.
An hour later I’m walking off the ferry holding nothing but the Eagles Palace hotel laundry bag and Cesar’s little map, and he’s still repeating his own punch line—“How much worse could it get for you?”—and laughing more loudly each time.
The monk who meets me at Vatopaidi’s front gate glances at the laundry bag and hands me a form to fill in. An hour later, having pretended to settle into my surprisingly comfortable cell, I’m carried by a river of bearded monks through the church door. Fearing that I might be tossed out of the monastery before I got a sense of the place, I do what I can to fit in. I follow the monks into their church; I light candles and jam them into a tiny sandpit; I cross myself incessantly; I air-kiss the icons. No one seems to care one way or the other about the obviously not Greek guy in the mauve Brooks Brothers shirt, though right through the service a fat young monk who looks a bit like Jack Black glares at me, as if I was neglecting some critical piece of instruction.
Otherwise the experience was sensational, to be recommended to anyone looking for a taste of 10th-century life. Beneath titanic polished golden chandeliers, and surrounded by freshly cleaned icons, the monks sang; the monks chanted; the monks vanished behind screens to utter strange incantations; the monks shook what sounded like sleigh bells; the monks floated by waving thuribles, leaving in their wake smoke and the ancient odor of incense. Every word that was said and sung and chanted was Biblical Greek (it seemed to have something to do with Jesus Christ), but I nodded right along anyway. I stood when they stood, and sat when they sat: up and down we went like pogos, for hours. The effect of the whole thing was heightened by the monks’ magnificently wild beards. Even when left to nature, beards do not all grow in the same way. There are types: the hopelessly porous mass of fuzz; the Osama bin Laden/Assyrian-king trowel; the Karl Marx bird’s nest. A surprising number of the monks resembled the Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercial. (“His beard alone has experienced more than a lesser man’s entire body.”)
The Vatopaidi monks have a reputation for knowing a lot more about you than you imagine they do, and for sensing what they do not know. A woman who runs one of the big Greek shipping firms told me over dinner in Athens that she had found herself seated on a flight not long ago beside Father Ephraim, the abbot of Vatopaidi (business class). “It was a very strange experience,” she said. “He knew nothing about me, but he guessed everything. My marriage. How I felt about my work. I felt that he completely knew me.” Inside their church I doubted their powers—in the middle of a great national scandal they have allowed a writer from VANITY FAIR, albeit one who has not formally announced himself, to show up, bunk down, and poke around their monastery without asking the first question.
But coming out of the church I finally get seized: a roundish monk with a salt-and-pepper beard and skin the color of a brown olive corners me. He introduces himself as Father Arsenios.
Grecian Formulas
For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Greek interest rates had run a full 10 percent higher than German ones, as Greeks were regarded as far less likely to repay a loan. There was no consumer credit in Greece : Greeks didn’t have credit cards. Greeks didn’t usually have mortgage loans either. Of course, Greece wanted to be treated, by the financial markets, like a properly functioning Northern European country. In the late 1990s they saw their chance: get rid of their own currency and adopt the euro. To do this they needed to meet certain national targets, to prove that they were capable of good European citizenship—that they would not, in the end, run up debts that other countries in the euro area would be forced to repay. In particular they needed to show budget deficits under 3 percent of their gross domestic product, and inflation running at roughly German levels. In 2000, after a flurry of statistical manipulation, Greece hit the targets. To lower the budget deficit the Greek government moved all sorts of expenses (pensions, defense expenditures) off the books. To lower Greek inflation the government did things like freeze prices for electricity and water and other government-supplied goods, and cut taxes on gas, alcohol, and tobacco. Greek-government statisticians did things like remove (high-priced) tomatoes from the consumer price index on the day inflation was measured. “We went to see the guy who created all these numbers,” a former Wall Street analyst of European economies told me. “We could not stop laughing. He explained how he took out the lemons and put in the oranges. There was a lot of massaging of the index.”
Which is to say that even at the time, some observers noted that Greek numbers never seemed to add up. A former I.M.F. official turned economic adviser to former Greek prime minister Konstantinos Mitsotakis turned Salomon Brothers analyst named Miranda Xafa pointed out in 1998 that if you added up all the Greek budget deficits over the previous 15 years they amounted to only half the Greek debt. That is, the amount of money the Greek government had borrowed to fund its operations was twice its declared shortfalls. “At Salomon we used to call [the head of the Greek National Statistical Service] ‘the Magician,’ ” says Xafa, “because of his ability to magically make inflation, the deficit, and the debt disappear.”
In 2001, Greece entered the European Monetary Union, swapped the drachma for the euro, and acquired for its debt an implicit European (read German) guarantee. Greeks could now borrow long-term funds at roughly the same rate as Germans—not 18 percent but 5 percent. To remain in the euro zone, they were meant, in theory, to maintain budget deficits below 3 percent of G.D.P.; in practice, all they had to do was cook the books to show that they were hitting the targets. Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government’s true level of indebtedness. For these trades Goldman Sachs—which, in effect, handed Greece a $1 billion loan—carved out a reported $300 million in fees. The machine that enabled Greece to borrow and spend at will was analogous to the machine created to launder the credit of the American subprime borrower—and the role of the American investment banker in the machine was the same. The investment bankers also taught the Greek-government officials how to securitize future receipts from the national lottery, highway tolls, airport landing fees, and even funds granted to the country by the European Union. Any future stream of income that could be identified was sold for cash up front, and spent. As anyone with a brain must have known, the Greeks would be able to disguise their true financial state for only as long as (a) lenders assumed that a loan to Greece was as good as guaranteed by the European Union (read Germany), and (b) no one outside of Greece paid very much attention. Inside Greece there was no market for whistle-blowing, as basically everyone was in on the racket.
That changed on October 4 of last year, when the Greek government turned over. A scandal felled the last government and sent Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis packing, which perhaps is not surprising. What’s surprising was the nature of the scandal. In late 2008, news broke that Vatopaidi had somehow acquired a fairly worthless lake and swapped it for far more valuable government-owned land. How the monks did this was unclear—paid some enormous bribe to some government official, it was assumed. No bribe could be found, however. It didn’t matter: the furor that followed drove Greek politics for the next year. The Vatopaidi scandal registered in Greek public opinion like nothing in memory. “We’ve never seen a movement in the polls like we saw after the scandal broke,” the editor of one of Greece ’s leading newspapers told me. “Without Vatopaidi, Karamanlis is still the prime minister, and everything is still going on as it was before.” Dimitri Contominas, the billionaire creator of a Greek life-insurance company and, as it happens, owner of the TV station that broke the Vatopaidi scandal, put it to me more bluntly: “The Vatopaidi monks brought George Papandreou to power.”
After the new party (the supposedly socialist Pasok) replaced the old party (the supposedly conservative New Democracy), it found so much less money in the government’s coffers than it had expected that it decided there was no choice but to come clean. The prime minister announced that Greece ’s budget deficits had been badly understated—and that it was going to take some time to nail down the numbers. Pension funds and global bond funds and other sorts who buy Greek bonds, having seen several big American and British banks go belly-up, and knowing the fragile state of a lot of European banks, panicked. The new, higher interest rates Greece was forced to pay left the country—which needed to borrow vast sums to fund its operations—more or less bankrupt. In came the I.M.F. to examine the Greek books more closely; out went whatever tiny shred of credibility the Greeks had left. “How in the hell is it possible for a member of the euro area to say the deficit was 3 percent of G.D.P. when it was really 15 percent?” a senior I.M.F. official asks. “How could you possibly do something like that?”
Just now the global financial system is consumed with the question of whether the Greeks will default on their debts. At times it seems as if it is the only question that matters, for if Greece walks away from $400 billion in debt, then the European banks that lent the money will go down, and other countries now flirting with bankruptcy (Spain, Portugal) might easily follow. But this question of whether Greece will repay its debts is really a question of whether Greece will change its culture, and that will happen only if Greeks want to change. I am told 50 times if I am told once that what Greeks care about is “justice” and what really boils the Greek blood is the feeling of unfairness. Obviously this distinguishes them from no human being on the planet, and ignores what’s interesting: exactly what a Greek finds unfair. It’s clearly not the corruption of their political system. It’s not cheating on their taxes, or taking small bribes in their service to the state. No: what bothers them is when some outside party—someone clearly different from themselves, with motives apart from narrow and easily understood self-interest—comes in and exploits the corruption of their system. Enter the monks.
Among the first moves made by the new minister of finance was to file a lawsuit against the Vatopaidi monastery, demanding the return of government property and damages. Among the first acts of the new Parliament was to open a second investigation of the Vatopaidi affair, to finally nail down exactly how the monks got their sweet deal. The one public official who has been strung up—he’s had his passport taken away, and remains free only because he posted a bail of 400,000 euros—is an assistant to the former prime minister, Giannis Angelou, who stands accused of helping these monks.
In a society that has endured something like total moral collapse, its monks had somehow become the single universally acceptable target of moral outrage. Every right-thinking Greek citizen is still furious with them and those who helped them, and yet no one knows exactly what they did, or why.
Monk Business
Father Arsenios looks to be in his late 50s—though who knows, as their beards cause them all to look 20 years older. He’s about as famous as you can get, for a monk: everyone in Athens knows who he is. Mr. Inside, the consummate number two, the C.F.O., the real brains of the operation. “If they put Arsenios in charge of the government real-estate portfolio,” a prominent Greek real-estate agent said to me, “this country would be Dubai. Before the crisis.” If you are kindly disposed to these monks, Father Arsenios is the trusted assistant who makes possible the miraculous abbacy of Father Ephraim. If you are not, he’s Jeff Skilling to Ephraim’s Kenneth Lay.
I tell him who I am and what I do—and also that I have spent the past few days interviewing political types in Athens. He smiles, genuinely: he’s pleased I’ve come! “The politicians all used to come here,” he says, “but because of our scandal they don’t now. They are afraid of being seen with us!”
He escorts me into the dining hall and plants me at what appears to be the pilgrim’s table of honor, right next to the table filled with the top monks. Father Ephraim heads that table, with Arsenios beside him.
Most of what the monks eat they grow themselves within a short walk of the dining hall. Crude silver bowls contain raw, uncut onions, green beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and beets. Another bowl holds bread baked by the monks, from their own wheat. There’s a pitcher of water and, for dessert, a soupy orange sherbet-like substance and dark honeycomb recently plundered from some beehive. And that’s pretty much it. If it were a restaurant in Berkeley, people would revel in the glorious self-righteousness of eating the locally grown; here the food just seems plain. The monks eat like fashion models before a shoot. Twice a day four days a week, and once a day for three: 11 meals, all of them more or less like this. Which raises an obvious question: Why are some of them fat? Most of them—maybe 100 out of the 110 now in residence—resemble their diet. Beyond thin: narrow. But a handful, including the two bosses, have an ampleness to them that cannot be explained by 11 helpings of raw onion and cucumber, no matter how much honeycomb they chew through.
After dinner the monks return to church, where they will remain chanting and singing and crossing and spraying incense until one in the morning. Arsenios grabs me and takes me for a walk. We pass Byzantine chapels and climb Byzantine stairs until we arrive at a door in a long Byzantine hall freshly painted but otherwise antique: his office. On the desk are two computers; behind it a brand-new fax machine—cum—printer; on top of it a cell phone and a Costco-size tub of vitamin-C pills. The walls and floor gleam like new. The cabinets exhibit row upon row of three-ring binders. The only sign that this isn’t a business office circa 2010 is a single icon over the desk. Apart from that, if you put this office side by side with the office of Greece’s minister of finance and asked which one housed the monk, this wouldn’t be it.
“There is more of a spiritual thirst today,” he says when I ask him why his monastery has attracted so many important business and political people. “Twenty or 30 years ago they taught that science will solve all problems. There are so many material things and they are not satisfying. People have gotten tired of material pleasures. Of material things. And they realize they cannot really find success in these things.” And with that he picks up the phone and orders drinks and dessert. Moments later a silver tray arrives, bearing pastries and glasses of what appears to be crčme de menthe.
Thus began what became a three-hour encounter. I’d ask simple questions—Why on earth would anyone become a monk? How do you handle life without women? How do people who spend 10 hours a day in church find time to create real-estate empires? Where did you get the crčme de menthe?—and he would answer in 20-minute-long parables in which there would be, somewhere, a simple answer. (For example: “I believe there are many more beautiful things than sex.”) As he told his stories he waved and jumped around and smiled and laughed: if Father Arsenios feels guilty about anything, he has a rare talent for hiding it. Like a lot of people who come to Vatopaidi, I suppose, I was less than perfectly sure what I was after. I wanted to see if it felt like a front for a commercial empire (it doesn’t) and if the monks seemed insincere (hardly). But I also wondered how a bunch of odd-looking guys who had walked away from the material world had such a knack for getting their way in it: how on earth do monks, of all people, wind up as Greece’s best shot at a Harvard Business School case study?
After about two hours I work up the nerve to ask him. To my surprise he takes me seriously. He points to a sign he has tacked up on one of his cabinets, and translates it from the Greek: the smart person accepts. the idiot insists.
He got it, he says, on one of his business trips to the Ministry of Tourism. “This is the secret of success for anywhere in the world, not just the monastery,” he says, and then goes on to describe pretty much word for word the first rule of improvisational comedy, or for that matter any successful collaborative enterprise. Take whatever is thrown at you and build upon it. “Yes … and” rather than “No … but.” “The idiot is bound by his pride,” he says. “It always has to be his way. This is also true of the person who is deceptive or doing things wrong: he always tries to justify himself. A person who is bright in regard to his spiritual life is humble. He accepts what others tell him—criticism, ideas—and he works with them.”
I notice now that his windows open upon a balcony overlooking the Aegean Sea. The monks are not permitted to swim in it; why, I never asked. Just like them, though, to build a beach house and then ban the beach. I notice, also, that I am the only one who has eaten the pastries and drunk the crčme de menthe. It occurs to me that I may have just failed some sort of test of my ability to handle temptation.
“The whole government says they are angry at us,” he says, “but we have nothing. We work for others. The Greek newspapers, they call us a corporation. But I ask you, Michael, what company has lasted for 1,000 years?”
At that moment, out of nowhere, Father Ephraim walks in. Round, with rosy cheeks and a white beard, he is more or less the spitting image of Santa Claus. He even has a twinkle in his eye. A few months before, he’d been hauled before the Greek Parliament to testify. One of his interrogators said that the Greek government had acted with incredible efficiency when it swapped Vatopaidi’s lake for the Ministry of Agriculture’s commercial properties. He asked Ephraim how he had done it.
“Don’t you believe in miracles?” Ephraim had said.
“I’m beginning to,” said the Greek M.P.
When we are introduced, Ephraim clasps my hand and holds it for a very long time. It crosses my mind that he is about to ask me what I want for Christmas. Instead he says, “What is your faith?” “Episcopalian,” I cough out. He nods; he calibrates: it could be worse; it probably is worse. “You are married?” he asks. “Yes.” “You have children?” I nod; he calibrates: I can work with this. He asks for their names …
Notes on a Scandal
The second parliamentary inquiry into the Vatopaidi affair is just getting under way, and you never know what it may turn up. But the main facts of the case are actually not in dispute; the main question left to answer is the motives of the monks and the public servants who helped them. In the late 1980s, Vatopaidi was a complete ruin—a rubble of stones overrun with rats. The frescoes were black. The icons went uncared for. The place had a dozen monks roaming around its ancient stones, but they were autonomous and disorganized. In church jargon they worshipped idiorrhythmically—which is another way of saying that in their quest for spiritual satisfaction it was every man for himself. No one was in charge; they had no collective purpose. Their relationship to their monastery, in other words, was a lot like the relationship of the Greek citizen to his state.
That changed in the early 1990s, when a group of energetic young Greek Cypriot monks from another part of Athos, led by Father Ephraim, saw a rebuilding opportunity: a fantastic natural asset that had been terribly mismanaged. Ephraim set about raising the money to restore Vatopaidi to its former glory. He dunned the European Union for cultural funds. He mingled with rich Greek businessmen in need of forgiveness. He cultivated friendships with important Greek politicians. In all of this he exhibited incredible chutzpah. For instance, after a famous Spanish singer visited and took an interest in Vatopaidi, he parlayed the interest into an audience with government officials from Spain. They were told a horrible injustice had occurred: in the 14th century a band of Catalan mercenaries, upset with the Byzantine emperor, had sacked Vatopaidi and caused much damage. The monastery received $240,000 from the government officials.
Clearly one part of Ephraim’s strategy was to return Vatopaidi to what it had been for much of the Byzantine Empire: a monastery with global reach. This, too, distinguished it from the country it happened to be inside. Despite its entry into the European Union, Greece has remained a closed economy; it’s impossible to put one finger on the source of all the country’s troubles, but if you laid a hand on them, one finger would touch its insularity. All sorts of things that might be more efficiently done by other people they do themselves; all sorts of interactions with other countries that they might profitably engage in simply do not occur. In the general picture the Vatopaidi monastery was a stunning exception: it cultivated relations with the outside world. Most famously, until scandal hit, Prince Charles had visited three summers in a row, and stayed for a week each visit.
Relationships with the rich and famous were essential in Vatopaidi’s pursuit of government grants and reparations for sackings, but also for the third prong of its new management’s strategy: real estate. By far the smartest thing Father Ephraim had done was go rummaging around in an old tower where they kept the Byzantine manuscripts, untouched for decades. Over the centuries Byzantine emperors and other rulers had deeded to Vatopaidi various tracts of land, mainly in modern-day Greece and Turkey. In the years before Ephraim arrived, the Greek government had clawed back much of this property, but there remained a title, bestowed in the 14th century by Emperor John V Palaiologos, to a lake in northern Greece.
By the time Ephraim discovered the deed to the lake in Vatopaidi’s vaults, it had been designated a nature preserve by the Greek government. Then, in 1998, suddenly it wasn’t: someone had allowed the designation to lapse. Shortly thereafter, the monks were granted full title to the lake.
Back in Athens, I tracked down Peter Doukas, the official inside the Ministry of Finance first accosted by the Vatopaidi monks. Doukas now finds himself at the center of the two parliamentary investigations, but he had become, oddly, the one person in government willing to speak openly about what had happened. (He was by birth not an Athenian but a Spartan—but perhaps that’s another story.) Unlike most of the people in the Greek government, Doukas wasn’t a lifer but a guy who had made his fortune in the private sector, inside and outside of Greece, and then, in 2004, at the request of the prime minister, had taken a post in the Finance Ministry. He was then 52 years old and had spent most of his career as a banker with Citigroup in New York. He was tall and blond and loud and blunt and funny. It was Doukas who was responsible for the very existence of long-term Greek-government debt. Back when interest rates were low, and no one saw any risk in lending money to the Greek government, he talked his superiors into issuing 40- and 50-year bonds. Afterward the Greek newspapers ran headlines attacking him (DOUKAS MORTGAGES OUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE), but it was a very bright thing to have done. The $18 billion of long-term bonds now trade at 50 cents on the dollar—which is to say that the Greek government could buy them back on the open market. “I created a $9 billion trading profit for them,” says Doukas, laughing. “They should give me a bonus!”
Not long after Doukas began his new job, two monks showed up unannounced in his Finance Ministry office. One was Father Ephraim, of whom Doukas had heard; the other, unknown to Doukas but clearly the sharp end of the operation, a fellow named Father Arsenios. They owned this lake, they said, and they wanted the Ministry of Finance to pay them cash for it. “Someone had given them full title to the lake,” says Doukas. “What they wanted now was to monetize it. They came to me and said, ‘Can you buy us out?’ ” Before the meeting, Doukas sensed, they had done a great deal of homework. “Before they come to you they know a lot about you—your wife, your parents, the extent of your religious beliefs,” he said. “The first thing they asked me was if I wanted them to take my confession.” Doukas decided that it would be unwise to tell the monks his secrets. Instead he told them he would not give them money for their lake—which he still didn’t see how exactly they had come to own. “They seemed to think I had all this money to spend,” says Doukas. “I said, ‘Listen, contrary to popular opinion, there is no money in the Finance Ministry.’ And they said, ‘O.K., if you cannot buy us out, why can’t you give us some of your pieces of land?’ ”
This turned out to be the winning strategy: exchanging the lake, which generated no rents, for government-owned properties that did. Somehow the monks convinced government officials that the land around the lake was worth far more than the 55 million euros an independent appraiser later assessed its value as, and then used that higher valuation to ask for one billion euros’ worth of government property. Doukas declined to give them any of the roughly 250 billion euros’ worth controlled by the Ministry of Finance. (“No fucking way I’m doing that,” he says he told them.) The monks went to the source of the next most valuable land—farmlands and forests controlled by the Ministry of Agriculture. Doukas recalls, “I get a call from the Minister of Agriculture saying, ‘We’re trading them all this land, but it’s not enough. Why don’t you throw in some of your pieces of land, too?’ ” After Doukas declined, he received another call—this one from the prime minister’s office. Still he said no. Next he receives this piece of paper saying he’s giving the monks government land, and all he needs to do is sign it. “I said, ‘Fuck you, I’m not signing it.’ ”
And he didn’t—at least not in its original form. But the prime minister’s office pressed him; the monks, it seemed to Doukas, had some kind of hold on the prime minister’s chief of staff. That fellow, Giannis Angelou, had come to know the monks a few years before, just after he had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. The monks prayed for him; he didn’t die, but instead made a miraculous recovery. He had, however, given them his confession.
By now Doukas thought of these monks less as simple con men than the savviest businessmen he had ever dealt with. “I told them they should be running the Ministry of Finance,” he says. “They didn’t disagree.” In the end, under pressure from his boss, Doukas signed two pieces of paper. The first agreed not to challenge the monks’ ownership of the lake; the second made possible the land exchange. It did not give the monks rights to any lands from the Finance Ministry, but, by agreeing to accept their lake into the Ministry of Finance’s real-estate portfolio, Doukas enabled their deal with the minister of agriculture. In exchange for their lake the monks received 73 different government properties, including what had formerly been the gymnastics center for the 2004 Olympics—which, like much of what the Greek government built for the Olympic Games, was now empty and abandoned space. And that, Doukas assumed, was that. “You figure they are holy people,” he says. “Maybe they want to use it to create an orphanage.”
What they wanted to create, as it turned out, was a commercial-real-estate empire. They began by persuading the Greek government to do something it seldom did: to re-zone a lot of uncommercial property for commercial purposes. Above and beyond the lands they received in their swap—which the Greek Parliament subsequently estimated to be worth a billion euros—the monks, all by themselves, were getting 100 percent financing to buy commercial buildings in Athens, and to develop the properties they had acquired. The former Olympics gymnastics center was to become a fancy private hospital—with which the monks obviously enjoyed a certain synergy. Then, with the help of a Greek banker, the monks drew up plans for something to be called the Vatopaidi Real Estate Fund. Investors in the fund would, in effect, buy the monks out of the properties given to them by the government. And the monks would use the money to restore their monastery to its former glory.
From an ancient deed to a worthless lake the two monks had spun what the Greek newspapers were claiming, depending on the newspaper, to be a fortune of anywhere from tens of millions to many billions of dollars. But the truth was that no one knew the full extent of the monks’ financial holdings; indeed, one of the criticisms of the first parliamentary investigation was that it had failed to lay hands on everything the monks owned. On the theory that if you want to know what rich people are really worth you are far better off asking other rich people—as opposed to, say, journalists—I polled a random sample of several rich Greeks who had made their fortune in real estate or finance. They put the monk’s real-estate and financial assets at less than $2 billion but more than $1 billion—up from zero since the new management took over. And the business had started with nothing to sell but forgiveness.
The monks didn’t finish with church until one in the morning. Normally, Father Arsenios explained, they would be up and at it all over again at four. On Sunday they give themselves a break and start at six. Throw in another eight hours a day working the gardens, or washing dishes, or manufacturing crčme de menthe, and you can see how one man’s idea of heaven might be another’s of hell. The bosses of the operation, Fathers Ephraim and Arsenios, escape this grueling regime roughly five days a month; otherwise this is the life they lead. “Most people in Greece have this image of the abbot as a hustler,” another monk, named Father Matthew, from Wisconsin, says to me in a moment of what I take to be candor. “Everyone in Greece is convinced that the abbot and Father Arsenios have their secret bank accounts. It’s completely mad if you think about it. What are they going to do with it? They don’t take a week off and go to the Caribbean. The abbot lives in a cell. It’s a nice cell. But he’s still a monk. And he hates leaving the monastery.”
The knowledge that I am meant to be back in the church at six in the morning makes it more, not less, difficult to sleep, and I’m out of bed by five. Perfect silence: it’s so rare to hear nothing that it takes a moment to identify the absence. Cupolas, chimneys, towers, and Greek crosses punctuate the gray sky. Also a pair of idle giant cranes: the freezing of the monks’ assets has halted restoration of the monastery. At 5:15 come the first rumblings from inside the church; it sounds as if someone is moving around the icon screens, the sweaty backstage preparations before the show. At 5:30 a monk grabs a rope and clangs a church bell. Silence again and then, moments later, from the monk’s long dormitory, the beep beep beep of electric alarm clocks. Twenty minutes later monks, alone or in pairs, stumble out of their dorm rooms and roll down the cobblestones to their church. It’s like watching a factory springing to life in a one-industry town. The only thing missing are the lunchpails.
Three hours later, in the car on the way back to Athens , my cell phone rings. It’s Father Matthew. He wants to ask me a favor. Oh no, I think, they’ve figured out what I’m up to and he’s calling to place all sorts of restrictions on what I write. They had, sort of, but he didn’t. The minister of finance insisted on checking his quotes, but the monks just let me run with whatever I had, which is sort of amazing, given the scope of the lawsuits they face. “We have this adviser in the American stock market,” says the monk. “His name is Robert Chapman. [I’d never heard of him. He turned out to be the writer of a newsletter about global finance.] Father Arsenios is wondering what you think of him. Whether he is worth listening to …”
The Bonfire of Civilization
The day before I left Greece the Greek Parliament debated and voted on a bill to raise the retirement age, reduce government pensions, and otherwise reduce the spoils of public-sector life. (“I’m all for reducing the number of public-sector employees,” an I.M.F. investigator had said to me. “But how do you do that if you don’t know how many there are to start with?”) Prime Minister Papandreou presented this bill, as he has presented everything since he discovered the hole in the books, not as his own idea but as a non-negotiable demand of the I.M.F. The general idea seems to be that while the Greek people will never listen to any internal call for sacrifice they might listen to calls from outside. That is, they no longer really even want to govern themselves.
Thousands upon thousands of government employees take to the streets to protest the bill. Here is Greece ’s version of the Tea Party: tax collectors on the take, public-school teachers who don’t really teach, well-paid employees of bankrupt state railroads whose trains never run on time, state hospital workers bribed to buy overpriced supplies. Here they are, and here we are: a nation of people looking for anyone to blame but themselves. The Greek public-sector employees assemble themselves into units that resemble army platoons. In the middle of each unit are two or three rows of young men wielding truncheons disguised as flagpoles. Ski masks and gas masks dangle from their belts so that they can still fight after the inevitable tear gas. “The deputy prime minister has told us that they are looking to have at least one death,” a prominent former Greek minister had told me. “They want some blood.” Two months earlier, on May 5, during the first of these protest marches, the mob offered a glimpse of what it was capable of. Seeing people working at a branch of the Marfin Bank, young men hurled Molotov cocktails inside and tossed gasoline on top of the flames, barring the exit. Most of the Marfin Bank’s employees escaped from the roof, but the fire killed three workers, including a young woman four months pregnant. As they died, Greeks in the streets screamed at them that it served them right, for having the audacity to work. The events took place in full view of the Greek police, and yet the police made no arrests.
As on other days, the protesters have effectively shut down the country. The air-traffic controllers have also gone on strike and closed the airport. At the port of Piraeus , the mob prevents cruise-ship passengers from going ashore and shopping. At the height of the tourist season the tourist dollars this place so desperately needs are effectively blocked from getting into the country. Any private-sector employee who does not skip work in sympathy is in danger. All over Athens shops and restaurants close; so, for that matter, does the Acropolis.
The lead group assembles in the middle of a wide boulevard a few yards from the burned and gutted bank branch. That they burned a bank is, under the circumstances, incredible. If there were any justice in the world the Greek bankers would be in the streets marching to protest the morals of the ordinary Greek citizen. The Marfin Bank’s marble stoop has been turned into a sad shrine: a stack of stuffed animals for the unborn child, a few pictures of monks, a sign with a quote from the ancient orator Isocrates: “Democracy destroys itself because it abuses its right to freedom and equality. Because it teaches its citizens to consider audacity as a right, lawlessness as a freedom, abrasive speech as equality, and anarchy as progress.” At the other end of the street a phalanx of riot police stand, shields together, like Spartan warriors. Behind them is the Parliament building; inside, the debate presumably rages, though what is being said and done is a mystery, as the Greek journalists aren’t working, either. The crowd begins to chant and march toward the vastly outnumbered police: the police stiffen. It’s one of those moments when it feels as if anything might happen. Really, it’s just a question of which way people jump.
That’s how it feels in the financial markets too. The question everyone wants an answer to is: Will Greece default? There’s a school of thought that says they have no choice: the very measures the government imposes to cut costs and raise revenues will cause what is left of the productive economy to flee the country. The taxes are lower in Bulgaria , the workers more pliable in Romania . But there’s a second, more interesting question: Even if it is technically possible for these people to repay their debts, live within their means, and return to good standing inside the European Union, do they have the inner resources to do it? Or have they so lost their ability to feel connected to anything outside their small worlds that they would rather just shed themselves of the obligations? On the face of it, defaulting on their debts and walking away would seem a mad act: all Greek banks would instantly go bankrupt, the country would have no ability to pay for the many necessities it imports (oil, for instance), and the country would be punished for many years in the form of much higher interest rates, if and when it was allowed to borrow again. But the place does not behave as a collective; it lacks the monks’ instincts. It behaves as a collection of atomized particles, each of which has grown accustomed to pursuing its own interest at the expense of the common good. There’s no question that the government is resolved to at least try to re-create Greek civic life. The only question is: Can such a thing, once lost, ever be re-created?

[julie]

Mak Kafanea, that is an amazing article.
The journalist has identified the corruption of every sector, with the knowledge of the IMF and EU.
They have no enforceable taxation system in place, no enforceable compliance regulators, there is no record keeping, the government is corrupt, whistleblowers are punished, every section of the building industry is corrupt, the mind just boggles.
The governments are not answerable to the IMF and EU, who continue to lend exorbitant amounts of funds at nil interest!
Who is holding the EU, IMF etc accountable for knowingly allowing the corruption and the Greek lying cheating economic system to continue?
Yet Hellass continues to hold Macedonia at ransom, deny the minorities basic human rights, and EU have the fucking nerve to make demands on our name.
Fuck them

[Makedonska_Kafana]

YouTube - Ico Najdovski intervju so Jordan Petrovski prv del!

[Makedonska_Kafana]

Dear readers and friends,

We ask that you please support this initiative, which aims to send emails to a number of German institutions in order to seek recognition for the Republic of Macedonia under the name Republic of Macedonia, by sending your own letter or a copy of the following letters in German or English to the provided e-mails:

Germany is one of the few European countries which still has not recognized Macedonia by its proper name. A few months ago a rally was held in Berlin to encourage Germany to recognize Macedonia but the rally was unsuccessful. However we must continue our struggle so we ask that you join our people in Germany and contribute to this struggle through an Internet campaign that has the same goal.

Please address the letters to:

Embassy of Germany in Macedonia - Link
[email protected]
[email protected]

Parliament of Germany - Link
[email protected]

Council of Germany (Bundesrat) - Link

Mission of Germany to the UN, New York - Link
[email protected]

Mission of Germany to the United Nations, Geneva - Link
[email protected]

Government of Germany - Link

President of Germany
[email protected]
[email protected]

Representative of Germany to the EU - Link
[email protected]

Mission of Germany to the OSCE - Link


Our letter in English:

Ladies and Gentlemen,

On April 15th, 1993 the Federal Republic of Germany recognized the Republic of Macedonia as a sovereign state and both countries established diplomatic relations. However, the recognition was not done under the name Republic of Macedonia but under a temporary reference with which the Republic of Macedonia was admitted to the UN.

We the Macedonians believe that this decision is not only unjust for the Macedonian people but defies universal rights and principles.

The reference under which the Republic of Macedonia was admitted to the UN is only for use within the UN, as per resolution 817.

The preliminary reference which was included in the UN constitutes a reference, not a name!

We the Macedonians ask that fundamental human rights and principles also apply to us.

We ask that you please end the injustice and discrimination against us and recognize our country by the name Republic of Macedonia .

Over 130 countries worldwide, including the USA , Canada , Brazil , India , China , Japan , Russia … have already acknowledged our country under the name Republic of Macedonia !

Yours sincerely,


Our letter in German:

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

Am 15. April 1993 hat die Bundesrepublik Deutschland die Republik Mazedonien als selbstständigen Staat anerkannt, sodass beide Länder diplomatische Beziehungen aufnahmen. Allerdings war die Anerkennung nicht unter dem verfassungsmäßigen Namen unseres Landes - Republik Mazedonien, sondern unter der vorübergehenden Referenz, mit der die Republik Mazedonien in die UNO aufgenommen wurde.

Wir Bürger der Republik Mazedonien, glauben, dass diese Entscheidung die vorübergehende Referenz als Bezeichnung für unser Land anzuwenden nicht den Prinzipien als auch den Rechten von Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit entsprechen.

Die Referenz, unter der die Republik Mazedonien in die UNO aufgenommen wurde, ist nur für die Verwendung innerhalb der UN, wie in der Resolution 817. angegeben.

Ein weiterer Grund ist, dass die vorläufige Referenz unter der Mazedonien in die UNO aufgenommen wurde, eine vorübergehende Referenz darstellt - aber keinen Namen!

Wir, die Bürgerinnen und Bürger der Republik Mazedonien mit Sinn für Gerechtigkeit und Fairness, bitten, dass die grundlegenden Menschenrechte und Prinzipien auch für uns gelten. Haben wir es nicht verdient, unseren Namen zu tragen, den wir gewählt haben und mit welchen wir uns seit Jahrhunderten selbst nennen und definieren?

Unsere Bitte an Sie ist dazu beizutragen, die Ungerechtigkeit und Diskriminierung zu beenden und unser Land unter seinem historischen und verfassungsmäßigen Namen anzuerkennen - Republik Mazedonien.

Wir möchten anmerken, dass über 130 Länder weltweit, darunter die USA, Kanada, Brasilien, Indien, China, Japan, Russland ... unsere Heimat unter ihrem verfassungsmäßigen Namen anerkannt haben!

Auch möchten wir nicht vergessen zu erwähnen, dass wir die öffentliche Meinung Deutschlands zur Kenntnis genommen haben, in der wir überwiegend mit unserem verfassungsrechtlichen Namen bezeichnet werden.

Der Name unserer Heimat ist Republik Mazedonien! Wir Bitten dies zu respektieren, so wie wir immer Ihren Namen respektiert haben!

Mit freundlichen Grüßen


Our letter in Macedonian:


Сакаме да ве замолиме да ја подржите иницијативата која цели со испраќање на електронски пораки до германските институции да издејствува признавање на Р. Македонија под нејзиното уставно име. Исто така сакаме да ве замолиме да ја проширите меѓу вашите контаакти:

Германија е една од неколкуте европски земји која сеуште не нема признато под нашето уставно име. Пред неколку месеци во Берлин беше одржан митинг со барање Германија да не признае под уставно име. За да дадеме свој придонес во оваа битка на нашите во Германија решивме да иницираме Интернет кампања која ја има истата цел.

Немаме заблуди дека со ова ќе постигнеме којзнае колку голем успех, ама ако постојано се водиме од дефетистичка филозофија, сигурно е дека никогаш и нема да постигнеме нешто со што ќе направиме разлика. Од друга страна пак ако сите запнеме со здружени сили и ако секој го даде својот максимум, неминовно ќе успееме да се избориме за нашето име.

Дури и да не успееме сега, ефектот од иницијативата ќе се кумулира и ќе дојде моментот кога последната капка што ќе ја наполни чашата, колку и да е мала ќе резултира со признавање на Македонија под уставно име.


Писмото е адресирано до:

Амбасада на Германија во Македонија - Линк
[email protected]
[email protected]

Парламент на Германија - Линк
[email protected]

Совет на Германија (Бундесрат) - Линк

Мисија на Германија во ООН, Њујорк - Линк
[email protected]

Мисија на Германија во ООН, Женева - Линк
[email protected]

Влада на Германија - Линк

Претседател на Германија
[email protected]
[email protected]

Претставник на Германија во ЕУ - Линк
[email protected]

Мисија на Германија во OSCE - Линк

Доколку имате можност напишете ваш текст во кој најкултурно и аргументирано побарајте признавање на Република Македонија под уставно име, и пратете го на сите посочени адреси.

[Makedonska_Kafana]

Macedonia has reasonable case on language and name of citizenship, top US diplomat says

Washington/Skopje, 10 December 2010 (MIA) - Macedonia has reasonable case on topics such as Macedonian language and name of their citizenship, but it should climb down on issues such as naming their airport, US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Philip Gordon said in the document from the meeting with EU high representatives and officials of 27 EU member states in Stockholm on July 3, 2009, released by Wikileaks.

The meeting was focused on Western Balkans, Gordon assessed that during EU Swedish presidency, Macedonia may receive a relatively positive EU progress assessment, but as he underlined "fairly or unfairly, Macedonia may have to compromise on the name issue in order to move forward on the EU accession."

US diplomat said that the US is still letting UNSR Matthew Nimetz lead, and noted that Deputy Secretary Steinberg has talked to the Greeks.

- While the Macedonians need to climb down on issues such as naming their airport, they have a reasonable case on other topics such as their language and the name of their citizenship. Some climbing down is needed on both sides, Gordon said in the document released by Wikileaks.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Philip Gordon at the meeting urged for more intensified US-EU cooperation regarding the Balkans and open issues in the region. sk/fd/11:48

###

[Makedonska_Kafana]

Q. Explain to me why the UMD and George Sorass have many of the same goals and objectives ie. Interim Agreement is a legal document, avoid answering the tough questions or give open ended answers - fence sitters who play both sides

[julie]

Macedonia has reasonable case on language and name of citizenship, top US diplomat says

Washington/Skopje, 10 December 2010 (MIA) - Macedonia has reasonable case on topics such as Macedonian language and name of their citizenship, but it should climb down on issues such as naming their airport, US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Philip Gordon said in the document from the meeting with EU high representatives and officials of 27 EU member states in Stockholm on July 3, 2009, released by Wikileaks.

The meeting was focused on Western Balkans, Gordon assessed that during EU Swedish presidency, Macedonia may receive a relatively positive EU progress assessment, but as he underlined "fairly or unfairly, Macedonia may have to compromise on the name issue in order to move forward on the EU accession."

US diplomat said that the US is still letting UNSR Matthew Nimetz lead, and noted that Deputy Secretary Steinberg has talked to the Greeks.

- While the Macedonians need to climb down on issues such as naming their airport, they have a reasonable case on other topics such as their language and the name of their citizenship. Some climbing down is needed on both sides, Gordon said in the document released by Wikileaks.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasian Affairs, Philip Gordon at the meeting urged for more intensified US-EU cooperation regarding the Balkans and open issues in the region. sk/fd/11:48

###

Gordon will be the recipient of the next UMD hero award for extermination of Macedonian name and identity, for sure.
UMD continues to remain strangely silent on these allegations - busy organising hero awards and boat trips with their UMD based member funds, but of course, they would go along with this, its all for the extinction of Macedonian name and identity
Questions have been asked and funny how they stated dont support negotiations, very quietly

[Makedonska_Kafana]

Questions have been asked and funny how they stated dont support negotiations, very quietly

It took me about a year of demanding until they finally prepared a press release which was done very "quietly" and with little fanfare.

I think a person would have to be blind not to see who's interests they really defend.

NOTE

After 5 years the UMD have not managed to get the Macedonian or United States governments to implement any changes yet the call for more funding continues weekly. Going to buy changes and human rights like Soros does?

[Makedonska_Kafana]

Integration of the Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia into the General Macedonian Community

By Irena Borisovska
Translated and edited by Risto Stefov

The Macedonians like many other people in this world, during the course of their history, had the unfortunate fate of being divided, resettled and negated. It took decades for them to free themselves of the feeling of uncertainty and that only happened after the formation of a Macedonian state, first as part of the Former Yugoslav Federation and later, after 1991, as an independent Macedonian state.

Today, unwinding under International supervision, the Macedonian state is being transformed, a condition under which it has existed since its beginning, since the moment the Macedonian people created it. European standards are adopted in every segment of society, with hopes that Macedonia will soon join the European family. With hopes that eventually the Macedonian people will have the ability to at least reunite culturally.

The future of the Balkan people is the European Union where everyone can be connected culturally and economically.

Macedonia’s fate of being divided was determined by other people, Balkan people, but Macedonia’s unfortunate situation was brought on particularly because of its ancient name – a situation which until now was unrecognized by the world.

The golgotha and hardship of the Macedonian people from the Aegean part of Macedonia begins with Macedonia’s partition in 1913. Macedonia’s partition and the Macedonian people’s division into four parts after the 1912, 1913 Balkan Wars have prevented the Macedonian people’s centuries old wish to form a free and independent Macedonian state which was to encompass the entire Macedonian territory. In the course of history, since the Balkan Wars, under the various states in which they found themselves, the Macedonian people have been exposed to many re-settlements and forced assimilations. Plunged into such tragic circumstances has especially been the fate of Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia, in other words the Macedonians living under Greece where a large part of the Macedonian population was evicted from its native home with no hope of ever returning.

After the Balkan Wars, under the signed convention between Greece and Bulgaria (November 1919) for exchange of populations, tens of thousands of Macedonians from Greece were forced to leave their homes. The Kukush, Enidzhevardar, Gjumensko and Solun Region populations were the first to be evicted. Part of that population was relocated to Struma Region, today called “Bezhantsi”.

The new brand of eviction began with the signing of the 1923 Lausanne Agreement for the exchange of the Muslim and Christian populations between Greece and Turkey. As a result of this agreement about 40 thousand Macedonians of the Muslim faith were evicted to Turkey and so-called “Greeks” from Asia Minor and the Caucasus were settled in the Aegean part of Macedonia.

Kostur, Lerin, Voden and the wider regions were predominantly populated by Macedonians. The Greek government, with the August 10th, 1929 act “Agreement for protection of the non-Greek population living in Greece”, was obliged to respect “the interests of the residents who were different from Greek by ethnicity, language or religion”. Bus as soon as that was about to happen, the Bulgarian state insisted that the Macedonians living in Greece were Bulgarians and put pressure on Greece to call them a Bulgarian minority. Then the Yugoslav side put pressure on Greece to regard the same Macedonians as a Serbian minority.

In 1925 under pressure from the League of Nations, Greece published the “Abecedar”, a Latin scripted primer in the Bitola-Lerin dialect of the Macedonian language. Even though it was regulated by the Greek Ministry of Education, its application, as was generally designed to teach the Macedonian language to Macedonian children, was never carried out. The primer was confiscated and denationalizing politics continued at the same tempo. With that the Macedonian people’s rights to learn their mother tongue was, one more time, taken away.

In 1928, after a Greek-Bulgarian agreement for population exchanges, 86,000 Macedonians were evicted to Bulgaria. During the August 1936 Ioannis Metaxas dictatorship more strict measures for denationalizing Macedonians were put in place and in 1938 a law was enacted to entirely ban the Macedonian language. To accelerate the learning of the Greek language, night schools were opened to teach adults.

During the Greek-Italian War (October 1940) and generally during the Second World War, Macedonians along with the Greek population joined the anti-fascist struggle to protect the Greek state. By doing so the Macedonians were hoping that they would finally achieve their rights, at least of free expression as Macedonians, but that too did not happen.

Not being granted their human rights and dissatisfied with the conduct of the Communist Party of Greece (CPG) towards them, a large number of Macedonian fighters crossed over the Greek-Yugoslav border into Bitola, the territory of today’s Republic of Macedonia and, on November 18th, 1944, formed their own Aegean Brigade. (1)

With the formation of this brigade, in the territory of the then People’s Republic of Macedonia, began the integration of the Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia with the Macedonians from the Republic of Macedonia working together to form a mother state. The long term aim of the brigade, however, was to return to the territory of the Aegean part of Macedonia and fight for the rights of the Macedonian people in Greece, especially since at the time Greece was still in the process of forming a government. However, the Greek left was not interested in the Macedonians and was flirting with the communist block and with the western bourgeoisie block to boost its own national interests. The Aegean brigade in the meantime was engaged in the clean-up battles in the liberation of western Macedonia.

The question as to why the Greek Civil War was started to begin with and why it involved the Macedonian people is very interesting, especially since the division of spheres of influence between the Great Powers was already known. If the Greek Civil War was not about expelling those people who did not see themselves as Greeks then what was it all about?

The end of the Second World War was not the end of the Macedonian “dream” for achieving equal rights in rebuilding the modern Greek state. Against all odds, in view of the circumstances then, Macedonians fighters still hoped that they would somehow achieve their human rights. On May 6th, 1945 the Brigade was disbanded. A small part of the fighting force joined the Yugoslav National Army (YNA) and a greater part returned to Greece, to the Aegean part of Macedonia where fighters joined the Democratic Army of Greece (DAG) (2). The Brigade in its entirety consisted of about 2 to 3 thousand fighters. (3)

At that time major terror campaigns aimed against the Macedonian people and against the left in general were conducted by the right and supported by the British. Terror, lawlessness, murders, rapes, kidnappings, destruction of Macedonian homes and properties, expulsions, etc. were common practice in the Aegean part of Macedonia since the day ELAS was demobilized in February 26th, 1945. The Greek colonists (the Prosfigi or Majars as they were known), brought to Macedonia from Asia Minor in the 1920’s, became organized, joined armed bands and wreaked havoc on the Macedonian population to avenge alleged crimes the Macedonians had supposedly perpetrated against them in the course of the occupation and to punish the Macedonians for their alleged activities against Greek interests in Macedonia. (4) The entire state apparatus had joined the anti-Macedonian campaign and the Macedonians were labeled Bulgarians, rebels and autonomists who were a danger to the security and integrity of Greece. Many Macedonians were wrongly accused of being “rebels” but in fact it was the so-called counter-bands of the right who released the majority of the “rebels” and allowed them to join the rebel movement. These so-called “rebels” were the best fighters and leaders of DAG who, in order to defend themselves from the fierce terror waged against them and against the Macedonian people, attempted to create an all Macedonian organization called SNOF (Macedonian National Front) and, on January 20th, 1945, Vangel Ajanovski Oche, a veteran of SNOF, initiated the organization TOMO (Macedonian Clandestine Liberation Organization).

In the period between the Varkiza negotiations (February 12, 1945) and sometime after the 2nd plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Greece (February 12, 1946) 1,192 people were killed, 6,413 were wounded, 75,000 were jailed, 165 women were raped, 6,569 were kidnapped, about 100,000 were persecuted and 20,000 fled to Yugoslavia, Albania and Bulgaria. During the second plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Part of Greece a resolution was reached to re-evaluate the need for resuming the armed struggle conducted during World War II and to abstain from the March 31st, 1946 parliamentary elections. The resolution to re-evaluate the need for the resumption of the armed struggle gave the Greek right more reasons to seek a final resolution with the left. With the number of fighters enlisted in DAG being much smaller compared to those who had enlisted in ELAS, the Greek People’s Liberation Army during World War II, such a resolution was now possible. Because of this the British and Americans, who had interests of their own in the region, had no intention of allowing the CPG to win and letting Greece fall into communist hands.

The “renewed conflict” drew the Macedonians into the struggle once again raising their hopes of gaining their human rights, hopes that were destined to be disappointed right from the start. But what choice did they have? The CPG in Greece was the only party to recognize them as Macedonians making it obvious which side they should take. As one of the fighters from the Aegean Brigade, Boris Dimitrov, from the village R’bi located near the Macedonian-Greek border in Prespa Region, said to his wife, who begged him to cross border and join his two younger sons, “I have no other choice but to fight to the end, because if I stay and fight there will always be hope.” (5) Today we may think this man’s ideals are strange but what kind of person is he without ideals?

The mass exodus of Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia took place exactly at the time when the United Nations Universal declaration of human rights was being adopted. (6) Unfortunately as the rest of the world began to enjoy its human rights, the rights of the Macedonians in Greece were trampled on and repeatedly violated by the Greek state. The basic human rights which include equality, freedom from discrimination, the right to live free and secure, freedom from torture and humiliation, the right to be recognized as an individual before the law, freedom from arbitrary jailing and persecution, the right to get a fair trial, the right to be deemed innocent until proven guilty, the freedom to travel outside of the country, the right to property, freedom of thought and expression, the freedom to peacefully assembly and gather, freedom to education, freedom to belong to a political system in which these rights and freedoms can be realized, the right to achieve the regulations from this declaration without their prevention from the state, groups or individuals, etc., of the Macedonians were repeatedly violated. (7)

It is sad that none of this is acceptable in Greece. In 1950 Greece introduced two laws in order to evict Macedonians from their homeland. The first law treated Macedonians as “undesirable foreigners” on their own lands and the second law (decree 2536) allowed for Macedonian lands to be confiscated for the “colonization of the Greek population”. (8)

In the course of the Greek Civil War, particularly during the gathering and relocation of the Refugee Children (Detsa Begaltsi) from Greece in 1948, the Peoples’ Republic of Macedonia, under the framework of the Peoples’ Republic of Yugoslavia, accepted a number of these refugees. The greater number however was sent to several Eastern European countries including the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and East Germany. Some refugees were sent to other republics in the Yugoslav federation.

The Provisional Democratic Government of Greece from the left at the time had passed a resolution to move the children away from the regions where war was being waged, especially away from the regions that were being bombed by air by British and American bombers. Simultaneously, the Greek government from the right was also attempting to resettle the children through the Greek queen Frederica who initiated a campaign to “save” the children. Unlike the left which collected the children whose families were willing to let them go voluntarily, the right was essentially working to kidnap the children with aims of sending them to “right sponsored” Greek schools and turning them into great spirited Greeks of the “neo-janissary” kind. Believing that their children were in danger of being kidnapped by the right, mothers in the village Zagorichani, Kostur Region, hid their children in the ovens. Frustrated by being unable to find them, the armed monarcho-fascists, looking for children to kidnap, slashed 17 women to death from the surrounding villages and threw their bodies into Lake Kostur. (9)

The Greek Civil War lasted from 1946 to 1949 during which conditions in Greece were aggravated and turned from bad to worse for the population. But at the same time, even though this period was short, it gave the Macedonian people, at least those in the free territories, an opportunity to learn their own language.

In Mala Prespa during the preparations for the children’s evacuations, in February 1948, a letter from the Provisional Greek Government was sent to the Albanian government outlining its reasons for this mass organized deportation. Its first reason was to save the children from the British and American terror waged against the Greek people in general (10). An announcement was also made by the radio station “Free Greece” on March 4th, 1948 giving similar reasons for the deportation.

The actual campaign to collect the children from Lerin, Kostur and Voden Regions was initiated and carried out by the Peoples’ Liberation Army and by the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front, with help from the people’s committees in the villages.

With the children removed from the country, a smaller of the two evils was realized. While unable to return to their homeland, the children would at least be free to maintain and protect their true identity away from the hands of the queen Frederica who had aims to take them to the Greek islands to “educate” them in how to be great spirited Greeks.

It was decided that children ages 2 to 14 would qualify for the evacuation which would be conducted under voluntary consent from their parents or guardians. The children would be placed in groups of 20 to 25 and one adult person would be given responsibility for looking after each group. In most cases the person responsible was a young woman, a widow of a fallen DAG fighter, a woman or a man who had spent time in jail or a young woman whose parents were fighters in DAG.

A memorandum from the Provisional Government of Greece was also sent to Trigve Li in the United Nations explaining the reasons for the evacuation. Some of these reasons were outlined on the radio program “Free Greece” on May 27, 1948. On May 28, 1948 an article appeared in the newspaper “Nova Makedonija” stating that the memorandum also contained information that exposed the Athenian government and the archbishop Damaskinos of personally having cooperated with Hitler’s forces during the fascist occupation and in December 1944 having approved the terror campaigns and genocide which the Athenian government then carried out.

Even though 2/3 of the children were Macedonian, the memorandum failed to mention that fact thus calling them all “Greek children”. The memorandum was signed by General Markos Vafiadis, president of the Provisional Government of Greece.

In the 70’s when Papandreou, the Greek Prime Minister, finally made his peace with the former partisans, General Markos Vafiadis triumphantly returned to Athens, not forgetting to emphasize that he was a deserving Greek who exiled the Macedonian population from the Aegean part of Macedonia. Reminding the Greek regime in power that it was he and his communists alone who accomplished more in a few short years in eliminating the Macedonian menace than all the Greek regimes put together. (11) According to United Nations statistics 28,000 children were exiled but according to the Provisional Government of Greece the number was 25,000. (12)

The Greek Civil War ended in August 1949 with dire consequences for the Macedonian people. Apart from the children being exiled and the exhaustion of the population in Lerin, Kostur and Voden Regions, a large part of the adult population was also exiled. Therefore the December 1944 Greek aim to eliminate the Macedonians from Greece was achieved with the eviction of 120,000 Macedonians.

The Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia who found themselves on the other side of the border, outside of Greece, were determined to preserve their Macedonian national identity even at the cost of losing their homes and everything that their predecessors had worked for through the ages. They were guided by the words: “A people without life cannot die, neither can they be destroyed, but from the spirit of martyrdom those people will again be resurrected.” These words were taught by their teacher and revolutionary, Lazo Angelovski from the village Grazhdeno in Prespa Region. Lazo was the main organizer who put together the Macedonian language courses for teaching the Macedonian language to the Macedonian teachers in the Aegean part of Macedonia. Lazo was also one of the first teachers to teach in the Peoples’ Republic of Macedonia and to sacrifice himself for Macedonians so that they could again be resurrected. (13)

The displaced Macedonians, carrying with them their strong Macedonian national feeling, in the struggle to preserve themselves from being assimilated, persisted in becoming integrated in Macedonian society. Rejected by the Greeks they felt the Greek chauvinistic politics crawling under their skin as they were prohibited from “returning home”, to be with their people, to become whole. Accepting that as Macedonians they could not return home, they turned to the single mother which they had, the modern Macedonian state, the Republic of Macedonia, the only place they could communicate and work in their mother tongue. Even though in the early years the Macedonian children and adults were displaced in many countries they never forgot who they were. The young children before leaving home were told to always remember who they were and to never forget that they were Macedonians.

“Macedonian woman from the Aegean part of Macedonia, who initially did not even know how to read Macedonian, eventually became the primary educators and surrogate mothers of the evacuated children. Even in the countries unknown to them, they as teachers and mother figures cared for the children and spoke to them honestly, directly, quietly, gently, always determined to educate them while tenaciously keeping watch over them day and night. They worried about the children, about their well being and about their education constantly reminding them to strive to learn: ‘Learn dear children. You are Macedonians. You need to learn to become doctors, engineers, professors... you are Macedonia’s future, when we return to Macedonia you will be needed to build our devastated Macedonia. We, on the other hand never had such opportunity because the Greek reactionary regimes would not allow us to be educated not even in the Greek language.’” (14)

That Macedonian feeling was seeded in the evacuated children. Besides learning the language of the host country, they were learning Macedonian, their own language. In parallel they were also learning the Greek language.

Courses to educate the Macedonian teachers at that time were held in the free territories of Prespa in the Aegean part of Macedonia, in the Peoples’ Republic of Macedonia and in Romania.

Evacuated children sent to the various Eastern European countries were doing well in developing their knowledge of Macedonian culture. They were learning and singing Macedonian songs, reciting performances in Macedonian and reading Macedonian books and other reading material which was provided for them by the Peoples’ Republic of Macedonia and by the publishing council of the Peoples’ Liberation Front.

The children cared for Macedonian cultural traditions and were eager to learn the Macedonian language, especially from articles and newspapers published in Macedonian. Generally they cared very much for their mother country and wanted to have good relations with their own people.

Some of the newspapers and publications sent to the children as reading material included: “Macedonian” edited by Pavle Kaljkov (published 35 issues from 1949 to 1953), “Ilinden”, published from 1952 to 1956 and “Macedonian Life” published from 1963 to 1966. There were also cultural events organized during which the song “Today in Macedonia is Born” was sung; a song which today is the Republic of Macedonia’s National Anthem. (15)

The Communist Party of Greece did its best to win over the children but without much success with the exception of those who still had relatives in Greece. It won over them by offering them repatriation. Most of the children however, even those who migrated to overseas countries, always felt Macedonian and considered Macedonia to be their homeland. They continued to enjoy their Macedonian culture and practice their Macedonian traditions wherever they lived, not forgetting who they were.

“The evacuated young children, who were taken care of outside of their own homeland, are now academic citizens and qualified professionals. Their education they received in the language of the host countries. Most returned to the Republic of Macedonia and, for various reasons, some immigrated to overseas countries such as Canada, Australia, the USA and other countries.” Testimony given by Evdokia Foteva Vera. (16)

The largest part of all the displaced people from the Aegean part of Macedonia returned to the Republic of Macedonia, a process which had been unwinding through several phases. During the first phase some decided to stay in the Peoples’ Republic of Macedonia while the rest were settled in other countries, mostly in Eastern European countries. The total number of displaced people was estimated to exceed 100,000, from which 60,000 were sent to European countries and the rest went overseas. If we take into consideration that more than 20,000 were killed during the course of the anti-fascist war and during the Greek Civil War, we arrive at the number of people which the Greek government of December 1944 wanted eliminated.

In March 1948 the Yugoslav state delegated responsibility for the reception and care of the refugee children to the Yugoslav Committee for Social Affairs and to the Yugoslav Red Cross. Bitola was chosen to act as the central point for front line assistance, food and clothing distribution. Further distribution of food, clothing, disinfection and medical exams were conducted in Matka (Skopje) and Belgrade, with help from the federal, republic and local government organs and by activists from the various organizations such as the Women’s Anti-fascist Front and the Peoples’ Front. In Yugoslavia, as in the remaining Eastern European countries, the children were settled in children’s homes where a large number spent years of their lives. Upon completing their elementary education, the children who were settled in children’s homes in the former Yugoslav Republics were sent to the Peoples’ Republic of Macedonia to further their education. Most wanted to remain in the Republic of Macedonia and complete their entire education, but because of the Republic’s difficult economic situation, at that time, all their wishes could not be granted.

There was a time, of course, when people reacted both positively and negatively to the re-settling of the “Aegeans” in the Republic of Macedonia, but that, as it is understood, did not discourage the so-called “Aegeans” from wanting to return to the embrace of their own country.

The situation was further aggravated when relations between the Federal Peoples’ Republic of Yugoslavia and the Eastern Block countries began to deteriorate on account of their disputes on who had the right to steer the socialist system.

Problems deepened when the Communist Party of Greece took the Soviet Union side and sided with the Eastern European countries. This unfortunately left many families either divided or on the other side of the “fence”, a fence erected between Yugoslavia and the Eastern European countries.

A large number of adults, including those who were directly involved in the struggle in ELAS and DAG, were sent to the Soviet Union with some being sent to Poland and Hungary, while children were spread out in children’s homes everywhere. Because of United Nations conventions, everywhere they went they were considered “refugees” which was also the case in the Federal Peoples’ Republic of Yugoslavia and understandably in the Peoples’ Republic of Macedonia. Even though they were Macedonians they were still considered refugees by International standards but the Macedonian authorities did their best to expedite their citizenship. When relations between the Federal Peoples’ Republic of Yugoslavia and the remaining countries from the “socialist camp” (Eastern block) began to improve, families that were divided were allowed to reconnect and parents could finally be with their children. There are many examples of families being divided and placed in several countries. There are also instances where members of those families did not know the whereabouts of their relatives or if they were dead or alive. Efforts to reconnect families lasted, in some cases, up to the 1970s with many Macedonians ending up in the Republic of Macedonia, which they considered to be their own homeland.

The departure of the Macedonians from the Eastern European countries began in the mid 50s and, according to some authors, numbered around 100,000. (17)

Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia who decided to remain in the Peoples’ Republic of Macedonia were eventually integrated into its economic sector and cultural life. Aegeans worked mainly in collectives and factories and quickly integrated themselves into the social life.

In the economic sector they were integrated in the collectives as early as March 1948 when around 60 families from the Aegean part of Macedonia were given work at the village collectives in the villages Gari and Trsontse. Initially they faced problems such as their daily wages being short but most were administrative problems to do with the collectives themselves. Some received equitable salaries but the salaries of most were far less than those received by members of the collective. (18) The Aegeans also worked in other businesses such as the stock breeding collective “Tsrvena Dzvezda” in Shtip, the business “Erzhelia” in Sveti Nikole, the construction companies in Mavrovo and Titov Veles, the factory in “Treska”, the collective in Stenche, the confectionary factory “Progres”, “Kuzman Josifovski Pitu” in Prilep, the factory “Michurin” in Skopje and other places. (19)

The Macedonian government also showed concern about educating the young, particularly those children who lived in the children’s homes, as well as those who remained in the Republic and lived with their families. The Aegean children were well integrated with the local children in various schools, including the middle schools in Skopje. (20) The older children were given opportunities to study in Macedonian faculties.

In the course of settling the Aegean Macedonians, plans were made and money was set aside to build apartments in various cities in the Republic of Macedonia. A lot of effort was made to integrate them into Macedonian communities and turn them into productive citizens. In June 1951 the Macedonian government introduced regulations which permitted the refugees to build homes. Those who wanted to build their own homes were given land from the national assets fund to use for free for a predetermined time. Similarly, credit was set aside through the Yugoslav Federal government’s investment bank and the Macedonian bank. Credit was given out interest free for 30 years. In Skopje new buildings were built in the Michurin and Avtokomanda suburbs as well as in Prilep, Kumanovo, Shtip, Bitola and Titov Veles. (21)

To expedite and ease their integration, the refugees began to form their own organizations and publish their own newspapers. One of their newspapers, “Glas na Egejtsite” (Voice of the Aegeans), published for three years, informed the refugees of their ongoing situation and reported on activities which were of general interest to them. Another organization established by the refugees was the arts organization “Egej” which served to affirm the Macedonian traditions from the Aegean part of Macedonia.

One of the most important aspects of refugee integration was to disassociate themselves from former political party ties. A large number of the Partisan fighters who found themselves in the Republic of Macedonia were members of the Greek communist party. For some years they were also members of the Yugoslav communist party but because of their former membership in the Greek communist party, they were not trusted. From testimonies given by people who lived in Yugoslavia at the time, it was understood that these people were carefully watched because of the contacts they had with people from the “enemy block”. There were cases where distinguished anti-fascist fighters were sued and jailed in Goli Otok prison, some purely on suspicion. Most interesting was the case of Partisan Pando Ljorovski from the village Dmbeni, Kostur Region, a fighter who belonged to the First Macedonian Kosovo shock brigade. He was pardoned in 1959 by the government. (22) After his life was spared he remained and worked in Macedonia.

Many projects initiated by the Aegeans were questioned by the Yugoslav authorities, including the building of a monument to honour the fallen in Katlanovo, which was halted by a directive from Belgrade. (23) Those returning from the Eastern Block countries were investigated upon their arrival and a large number were treated as possible Soviet agents. (24)

It is also important however to mention some positive aspects experienced by the refugees like jobs that they easily found after their arrival. Their relocation which did not go as smoothly as expected was offset by the fact that there were building funds set aside to help them resettle. Unfortunately, as fate would have it, after the 1963 Skopje earthquake many newcomers had to be relocated again to new Skopje neighbourhoods.

It is also important to mention that a large number of the newcomers returning from Eastern European countries came with a developed middle professional education, a large number of them having received higher education, including magistrate and doctoral degrees. In Macedonia their education was valued and recognized because at that time people with higher education were in great demand, not only in Macedonia but also in the rest of Yugoslavia.

The Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia generally had and still have a highly developed Macedonian consciousness. This was true even in the first years after their arrival. A small number even desired a united Macedonia.

Unfortunately, at the insistence of Great Britain, Yugoslavia and Greece after 1955 began to improve their relations thus ignoring the unsettled Aegean Macedonian question. Many times, when the Macedonian leadership attempted to bring it up the answer was always the same “we cannot risk ruining our relations with Greece on account of the Aegeans”.

The return of the Aegean Macedonians to the Republic of Macedonia was accomplished during Yugoslav times when these people, along with local Macedonians, took part in building and modernizing the Socialist Republic of Macedonia.

In the period after the Republic of Macedonia’s independence, the Aegeans continued to be involved in shaping the general course of this country and, like all Macedonians, shared in its rebuilding; each offering their own means to help and each hoping that some day all Macedonians from all parts of Macedonia would find a way to become culturally and economically united perhaps in a framework of a larger European family.

Many Aegeans distinguished themselves in various fields each in their own way helping to establish this state. Among them are many distinguished heroes, fighters, philosophers, politicians, businessmen, academics and artists, who with their creative opus have left and are still leaving a strong mark on Macedonia’s culture.

Many names need to be mentioned, however we will mention only two that we believe are very important for Macedonia – Gotse Delchev and Krste Misirkov. Today’s Macedonians are proud of those two great historic figures.

Epilog

“We ask them why are they sending us to Albania, and they told us why not Albania, it’s a democratic country? Then I asked them, why should we go to Albania when we have our own country, our Macedonia which is free? In Macedonia we share one language, and belong to one nation…” With these words Piriklija Bogdanov from the village Bapchor answered the border guard when he arrived at the Yugoslav-Greek border. (25)

Let these beautiful words serve as an example of how important it was for an Aegean Macedonian to be integrated into the Macedonian community.

Activities undertaken by the Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia prove that they were and still are always oriented towards bettering Macedonia.

It is important to also emphasize the valuable contribution made to the Republic of Macedonia by determined Macedonians from the Aegean part of Macedonia, who risked their lives in the struggle to protect the Macedonian national consciousness in the decades that followed their “uprooting” from their own homeland.

This year, 60 years will have passed since the mass exodus of the refugee children (Detsa Begaltsi) from the Aegean part of Macedonia, and 60 years from the adoption of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.

Next year will be the 60th anniversary marking the end of the Greek Civil War. But the problem of recognizing the Macedonian nation by the Greek state still remains open. And Greece is considered the cradle of democracy?

Summary

During the 1946 – 1949 Greek Civil War, when military actions were taking place in the territory settled by the Macedonian population, and due to the fact that a considerable number of Macedonians joined the Democratic Army of Greece, the Provisional Democratic Government of Greece carried out the so-called child evacuation program. The majority of children evacuated were Macedonians. They were sent to a number of Eastern European communist block countries and to Yugoslavia. Then, following the normalization of relations between Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, a process for returning the children to the Republic of Macedonia was initiated. Integration of the refugee children into Macedonian society was of great importance particularly to the process of building a modern Macedonian state.

Sources:

1. DARM fond br.1111 - Republi~ko zdru`enie na decata begalci od Egejskiot del na Makedonija vo Republika Makedonija

Literature:
1. "Istorija na makedonskiot narod" tret del - Skopje , 1963 godina
2. Zbornik "Etni~kite promeni vo Egejska Makedonija vo 20 - iot vek" - Skopje , 2003 godina
3. Fana Martinova Buckova " I nie sme deca na majkata zemja" - Skopje, 1998 godina
4. Mi{o Kitanovski, \or|i Donevski " Deca begalci od Egejska Makedonija vo Jugoslavija" - Skopje, 2003 godina
5. Sokrat Panovski "V'mbel" - Skopje , 2002 godina
6. Hristo Ristovski "Gra`deno" - Skopje, 2001 godina
7. Hristo Ristovski "Lazo Angelovski - u~itel i revlucioner" - Skopje, 2000 godina
8. \or|i Donevski "Bap~or" - Skopje, 1996 godina
9. Monografija za selo German - Skopje , 1979 godina
10. Vangel Ajanovski O~e "Egejski buri" - Skopje , 1975
11. Liljana Panovska "Terorot vo Egejska Makedonija" - Skopje , 1995 godina
12. d-r Stojan Kiselinovski "Gr~kata kolonizacija vo Egejska Makedonija (1913 - 1940)" - Skopje , 1981 godina
13. d-r Risto Kirjazovski "NOF i drugi organizacii na Makedoncite vo Egejska Makedonija ( 1945 - 1949)" Skopje , 1985 godina
14. Dragan Kqaki} "Izgubqena pobeda genarala Markosa - Gra|anski rat u Gr~koj 1946 - 1949 i KPJ" Beograd , 1987 godina
15. Univerzalna Deklaracija za ~ovekovi prava - Skopje 2001 godina

Newspapers and articles

1. Vesnicite "Glas na Egejcite" - od 1 do 41 broj - 1950 - 1953 godina
2.Feqton "Pette stra{ni godini - Egejska Makedonija od d-r Risto Kirjazovski - objaven vo nedelnikot "Makedonsko sonce" od maj 2002 do januari 2003 godina
Se}avawa na `ivi svedoci:
\or|i Donevski od selo Bap~or,
Sevda Demirova, Ta{e i \or|i Borisovski od selo R'bi.

Notes:

(1) Hristo Andonovski "Makedoncite pod Grcija vo borbata protiv fa{izmot (1940 - 1944)" Skopje , 1968 godina str.122
(2) Vangel Ajanovski - O~e "Egejski buri" Skopje , 1975 godina str.139 - 145
(3) Spored se}avawata na drugarkata Evdokija Foteva Vera - borec na Brigadata
(4) d - r Risto Kirjazovski "Pette stra{ni godini - Egejska Makedonija" - feљton vo nedelnikot "Makedonsko sonce" 2002 godina ( prv del )
(5) Spored se}avawata na Sevda Demirova - ~lenka na AF@
(6) Na 10 dekemvri 1948 godina Generalnoto sobranie na Obedinetite nacii ja usvoi i ja proglasi Univerzalnata Deklaracija za ^ovekovi prava. Ovaa deklaracija gi garantira pravata na site lu|e i go opfa}a {irokiot spektar od ekonomski, socijalni, kulturni, politi~ki i gra|anski prava.
(7) Ministerstvo za obrazovanie i nauka - Biro za razvoj na obrazovanieto "Univerzalna deklaracija za ~ovekovi prava"
(8) Dragan Kqaki} "Izgubwena pobeda generala Markosa - Gra|anski rat u Gr~koj 1946 - 1949 i KPJ" Beograd , 1987 godina str.275
(9) Mi{o Kitanovski, \or|i Donevski "Deca begalci od egejska Makedonija vo Jugoslavija" Skopje , 2003 godina str. 42
(10) Документи за учеството на македонскиот народ од егејскиот дел на Македонија во Граѓанската војна во Грција 1948 година том V - Архив на Македонија, Скопје 1981 година; стр. 115 и 116 –
PDV naveduva: "Od imeto na Privremenata demokratska vlada imame ~est da Vi go stavime na znaewe slednovo:
Kako {to mu e poznato na celiot svet и на албанскиот народ, od krajot na 1944 godina amerikanskite i angliskite imperijalisti so nivnite slugi vo Atina sproveduvaat sistematski teror i nastojuvaat da mu nalo`at na gr~kiot narod nova okupacija, edna od najstra{nite i najopasnite dosega {to gi poznava istorijata na Grcija.
Prvite `rtvi na varvarskite napadi se decata, bolnite, invalidite i licata bez za{tita. Pove}eto od tie `rtvi sega se nao|aat vo keliite na smrtta, {to se sozdadeni na gr~kite ostrovi od strana na monarhofa{istite, po naredba na nivnite angloamerikanski gospodari.
Poradi takvata situacija sozdadena e intervencija na angloamerikanskite imperijalisti zaedno so nivnite monarhofa{isti~ki lakei vo Atina, vo posledno vreme iljadnici lica od slobodnite i poluslobodnite teritorii ispra}aat pisma, so koi se obra}aat do Privremenata demokratska vlada i molat da im se obezbedi za{tita na decata, starcite, bolnite i invalidite od tie podra~ja.
So cel da im se spasi `ivotot na tie nevini `rtvi Privremenata demokratska vlada, imaj}i doverba vo ~ove~kite su{testva, re{i da Ve zamoli vo ramkite na svoite mo`nosti da dozvolite da bidat primeni vo Va{ata teritorija izvesen broj deca, starci, bolni i invalidi od Grcija.
Dostavuvaj}i ja gore iznesenata molba neka mi se dozvoli da Ve uveram gospodine Pretsedetele, deka pozitiven odgovor }e bide cenet od gr~kiot narod, za {to toj Vi e dlaboko blagodaren".
(11) Zbornik "Etni~kite promeni vo egejska Makedonija vo 20 vek" Skopje, 2001 godina - Kuzman Georgievski "Makedonskata emigracija od egejskiot del na Makedonija (1945 -1949)" str. 142 - 147
(12) Mi{o Kitanovski, \or|i Donevski " Deca begalci od egejska Makedonija vo Jugoslavija"
(13) Hristo Ristovski "Lazo Angelovski, u~itel i revolucioner" Skopje 2000 godina str. 43
(14) Spored se}avawata na Ta{e i \or|i Borisovski od selo R'bi - Prespa
(15) Fana Martinova Buckova "I nie sme deca na majkata zemja" Skopuje,1998 godina str.115 -162
(16) Mi{o Kitanovski, \or|i Donevski " Deca begalci od Egejska Makedonija vo Jugoslavija" Skopje, 2003 godina str. 45 - 48
(17) Zbornik "Etni~kite promeni vo Egejska Makedonija vo 20 - ot vek" Skopje 2001 godina Vangel Ka~ev "Nekoi etnoistoriski, psihofizi~ki i kulturno - sociolo{ki aspekti vo razvojniot pat na decata progoneti od egejskiot del na Makedonija" - str. 304
(18) Vesnik "Glas na Egejcite" br. 3 od 1 noemvri 1950 str.4 "Do koga }e se ~eka?"
(19) Vesnik "Glas na Egejcite" br. 4 od 1 dekemvri 1950 i od broj 5 - 9 1951
(20) Vesnik "Glas na Egejcite" br. 6 od 4 fevruari 1951 godina str.1
(21) Vesnik "Glas na Egejcite" br. 9 od 2 avgust 1951 godina str. 3
(22) Sokrat Panovski "V'mbel" Skopje , 2002 godina str. 123
(23) Spored se}avawata na \or|i Donevski od selo Bap~or
(24) Od svedo~ewe na pove}e povratnici od Isto~noevropskite zemji
(25) \or|i Donevski "Bap~or" Skopje , 1996 godina str.119

Other articles by Risto Stefov:

http://www.maknews.com/html/articles.html#stefov

http://www.americanchronicle.com/authors/view/3446

Free electronic books by Risto Stefov available at:

http://makedonskakafana.com/ebooks.html

Our Name is Macedonia

https://www.mhrmi.org/our_name_is_macedonia

You can contact the author at [email protected]


Irena Borisovska


INTEGRACIJA NA MAKEDONCITE OD EGEJSKA MAKEDONIJA
VO MAKEDONSKOTO OP[TESTVO



Makedoncite, како и многу други narodi, vo tekot na istorijata ja imale sudbinata na podelbi, preselbi i negirawa. Nitu posle pove}edeceniskoto postoewe na makedonskata dr`ava, najprvo vo ramkite na porane{na Jugoslavija (SFRJ), a po 1991 godina i kako samostojna dr`ava, makedonskiot narod ne mo`e da se oslobodi od ~uvstvoto na nesigurnost.
Izgradbata na dr`avata s# u{te e vo tek i se odviva пoд me|unaroden nadzor, a taka е i od samiot po~etok, odnosno od momentot koga Makedoncite kako narod dobile svoja dr`ava. Evropskite standardi za gradewe na dr`avnost se vнесуваат vo sekoj segment na op{testvoto, so nade` deka i Makedonija }e se vklu~i vo evropskoto semejstvo. Kone~no, makedonskiot narod }e ja ima mo`nosta barem kulturno da se obedini.
Idninata na balkanskite narodi e Evropskata unija kade {to site }e mo`at kulturno i ekonomski da se povrzat.
Makedonskata sudbina ja delat i drugi narodi, pa i balkanski, no makedonskiot slu~aj e osoben poradi upotrebata na privremenoto ime - slu~aj dosega nepoznat vo svetski ramki.
Golgotata na Makedoncite od egejskiot del na Makedonija po~nuva so razdeluvaweto na Makedonija. Podelbata na Makedonija i na makedonskiot narod na ~etiri dela po balkanskite vojni go spre~ila ostvaruvaweto na pove}evekovnata `elba za sozdavawe na nezavisna makedonska dr`ava, на целата македонска територија. Makedoncite bile izlo`eni na raseluvawa i asimilacii vo razli~nite balkanski dr`avi. Vo tie ramki, osobeno tragi~na bila sudbиnata na Makedoncite vo egejskiot del na Makedonija, odnosno vo Grcija. Golem del od makedonskoto naselenie gi napu{tilo svoite opo`areni domovi zaedno so sru{enite nade`i za skoro vra}awe nazad.
Po Balkanskite vojni desetici iljadi Makedonci od Grcija bile prinudeni da gi napu{tat svoite domovi po potpi{anata konvencija me|u Grcija i Bugarija (noemvri 1919 godina) za razmena na naselenie. Oblastite Kuku{ko, Enixevardarsko, Gumenxisko i Solunsko bile opfateni so prviot bran preselbi. Del od niv bile naseleni vo Strumi~ko, denes nare~eni "be`anci".
Noviot bran na raseluvawa se slu~il so sklu~uvaweto na Lozanskiot dogovor vo 1923 godina pome|u Grcija i Turcija za razmena na muslimansko i hristijansko naselenie. Okolu 40 iljadi Makeдonci so islamska veroispovest bile preseleni vo Turcija. Vo Egejska Makedonija bile naseleni Grci od Mala Azija i Kavkaz.
Vo Kosturskiot, Lerinskiot i Vodenskiot kraj i ponatamu preovladuvalo makedonskoto naselenie.
Gr~kata dr`ava so актот od 10 avgust 1920 godina "Dogovor za za{tita na negr~koto naselenie vo Grcija" se obvrzala da gi po~ituva "interesite na `itelite {to se razlikuvaat po nacija, jazik ili vera". Podocna bil vr{en pritisok od strana na Bugarskata dr`ava makedonskoto naselenie da se nare~e bugarsko malcinstvo vo Grcija. No pritisoci bile vr{eni i od jugoslovenska strana Makedoncite da bidat smetani kako srpsko malcinstvo.
Vo 1925 godina, pod pritиsok na Dru{tvoto na narodite, Грција go otpe~atila bukvarot na makedonski jazik so bitolsko-lerinsko nare~je, na latinica, nare~en "Abecedar". Иako bila donesena i uredba od strana na gr~koto ministerstvo za prosveta, неговата примена, kako i voop{o nastava na makedonski jazik, nikoga{ ne se ostvarila. Bukvarot bil zaplenet, denacionalizatorskata politika prodol`ila so nesmaleno tempo. So toa u{te edna{ на makedonskiot народ му биле одземени правата на образование на мајчин јазик.
U{te edna preselba se slu~ila vo 1928 godina, posle gr~ko-bugarskiot dogovor, koga vo Bugarija bile preseleni 86.000 Makedonci.
Za vreme na диктатурата на генералот Јоанис Метаксас, od avgust 1936 godina merkite za denacionalizacija na Makedoncite s# pove}e se vlo{uvale, a vo 1938 godina so Zakon bil zabranet makedonskiot jazik. Za da se u~i gr~kiot jazik bile otvorani duri i ve~erni u~ili{ta kade u~ele и postari lu|e.
I pokraj toa, za vreme na gr~ko-italijanskata vojna (oktomvri 1940 godina) i voop{to za vreme na Vtorata сvetska vojna, Makedoncite se vklu~ile vo antifa{isti~kata borba za odbrana na гr~kata dr`ava zaedno so gr~kiot narod. Nivnite nade`i deka so toa kone~no }e gi ostvarat svoite prava na slobodno izrazuvawe kako Makedonci ne se ostvarile.
Tokmu zatoa, но i nezadovolni od odnesuvaweto na Komunisti~ka partija na Grcija (КПГkon niv, golem del od borcite i komunistite Makedonci preminale na teritorijaта na dene{na Republika Makedonija i vo Bitola na 18 noemvri 1944 godina ja formirale Egejskata brigada.[1]
So formiraweto na ovaa brigada na teritorijaта na toga{nata Narodna Republika Makedonija vsu{nost zapo~nuva integrigaweto na Makedoncite od egejskiot del vo ramkite na toga{ ve}e postoe~kata mati~na dr`ava. Celta na brigadata bila da se vrati na teritorijata na Egejska Makedonija, osobeno ako se ima predvid faktot deka vo Grcija s# u{te ne bile dovr{eni procesite na formirawe na vlasta. Gr~kata levica seu{te koketirala i so komunisti~kiot blok, no i so zapadniot bur`oaski blok, zaradi sopstvenite nacionalni interesi. Pra{aweto za po~etokot na Gra|anskata vojna i u~estvoto na Makedoncite vo nea, ako веќе se znaelа podelbata na sferi na vlijanie na golemite sili, stanuva mo{ne interesno, odnosno dali toa ne zna~elo posledеn ~ekor za proteruvawe na site koi sebesi ne se smetale za Grci ?
Egejskata brigada bila vklu~ena i vo zavr{nite bitki za osloboduvawe na Zapadna Makedonija. Toa ne било i kraj na makedonskiot "son" za ramnopravno u~estvo vo gradeweto na sovremenata gr~ka dr`ava. Naprotiv, so ogled na toga{nite okolnosti, makedonskite borci seu{te se nadevale deka }e mo`at da gi ostvarat svoite ideali ili sovremeno nare~eni ~ovekovi prava. Na 6 maj 1945 godina, Brigadata bila rasformirana, del od borcite vlegle vo redovniot sostav na JNA, a pogolemiot del se vratile i se vklu~ile vo redovite na Demokratska аrmija na Grcija (ДАГ).[2] Brigadata broela me|u 2 i 3 iljadi borci.[3]
Vo toa vreme vo Grcija terorot na desnicata, poddr`an od Angli~anite, osobeno bil vperen protiv Makedoncite, no i kon levicata voop{to. Od denot na demobilizacijata na ELAS (26 fevruari 1945 godina) do maj istata godina vo egejskiot del na Makedonija vladeel teror, bezzakonie, ubistva, siluvawa, ograbuvawa, uni{tuvawa na makedonski domovi, proteruvawe preku granica… Gr~kite kolonisti (Maxirite) se vpu{tile vo teror organizirani vo bandi, kako revan{ za ona {to navodno im go napravile Makedoncite vo tekot na okupacijata i kako kazna za nivnata dejnost protiv gr~kite interesi vo Makedonija.[4] Celiot dr`aven aparat bil vklu~en vo antimakedonskiot pohod, a Makedoncite bile narekuvani Bugari, komiti, avtonomisti, opasni za bezbednosta i integritetot na Grcija. Bile krivi~no goneti mnogu Makedonci pod izgovor deka bile "komitaxii", no vistinata bila vsu{nost deka pove}eto od "komitite", gi napu{tile kontra~etite i se vklu~ile vo dvi`eweto na otporot. Tie bile najdobrite borci i stare{ini na DAG. Za da mo`at da se odbranat od silniot teror bile praveni obidi da se obnovi SNOF (Slavjanomakedonskiot нarodnoosloboditelen front), a na 20 januari 1945 godina veteranot na Makedonskoto nacionalno osloboditelno dvi`ewe Vangel Ajanovski O~e ja formiral TOMO (Tajnata osloboditelna makedonska organizacija ) .
Spored nekoi podatoci, vo vremeto на dogovorot vo Varkiza (12.02.1945) do 20- ot plenum na CK na KPG ( 12.02. 1946), биле ubieni 1.192 lu|e, raneti 6.413, apseni 75.000, siluvani 165 `eni, izvr{eni bile 6.567 grabe`i, okolu 100.000 lu|e bile progonuvani, okolu 20.000 Makedonci emigrirale vo Jugoslavija, Albanija i Bugarija. Na Vtoriot plenum na CK na KPG bila donesena odluka za vooru`ena presmetka, kako i za apstinencija od parlamentarnite izbori odr`ani na 31 mart 1946 godina. Odlukata za vooru`ena presmetka i dala u{te pogolem povod na gr~kata desnica za kone~na presmetka so levicata. Ne smee da se zaboravi faktot deka vo DAG za razlika od Gr~ka narodnoosloboditelna armijа (ЕЛАС) u~estvuvale mnogu pomal broj borci. Osven toa, Angli~anite i Amerikancite, zaradi svoite strate{ki interesi vo regionot, nemale namera da dozvolat vo Grcija na vlast da dojdat komunistite.
"Бitkata" vo koja Makedoncite u{te edna{ se vklu~ile so nade` deka }e bidat ostvareni nivnite ~ovekovi prava, odnapred bila osudena na propast. A Makedoncite sekako deka i nemale nekoj drug izbor vo dadeniot moment. Faktot deka samo KPG vo ramkite na Grcija go priznavala makedonskoto "malcinstvo" za Makedoncite bil pokazatel na ~ija strana treba da zastanat. Eden od borcite na Egejskata brigada, od Prespanskoto selo R'bi pokraj samata makedonsko-gr~ka granica, Boris Demirov, koga soprugata go molela da zaminat preku granica kade ve}e zaminale nivnite dve pomali deca, & odogovoril deka toj nema drug izbor osven da se bori do kraj, za{to ako se bori nade` sepak postoi…[5] Od dene{en aspekt, ~uden bil toj idealizam, no {to bi bil ~ovekot dokolku nema nikakvi ideali?
Masovniot egzodus na Makedoncite od egejskiot del na Makedonija se slu~uval tokmu vo periodot koga bila usvoena Univerzalnata дeklaracija za чovekovi prava na Obedinetite nacii[6], a na Makedoncite od Еgejska Makedonija, od strana na Grcija kako dr`ava im bile naru{eni pogolemiot del od Osnovnite ~ovekovi prava odnosno Pravoto na ednakvost, Osloboduvaweто od diskriminacija, Pravoто na `ivot, sloboda i li~na sigurnost, Osloboduvaweто od tortura i poni`uva~ki tretman, Pravoто na priznatost kako li~nost pred zakonot, Pravoто na ednakvost pred zakonot, Osloboduvawe od proizvolnoto apsewe i progonstvo, Pravoто na pravedno sudewe, Pravoто da se bide nevin se dodeka ne se doka`e vinata, Pravoто na slobodno dvi`ewe vo i nadvor od dr`avata, Pravoto na sopstvenost, Slobodaта na mislewe i izrazuvawe, Pravoто na mirno sobirawe i zdru`uvawe, Pravoто na obrazovanie, Pravoто na op{testven poredok vo koj ovie prava i slobodi }e se realiziraat, Pravoто na ostvaruvawe na odredbite od ovaa Deklaracija bez nivno spre~uvawe od strana na dr`avi, grupi ili poedinci…[7]. Za `al, toa ne se odnesuva na Grcija. Vo 1950 godina Grcija donela dva zakoni za iseluvawe na Makedoncite "kako nepo`elni tu|inci" i zakon (dekret 2536) za "kolonizacija na gr~ko naselenie" na teritoriite od kade {to bile iseluvani Makedonci.[8]
Vo tekot na Gra|anskata vojna, a osobeno vo ramkite na organiziranata deportacija na decata begalci vo 1948 godina, Narodna Republika Makedonija vo ramkite na Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavija prifatilа del od ovie бегалци, a поголемиот del zaminale vo nekolku иsto~noevropski zemji (Sovetskiot Sojuz, Polska, ^ehoslova~ka, Romanija, Ungarija, Bugarija i Isto~na Germanija). Nekoi od begalcite bile upateni i vo drugite porane{ni jugoslovenski republiki. Privremenata дemokratska vlada na Grcija donela odluka da bidat raseleni decata od oblastite zafateni so voeni operacii, odnosno najmnogu poradi golemite bombardirawa na anglo-amerikanskite avionи. И вladata na desnicata se obiduvala da gi raseli decata od egejskite oblasti. Imeno kralicata Frederika sproveduvala akcija za "spasuvawe" na decata, a vsu{nost se rabotelo za prisilno odzemawe na decata od semejstvata so cel da bidat vospitani vo golemogr~ki duh, odnosno od niv da bidat sozdadeni "novi jani~ari". Osoben e primerot vo seloto Zagori~ani, Kostursko, koga majkite gi skrile svoite deca vo furnite za da gi spasat. Monarhofa{istite od bes iskasapile 17 `eni od okolnite sela i nivnite tela gi frlile vo Kosturskoto Ezero.[9]
Gra|anskata vojna traela od 1946 do 1949 godina koga u{te pove}e se vlo{ila i taka lo{ata polo`ba na naselenieto. No, vo isto vreme, barem za kratko se ostvaril eden dolgotraen makedonski son za слободно u~ewe na sopstveniot jazik. Isto taka, samiot fakt deka postoela i slobodna teritorija vo Mala Prespa zna~el mnogu za Makedoncite. Sepak, na samiot po~etok na 1948 godina, ve}e bile izvr{eni podgotovki za evakuacija na decata od slobodnite i poluslobodnite teritorii. Vo pismoto - molba, isprateno vo fevruari 1948 godina, do vladата na Албанија, Privremenata demokratska vlada (PDV) gi naveduva pri~inite za ovaa organizirana deportacija, pri {to na prvo mesto se naveduva anglo-amerikanskiot teror vrz gr~kiot narod[10]. Sli~no soop{tenie bilo objaveno na radio stanicata "Slobodna Grcija" na 4 mart 1948 godina.
Po seto ova, zapo~nala akcija za sobirawe na decata od Lerinsko, Kostursko i Vodensko. Akcijata ja sproveduvale aktivistite na NOV i AF@ so pomo{ na selskite narodni odbori. So taa akcija se realiziralo pomaloto zlo od dvete - kralicata Frederika да ги одведе na gr~kite ostrovi na "prevospituvawe" ili sepak da go so~uvaat svojot nacionalen identitet. Bilo решено da se soberat decaта od 2 до 14 godi{na vozrast. Zapi{uvaweto bilo sproveduvano врз dobrovolna osnova. Bile распоредени vo grupi od 20 до 25 deca, a za sekoja grupa imalo odgovorno lice. Obi~no toa bile mladi `eni, vdovici na padnati borci od DAG, `eni ~ii ma`i bile zatvoreni vo zatvorite ili devojki ~ii roditeli bile borci. Bil ispraten i Memorandum na PDV do Generalniot sekretar na OON Trigve Li. Toj bil objaven na radioto "Slobodna Grcija" na 27 maj 1948 godina, a na 28 maj 1948 godina bil objaven i vo vesnikot "Nova Makedonija" . Vo Memorandumot se demaskirale atinskata vlada i li~no arhiepiskopot Damaskinos, koj za vreme na fa{isti~kata okupacija sorabotuval so Hitlerovcite, a vo dekemvri 1944 godina го odobril terorot i genocidot што го спровела atinskata vlada. Вo Memorandumot bilo navedeno samo "gr~ki deca" iako 2/3 od decata bile makedonski. Na toj Memorandum bil potpi{an generalot Markos Vafijadis, пretsedatelot na PDV. Vo 70-tite godini, otkako Papandreu proglasi pomiruvawe so biv{ite partizani, generalot Markos triumfalno se vratil vo Atina, ne zaboravaj}i da se istakne kako zaslu`en Grk koj go isteral makedonskoto naselenie od Egejskiot del na Makedonija.[11] Според статистиката на ООН rasseleni биле 28.000, а spored navodi na KPG 25.000 деца.[12]
Vojnata zavr{ila vo avgust 1949 godina so многу тешки posledici za makedonskiot narod. Osven decata i iznemo{tenite od Lerinskiot, Kosturskiot i Vodenskiot kraj, se povlekle i golem broj od naselenieto. So toa se ostvarila celta od dekemvri 1944 godina za proteruvawe na 120.000 Makedonci od Egejska Makedonija.
Makedoncite od egejskiot del na Makedonija кои se na{le od drugata strana na granicata, nadvor od Grcija, se opredelile da bide so~uvano nivnoto makedonsko nacionalno ~uvstvo, duri i po cena da gi izgubat svoite domovi i s# {to so vekovi nivnite pretci steknuvale. Nivна vodilka bile zborovite: "Narod so eden odzemen `ivot ne umira, nitu se uni{tuva, tuku toj narod od duhot na ma~enikot povtorno voskresnuva" iska`ani od u~itelot i revolucionerot Lazo Angelovski od Prespanskoto selo Gra`deno, koj bil glaven organizator na kursot za u~iteli po makedonski jazik vo egejskiot del na Makedonija i eden od prvite u~iteli vo NR Makedonija. I samiot padnal kako `rtva za Makedoncite povtorno да voskersnat.[13]
Raselenite Makedonci, nosej}i go svoeto silno makedonsko nacionalnoo ~ustvo, vo borbata da se so~uvaat od pretopuvawe nastojuvale da se integriraat vo makedonskoto op{testvo. Tie ja ~ustvuvale na svojata ko`a gr~kata {ovinisti~ka politika. Niv im bilo onevozmo`eno da se "vratat kaj svoite", da go nadopolnat svojot narod, da stanat celina. Sвa}aj}i deka ne }e mo`at kako Makedonci da se vratat vo svoite domovi, tie se svrtuvaat kon edinstvenata matica koja ja imaat, sovremеnаta makedonska dr`ava vo ramkite na federativna Jugoslavija, samo тamu kade {to mo`at da komuniciraat i da tvorat na maj~iniot jazik. Iako vo prvite godini makedonskite deca, no i vozrasnite, bile rasseluvani vo pove}e zemji duri i tamu nikoga{ ne zaboravale koi se. Kako refren im bilo povtoruvano na malite deca pred zaminuvawe da zapametat deka se Makedonci.
"Makedonkata od Egejskiot del na Makedonija, koja ne znae{e da ~ita i pi{uva na makedonski jazik, stana primerna vospituva~ka na evakuiranite deca. Umee{e na neposreden na~in, nenametlivo, tivko, vo dotoga{ nepoznati zemji za nea, uporno i `ilavo da bdee denono}no nad detskite `ivoti. Se gri`e{e i gi vospituva{e decata vo narodnite republiki, velej}i im: "U~ete, de~iwa mili. Vie ste Makedon~iwa. Treba da u~ite, da stanete lekari, in`eneri, profesori… koga }e se vratime vo Makedonija, da bidete primerni, da ja gradime na{ata opusto{ena Makedonija. Nam, gr~kite reakcionerni re`imi ne ni davaa da u~ime nitu na gr~ki jazik"[14].
Toa ~uvstvo be{e vsaduvano na evakuiranite deca. Tie, pokraj jazikot na zemjata doma}in, go izu~uvaa i svojot makedonski jazik. Naporedno go izu~uvaa i gr~kiot jazik.
Prvite kursevi za makedonski u~iteli bиле odr`ani na slobodnata teritorija vo Prespa во егејскиот дел, pa vo NR Makedonija i vo NR Romanija.
Kulturniot `ivot kaj decata {to bea evakuirani vo drugi zemji be{e na potrebno nivo. Se izu~uvaa i se peeja makedonski pesni, se pриka`uvaa ske~ovi… U~ebnicite i u~ebnite pomagala, kako i lektirata, na decata im be{e obezbedena od Narodna Republika Makedonija i od izdava~kiot odbor na NOF. Гi neguvale makedonskite kulturni tradicii, so zadovolstvo go u~ele makedonskiot jazik, izdavale spisanija i vesnici na makedonski jazik, voop{to gi neguvale vrskite so nivnata mati~na zemja. Takvi vesnici i spisanija bile: "Makedon~e" vo uredni{tvo na Pavle Kaqkov (izlegle 35 broja od 1949 do 1953 godina), potoa spisanieto "Ilinden", кое izleguvalo od 1952 do 1956 godina i "Makedonski `ivot" od 1963 do 1966 godina. Биле оrganiziraни i kulturni manifestacii kade so zadovolstvo се peelа "Denes nad Makedonija se ra|a".[15] Od strana na KPG imalo obidi da gi pridobijat na svoja strana, vo {to sekako uspeale kaj onoj del od decata na koi roditelite im bile vo Grcija taka {to odreden broj na deca se repatrirale vo Grcija.
Sepak najgolemiot del od niv, duri i onie koi zaminale vo prekuokeanskite zemji, Makedonija ja ~uvstvuvale kako svoja zemja. I tamu prodol`ile da gi neguvaat kulturnite tradicii na makedonskiot narod, ne zaboravaj}i nikoga{ koi se.
"Evakuiranite maloletni deca, toga{ zgri`eni nadvor od tatkovinata, sega se akademski gra|ani, kvalifikuvani stru~waci. Obrazovanieto go dobija na jazikot od zemjata doma}in. Pove}eto od niv se vratija vo Republika Makedonija, a pod razni okolnosti prili~no se najdoa i vo prekuokeanskite zemji: Kanada, Avstralija, SAD i drugi." Ova e svedo~ewe na Evdokija Foteva Vera. [16]
Sepak najgolemiot del od site rasseleni se vratile vo Republika Makedonija. Toa bil proces {to se odvival vo nekolku fazi. Vo prvata faza del od niv ostanale vo NR Makedonija, del bile rasseleni vo drugite republiki, najmnogu vo drugite isto~noevropski zemji. Vkupnata brojka na rasseleni najverojatno e pogolema od 100.000, od koi okolu 60.000 vo evropskite zemji, a okolu 40.000 vo prekuokeanskite zemji. Ako se zemat predvid i 20.000 `rtvi vo tekot na аntifa{isti~kata vojna i vo tekot na Gra|anskata vojna, se doa|a do предвидената brojka na gr~kata vlada od dekemvri 1944 godina.
Celokupnata gri`a okolu priemot i zgri`uvaweto na decata vo mart 1948 godina јugoslovenskata vlada ja doverila na Komitetot za socijalni gri`a pri вladata na FNRJ i Jugoslovenskiot crven krst. Centralniot punkt za prva pomo{ vo hrana i obleka bil vo Bitola. Podelba na hrana, obleka, potoa dezinfekcija i lekarski pregledi bile vr{eni kaj Matka (Skopje) i vo Belgrad, a so pomo{ na federalni, republi~ki i lokalni organi na vlasta, aktivisti na masovnite organizacii kako AF@ i Narodniot front. Vo Jugoslavija, kako i vo ostanatite isto~noevropski zemji, decata bile smestuvani vo detski domovi kade golem број od niv pominale golem del od svoeto detstvo. Оtkako }e go zavr{ele osnovnoto obrazovanie, дecata koi bile smesteni vo domovi vo porane{nite jugoslovenski republiki bile upatuvani на дообразование vo NR Makedonija. Najgolemiot број od нив sakale da ostanat vo NR Makedonija, no poradi te{kite uslovi vo koi se nao|ala republikata vo toa vreme toa moralo da bide odlo`eno. Sekako deka i vo toa vreme, postoele i pozitivni i negativni reakcii okolu doseluvaweto na "Egejcite", no toa se razbira ne gi obeshrabruvalo Makedoncite nare~eni "Egejci" da sakaat da se vratat vo pregratkite na svojata zemja.
Problemi nastanale i poradi naru{enite odnosi na FNRJ so zemjite od isto~niot blok во времето на Informbiroto, koga ednite i drugite si prefrluvale koj e vo pravo vo sproveduvaweto na socijalisti~kiot sistem. Problemot, isto taka, se prodlabo~uval zatoa {to KPG zastanala na stranata na Sovetskiot Sojuz, odnosno na stranata na иsto~noevropskite zemji. Toga{ mnogu semejstva ostanale od другата strana na "ogradata" koja bila postavena me|u toga{na Jugoslavija i иsto~noevropskite zemji.
Golem број od vozrasnite, osobeno onie koi direktno bile vklu~eni vo borbite odnosno vo ELAS i DAG, bile odneseni vo Sovetskiot сojuz, a некои vo Polska i vo Ungarija, decata bile rasporedeni po detskite domovi nasekade. Spored konvenciite na OON, tie sekade imale status na begalci. Toa bilo slu~aj i vo FNR Jugoslavija, se razbira i vo NR Makedonija. Сe pravele obidi {to poskoro da im bide ovozmo`en normalen gra|anski `ivot. Koga po~nale da se normaliziraat odnosite me|u FNR Jugoslavija i ostanatite zemji od "socijalisti~kiot lager", kako {to toga{ bil narekuvan источниот блок, po~nala da se realizira i golemata `elba na semejstvata da bidat spoeni. Taka imalo slu~ai roditelite po nekolku godini da si gi vidat svoite deca. Postojat примери koga edno semejstvo bilo razdeleno vo pove}e zemji. Akcijata na spojuvawe traela vo nekoi slu~ai duri do 70-tite godini na 20-iot vek и сиte тие se vra}ale vo svojata zemja - Makedonija.
Zaminuvaweto na makedonskite emigranti od isto~noevropskite zemji zapo~nalo vo sredinata na 50-tite godini i spored nekoi avtori dostignuva brojka od 100.000. [17]
Onie {to останувале vo NR Makedonija bile vklu~uvani vo stopanskiot i kulturniot `ivot na republikata. Rabotele po zadru`nite stopanstva, vo fabrikite, a podocna bile vklu~uvani i vo
op{testveniot `ivot.
Vo stopanskiot `ivot bile vklu~eni vo rabotata na zadru`ni te stopanstva u{te vo mart 1948 godina po okolu 60 familii od Egejska Makedonija bile vklu~eni vo rabotata na сelskite rabotni zadrugi na selo Gari i Treson~e i imale problemi so isplata na dnevnicite od strana na upravite na zadrugite. Иako rabotele do oktomvri, nekoi od niv ne dobile voop{to nadnica, a nekoi daleku pomala od onaa koja ja dobivale ~lenovite na zadrugata[18] . Sepak t.n. Egejci u~estvuvale vo rabotata i na drugi stopanstva. Takvi bile: sto~arskata zadruga "Crvena ѕvezda" od [tip, stopanstvoto "Erxelija" od Sveti Nikole, u~estvuvale vo izgradbata na Mavrovo, potoa izgradbata na Titov Veles, vo fabrikata "Treska" zadrugata vo Sten~e, vo konfekciskata fabrika "Progres", во "Kuzman Josifovski Pitu" Prilep, fabrikata "Mi~urin" vo Skopje i u{te na mnogu drugi mesta. [19]
Narodnata vlast vodela gri`a i za obrazovanieto na mladite, kako na onie koi `iveele vo detskite domovi, taka i na ostanatite koi `iveele so svoite semejstva. Taka, vo srednite u~ili{ta vo Skopje, zaedno so drugite makedonski deca u~ele i decatata po poteklo od Egejska Makedonija. [20] Isto taka, mladi lu|e ve}e studirale na makedonskite fakulteti.
Se vodelo smetka za nivnoto smestuvawe, bile gradeni i stambeni objekti vo pove}e gradovi niz Makedonija se so cel tie да stanat edna celina so ostanatite Makedonci i ponatamu da u~estvuvaat vo izgradbata na makedonskoto op{testvo. Vo juni 1951 godina, вladata na NR Makedonija donela Uredba so koja na begalcite od Egejska Makedonija im se ovozmo`uvalo da izgraduvaat sopstveni stambeni zgradi. Нa onie koi sakaat da gradat sopstveni stambeni zgradi im se dodeluvalo zemji{te na besplatno polzuvawe za neopredeleno vreme od fondot na op{tonarodniot imot. Isto taka bile odobruvani i krediti za izgradba od Dr`avnata investiciona banka na FNRJ, koja potrebnite pari~ni sredstva & gi prefrlila na вladata na NR Makedonija. Kreditot bil beskamaten, na 30 godini otplata. Vo Skopje se gradelo vo naselbite Mi~urin i Avtokomanda, a isto taka i vo gradovite Prilep, Kumanovo, [tip, Bitola i Titov Veles. [21]
Бilo formirano и Zdru`enie na Makedoncite od Egejska Makedonija, za polesno re{avawe na nivnite problemi. Tri godini izleguval i vesnikot "Glas na Egejcite", оrgan na Zdru`еnieto, во кој bile pomestuvani informacii za polo`bata na Makedoncite od Egejskiot del na Makedonija, no i drugi va`ni informacii od op{t dr`aven interes.
Bilo formirano i кulturno уmetni~koто dru{tvo "Egej" za afirmacija na tradiciite na Makedoncite od egejskiot del.
Eden od najva`nite aspekti na vklu~uvaweto na Makedoncite vo op{testveniot `ivot na mladata republika bilо nivnoto partisko aktivirawe. Тoa se pravelo малку срамежливо i golem број od borcite koi se na{le na makedonska teritorija и bile ~lenovi na KPG, duri po nekolku godini bile vklu~uvani vo KPM, odnosno KPJ. Od svedo~eweto na mnogu lu|e od onie koi `iveele vo ramkite na toga{na Jugoslavija doznavame deka nivnoto odnesuvawe bilo sledeno so vnimanie, zatoa {to tie kontaktirale so lu|e od "neprijetlskiot informbirovski blok". Imalo slu~ai koga istaknati antifa{isti~ki borci bile osuduvani i zatvorani na poznatiot Goli Otok. Slu~ajot na borecot Pando Qorovski od Kosturskoto selo V'mbel e interesen vo toj kontekst, bidej}i toj bil borec i na Prvata makedonsko kosovska udarna brigada. Toj bil pomiluvan od toga{nite vlasti duri vo 1959 godina.[22] I pokraj s#, ostanal da `ivee i raboti vo Makedonija.
So direktiva od Belgrad bilo stopirano i gradeweto na сpomen park na zaginatite vo Katlanovo. [23]
Problemot bil prisuten i kaj onie koi se vra}ale od "иnformbirovskite zemji". Pri prvoto doa|awe bile ispituvani, golem број od niv bile tretirani kako mo`ni sovetski agenti. [24]
No, va`no e da se spomene и faktot deka rabotni mesta naj~esto dobivale mnogu lesno. So smestuvaweto ne odelo s# taka lesno, kako {to se sakaло da se каже, no va`no e da se istakne deka i tie ja delele sudbinata na ostanatite Makedonci. Pokraj Egejskiot fond na stambeni objekti, po zemjotresot vo Skopje 1963 godina i tie, kako i mnogu drugi Makedonci, bile naseluvani vo pove}e skopski naselbi. Va`no e, isto taka, da se istakne deka golem del od povratnicite od isto~noevropskite zemji doa|ale so oformeno сredno stru~no obrazovanie, a osobeno bil golem brojot i na onie koi imale i visoko obrazovanie, pa i magisterski i doktorski tituli. I vo Makedonija dobivale stipendii za obrazovanie. No toa bilo vreme koga na Makedonija i na Jugoslavija voop{to i bile potrebni visokoobrazovani kadri i voop{to stru~ni kadri od razni profili.
Makedoncite od Egejskiot del na Makedonija naj~esto imale i imaat visoko izgradena makedonska svest i vo prvite godini po doa|aweto ne bil mal brojot na onie koi se zalagale za obedineta Makedonija.
Na insistirawe na Anglija, Jugoslavija i Grcija ve}e posle 1955 godina po~nale da gi podobruvaat odnosite. Mnogu pati, koga makedonskoto rakovodstvo }e se obidelo da gi spomene nere{enite problemi na Makedoncite od egejskiot del na Makedonija, bilo odgovorano deka "nema da gi rasipuvame odnosite so Grcite zaradi Egejcite" .
Vo periodot dodeka postoe{e SFR Jugoslavija, odnosno vo periodot od 1970 до 1990 godina, re~isi be{e zavr{eno nivnoto vra}awe i tie u~estvuvaa kako i site ostanati Makedonci vo izgradbaта i modernizacijata na toga{nata Socijalisti~ka Republika Makedonija.
Vo periodot od osamostojuvaweto na Republika Makedonija, isto taka, тие se vklu~eni vo op{testvenite tekovi. Ja delat sudbinata na site ostanati Makedonci i se obiduvaat sekoj na svoj na~in da & pomognat na Nezavisna Republika Makedonija da gi doizgradi svoite institucii po evropski terk.
Vo toj kontekst tie se nadevaat, isto kako i Makedoncite od site други delovi на Македонија, deka i Makedoncite }e imaat mo`nost (barem nekoi generacii) da bidat kulturno i stopanski obedineti vo ramkite na golemoto evropsko semejstvo.
Makedoncite od Egejska Makedonija, ve}e nekolku decenii u~estvuvaat na razni na~ini vo gradeweto na makedonskata dr`ava. Na site poliwa na gradeweto na dr`avata bile i se istaknati. Ima mnogu istaknati херои, борци, мислители, politi~ari, stopanstvenici, научници и уметници. Гolem е brojot na onie koi so svojot tvore~ki opus ostavile i ostavaat silen beleg vo makedonskata kultura.
Mnogu imiwa treba da bidat spomnati, no }e spomnam samo dve koi se va`ni za Македонија - Goce Del~ev i Krste Petkov Misirkov. Dene{nite Makedonci se gordi na dve taka golemi figuri vo svojata istorija.

Епилог

"Nia mu velime deka n# pu{ve (ne pra}aat) vo Albanija, a tie ni vele {o ne ojte tamo e demokracka dr`ava. Jaska mu vela, za{~o da ojme nia vo Albanija koga na{ata Makedonija e slobodna eden ezik, edna nacija…" , so ovie zborovi Piriklija Bogdanov od selo Bap~or im se obratil na stra`arite koga do{ol na jugoslovensko - gr~kata granica.[25]
Ovie ubavi zborovi neka poslu`at kako primer {to zna~i integracijata na Makedoncite od egejskiot del na Makedonija vo makedonskoto op{testvo.
I aktivnostite na Zdru`enijata na Makedoncite od Egejskiot del poka`uvaat deka tie sekoga{ bile i se naso~eni kon op{to makedonsko dobro.
Mnogu znajni i neznajni junaci gi polo`ile svoite `ivoti borej}i se za so~uvuvawe na makedonskata nacionalna svest vo pove}e deceniskoto "otkornuvawe" od nivnata zemja.
Оваа година се навршија 60 години од егозодусот на децата бегалци од егејскиот дел на Македонија, но и 60 години од усвојувањето на “Универзалната декларација за човекови права”.
Narednata godina se navr{uvaaт i 60 godina od krajot na Gra|anskata vojna vo Grcija. Problemot so priznavaweto na makedonskata nacija od strana na Grcija ostanuva otvoren. Грција и понатаму во светот ја сметаат за лулка на демократијата



РЕЗИМЕ

Во текот на Граѓанската војна во Грција 1946 – 1949 година, кога голем дел од воените дејствија се случувале на териториите со македонско население, а поради масовното вклучување на Македонците во рамките на Демократската армија на Грција, Привремената демократска влада извршила т.н. евакауирање на децата од тие области. Најголем број од евакураните биле македонски деца. Биле расселени во повеќе источно европски земји на комунистичкиот блок и во Југославија. По нормализацијата на односите помеѓу Југославија и источноевропските земји започнал процесот на враќање на децата во Република Македонија. Интегрирањето на децата бегалци од егејскиот дел на Македонија во општеството претставува важен процес во градењето на современата македонска држава.

Izvori:
1. DARM fond br.1111 - Republi~ko zdru`enie na decata begalci od Egejskiot del na Makedonija vo Republika Makedonija

Koristena literatura :
16. "Istorija na makedonskiot narod" tret del - Skopje , 1963 godina
17. Zbornik "Etni~kite promeni vo Egejska Makedonija vo 20 - iot vek" - Skopje , 2003 godina
18. Fana Martinova Buckova " I nie sme deca na majkata zemja" - Skopje, 1998 godina
19. Mi{o Kitanovski, \or|i Donevski " Deca begalci od Egejska Makedonija vo Jugoslavija" - Skopje, 2003 godina
20. Sokrat Panovski "V'mbel" - Skopje , 2002 godina
21. Hristo Ristovski "Gra`deno" - Skopje, 2001 godina
22. Hristo Ristovski "Lazo Angelovski - u~itel i revlucioner" - Skopje, 2000 godina
23. \or|i Donevski "Bap~or" - Skopje, 1996 godina
24. Monografija za selo German - Skopje , 1979 godina
25. Vangel Ajanovski O~e "Egejski buri" - Skopje , 1975
26. Liljana Panovska "Terorot vo Egejska Makedonija" - Skopje , 1995 godina
27. d- r Stojan Kiselinovski "Gr~kata kolonizacija vo Egejska Makedonija (1913 - 1940)" - Skopje , 1981 godina
28. d-r Risto Kirjazovski "NOF i drugi organizacii na Makedoncite vo Egejska Makedonija ( 1945 - 1949)" Skopje , 1985 godina
29. Dragan Kqaki} "Izgubqena pobeda genarala Markosa - Gra|anski rat u Gr~koj 1946 - 1949 i KPJ" Beograd , 1987 godina
30. Univerzalna Deklaracija za ~ovekovi prava - Skopje 2001 godina
Vesnici i spisanija
1. Vesnicite "Glas na Egejcite" - od 1 do 41 broj - 1950 - 1953 godina
2.Feqton "Pette stra{ni godini - Egejska Makedonija od d-r Risto Kirjazovski - objaven vo nedelnikot "Makedonsko sonce" od maj 2002 do januari 2003 godina
Se}avawa na `ivi svedoci:
\or|i Donevski od selo Bap~or,
Sevda Demirova, Ta{e i \or|i Borisovski od selo R'bi.



[1] Hristo Andonovski "Makedoncite pod Grcija vo borbata protiv fa{izmot ( 1940 - 1944 )" Skopje, 1968 godina str.122
[2] Vangel Ajanovski - O~e "Egejski buri" Skopje , 1975 godina str.139 - 145
[3] Spored se}avawata na drugarkata Evdokija Foteva Vera - borec na Brigadata
[4] d - r Risto Kirjazovski "Pette stra{ni godini - Egejska Makedonija" - feљton vo nedelnikot "Makedonsko sonce" 2002 godina ( prv del )
[5] Spored se}avawata na Sevda Demirova - ~lenka na AF@
[6] Na 10 dekemvri 1948 godina Generalnoto sobranie na Obedinetite nacii ja usvoi i ja proglasi Univerzalnata Deklaracija za ^ovekovi prava. Ovaa deklaracija gi garantira pravata na site lu|e i go opfa}a {irokiot spektar od ekonomski, socijalni, kulturni, politi~ki i gra|anski prava.
[7] Ministerstvo za obrazovanie i nauka - Biro za razvoj na obrazovanieto "Univerzalna deklaracija za ~ovekovi prava"
[8] Dragan Kqaki} "Izgubwena pobeda generala Markosa - Gra|anski rat u Gr~koj 1946 - 1949 i KPJ" Beograd, 1987 godina str.275
[9] Mi{o Kitanovski, \or|i Donevski "Deca begalci od egejska Makedonija vo Jugoslavija" Skopje, 2003 godina str. 42
[10] Документи за учеството на македонскиот народ од егејскиот дел на Македонија во Граѓанската војна во Грција 1948 година том V - Архив на Македонија, Скопје 1981 година; стр. 115 и 116 –
PDV naveduva: "Od imeto na Privremenata demokratska vlada imame ~est da Vi go stavime na znaewe slednovo:
Kako {to mu e poznato na celiot svet и на албанскиот народ, od krajot na 1944 godina amerikanskite i angliskite imperijalisti so nivnite slugi vo Atina sproveduvaat sistematski teror i nastojuvaat da mu nalo`at na gr~kiot narod nova okupacija, edna od najstra{nite i najopasnite dosega {to gi poznava istorijata na Grcija.
Prvite `rtvi na varvarskite napadi se decata, bolnite, invalidite i licata bez za{tita. Pove}eto od tie `rtvi sega se nao|aat vo keliite na smrtta, {to se sozdadeni na gr~kite ostrovi od strana na monarhofa{istite, po naredba na nivnite angloamerikanski gospodari.
Poradi takvata situacija sozdadena e intervencija na angloamerikanskite imperijalisti zaedno so nivnite monarhofa{isti~ki lakei vo Atina, vo posledno vreme iljadnici lica od slobodnite i poluslobodnite teritorii ispra}aat pisma, so koi se obra}aat do Privremenata demokratska vlada i molat da im se obezbedi za{tita na decata, starcite, bolnite i invalidite od tie podra~ja.
So cel da im se spasi `ivotot na tie nevini `rtvi Privremenata demokratska vlada, imaj}i doverba vo ~ove~kite su{testva, re{i da Ve zamoli vo ramkite na svoite mo`nosti da dozvolite da bidat primeni vo Va{ata teritorija izvesen broj deca, starci, bolni i invalidi od Grcija.
Dostavuvaj}i ja gore iznesenata molba neka mi se dozvoli da Ve uveram gospodine Pretsedetele, deka pozitiven odgovor }e bide cenet od gr~kiot narod, za {to toj Vi e dlaboko blagodaren".
[11] Zbornik "Etni~kite promeni vo egejska Makedonija vo 20 vek" Skopje, 2001 godina - Kuzman Georgievski "Makedonskata emigracija od egejskiot del na Makedonija (1945 -1949)" str. 142 - 147
[12] Mi{o Kitanovski, \or|i Donevski " Deca begalci od egejska Makedonija vo Jugoslavija"
[13] Hristo Ristovski "Lazo Angelovski, u~itel i revolucioner" Skopje 2000 godina str. 43
[14] Spored se}avawata na Ta{e i \or|i Borisovski od selo R'bi - Prespa
[15] Fana Martinova Buckova "I nie sme deca na majkata zemja" Skopuje,1998 godina str.115 -162
[16] Mi{o Kitanovski, \or|i Donevski " Deca begalci od Egejska Makedonija vo Jugoslavija" Skopje, 2003 godina str. 45 - 48
[17] Zbornik "Etni~kite promeni vo Egejska Makedonija vo 20 - ot vek" Skopje 2001 godina Vangel Ka~ev "Nekoi etnoistoriski, psihofizi~ki i kulturno - sociolo{ki aspekti vo razvojniot pat na decata progoneti od egejskiot del na Makedonija" - str. 304
[18] Vesnik "Glas na Egejcite" br. 3 od 1 noemvri 1950 str.4 "Do koga }e se ~eka?"
[19] Vesnik "Glas na Egejcite" br. 4 od 1 dekemvri 1950 i od broj 5 - 9 1951
[20] Vesnik "Glas na Egejcite" br. 6 od od 4 fevruari 1951 godina str.1
[21] Vesnik "Glas na Egejcite" br. 9 od 2 avgust 1951 godina str. 3
[22] Sokrat Panovski "V'mbel" Skopje, 2002 godina str. 123
[23] Spored se}avawata na \or|i Donevski od selo Bap~or
[24] Od svedo~ewe na pove}e povratnici od Isto~noevropskite zemji
[25] \or|i Donevski "Bap~or" Skopje, 1996 godina str.119

[Makedonska_Kafana]

YouTube - Vasilka & Martin

[Makedonska_Kafana]

Organized persecution and massacre of the Macedonian Population in Kukush Region during the Second Balkan War

By Dr. Ljubitsa Jancheva, INI Skopje , RM
Translated and edited by Risto Stefov
December 19, 2010

Horror, suffering, destroyed cities, burned down villages and genocide are characteristics of every war.

The Macedonian people, during the course of their long history, have experienced many wars, suffering, organized persecutions and massacres. At the beginning of the last century, during the First and especially during the Second Balkan War, the Greek army conducted organized persecutions and massacres against the Macedonian population in the southeastern part of Macedonia , particularly in the Kukush and Demir-Hisar Regions. The atrocities that took place in Kukush and the surrounding villages nearly a century ago, even today, leave us horrified. And that, in the mind of every normal person, pacifist by conviction or not, who has happened to learn about the fate of the people of Kukush, underscores in our minds the idea that such horrors must never be repeated again.

Since the beginning of the Balkan Wars the Greek army grew in strength: it was numerically superior (with around 100,000 soldiers) compared to the Bulgarian army and morally stronger because it was led by the king, Constantine himself. This region at the time was under the influence of the Second Bulgarian Army under the command of General Ivanov. But after suffering a defeat at Lahna, Kukush and Dojran, the Bulgarian army retreated towards the River Struma and the Rodopi Mountains , thus leaving the Greek army to enter and occupy the unprotected space. And this is how the Greeks took the cities Kukush, Gevgelia, Dojran and Strumitsa and caused their destruction. (1)

Upon its invasion of the region the Greek army perpetrated unbelievable massacres against the Macedonian population with the destruction and burning of the cities and villages. The Greek terror was so severe that it prompted an investigation from the Carnegie Endowment Inquiry for International Peace (2).

After the Second Balkan War erupted, a Carnegie Balkan Commission was formed and dispatched to the war zone (3) to prepare a report detailing evidence of atrocities committed against the Macedonian population during the course of the two Balkan Wars. The testimony obtained, both written and oral, from witnesses is a primary source upon which this write-up is based.

All in all the above mentioned characteristics of war can be summed up by words found in the Commission’s report: “war is not declared by those who carry it on. The armies are only instruments in the hands of governments…” This is why wars are so bloody and inflict great losses on the populations and destruction to the places where they are fought… (4)

The purpose of military conflict, as stated further in the report, is “complete annihilation of the enemy population”. (5) The villages and cities are not only seized but in many cases they are destroyed. Their residents who had the misfortune of not having fled are driven out of their homes and their houses are burned to the ground. The pillaged and homeless population has no choice but to leave its birthplace and never return. This is one of the characteristics of the Balkan Wars. The Commission established that the population of the occupied lands “by tradition, instinct and by experience knows what to expect from the armies…and does not wait for them…” This means that for the armies to carry out the “extermination” as ordered, they would need to burn down all the buildings in the populated areas which would result in a massive exodus of the population. This was the case in Macedonia where around 50,000 people were driven out of their homes, 30,000 from the Aegean part of Macedonia now under Greek control. (6) Included among them was the population from the city Kukush and surrounding villages.

On August 2nd, 1913 the Greek army burned down the city Kukush and destroyed 40 villages. (7) During this destruction the Greek army also bombed the orphanage, the school for orphans and the residence of the matrons who looked after the orphans. A building, which was clearly marked with three French flags so that it would not be destroyed, was bombed by the Greek soldiers in spite of the markings.

They had achieved their aim to Hellenize this part of Macedonia . The life of Kukush, the city and its surrounding villages was extinguished. Conditions were created to eradicate the non-Greek population from this region; a region which explorers called the cradle of Macedonian renaissance. (8)

The refugee testimony, at least of those who had a chance to be interviewed, was the same. They all saw with their own eyes how the Greek army, with successive bombings (9) burned down Kukush and the surrounding villages. They all said that while fleeing they saw many dead and dying bodies on the side of the road. Mothers abandoned their infant children in order to save the older ones. “My brother Stojan was a baby. My mother could not carry him so she left him beside the road under the leaves of a pumpkin plant. After we went to spend the night in a shelter my mother began to cry. She returned to the place where she left him. He was still alive… (10)

In work clothes, some with sickles in their hands, separated from their families, the people fled in great numbers thus beginning the Golgotha northwards: over the hillside of Krusha Mountain, towards Demir-Hisar, in the Struma valley, in the Pirin part of Macedonia towards today’s Blagoevgrad and even to Sofia, their trek began at the end of July 1913 and ended on Krstovden (September 17) of the same year. (11) The refugees or the “Bezhaltsi” as they called themselves, were gathered in camps in the cities where they found themselves: Dupnitsa, Blagoevgrad, Sofia. (12) Members of the Carnegie Commission visited some of these camps to find out first hand the reason for their flight. Being among the refugees, without official translators they asked their questions: “Who are you?” “Where do you come from?” “For what reason did you leave?”

“We came from twenty-six different villages. It took us twenty-five days to get here…”

“Why?”

“The Greeks threw us out…” To the question, “Where are you going and who is feeding you?” the commission received no answers because no one knew. (13) In the report regarding the expulsion of the population from the southeastern part of Macedonia, the Commission said the following: “…in the north and south actions taken for assimilation (of the non-Muslim population) are the same… the method of correcting is repeated in the eastern border of Macedonia. The only difference is that the method of assimilation and cleansing are carried on less humanely.” (13) The Commission, in an attempt to get some information as to why such a method was used, posed the following question to the Greek soldiers: “Is this truly ‘a human race’ these ‘Balkan’ Slavs?” By the testimony of the soldiers the answer was: “These are not ‘antropi’ (people), they are ‘arkudia’ (bears)”. (14)

Similar testimonies are found in the letters sent in July 1913, by some Greek soldiers to their families. “…they gave me sixteen prisoners to take to the division but I only brought two; the rest were taken by darkness… What is happening now has never taken place after Jesus Christ - the Hellenic army has destroyed everything… there are orders: to burn the villages, to kill the youth…” (15)

From this we can determine how nationalistic and chauvinistic politics can depersonalize people. Things done that should bring shame are viewed with pride and success. This is yet another confirmation of the kind of politics applied that has changed the demographic composition of Kukush Region. According to a census conducted in 1950 the Macedonian population was decimated and the vacant properties were occupied by settlers from eastern Thrace , the Caucasus and Asia Minor . During the Second Balkan War, for a certain number of villages as noted in the statistics, life was extinguished. (16)

The largest part of the population driven from Kukush and the surrounding villages in 1913 settled in Strumitsa and in the surrounding villages, an area of villages which to this day is called “Beshanski Sela” (Refugee Villages). The part of the city where these people settled is called “Beshanska Maala” (Refugee Neighbourhood).

My ancestors who were born in the village Postolar in Kukush Region, have settled in the village Ilovitsa in Strumitsa Region. My grandfather Ilija, who at age ten fled from Kukush, died at age 85 in Ilovitsa. The days of his worriless young life; in the yard, in front of the church, in the village square, in the Kukush valley, of which he often spoke, during harvest resembling a golden sea, have left him with deep feelings for his birthplace. Even though he spent the greater part of his life in Strumitsa, building a home and a family, he openly longed for Kukush and died with a single wish put into a question: “Will we someday return to Kukush?”

From all this we can conclude that the Carnegie Commission Report, published nearly a century ago, is a good example of how we should not behave and is one of the most eloquent and powerful summons for the recognition of all the stupidities which every war carries, for the essence of International peace, and for securing a better International Regime in a Europe without borders.

In the course of the Second Balkan War, the Macedonian people again, who knows how many times, were pawns of the chauvinistic aspirations of the Great Powers. The Macedonian population in southeast Macedonia was the object of this kind of action conducted by the Greek army.

The focus of this write-up was the fate of the Macedonian population from Kukush Region after the assault and destruction of the city and about 40 surrounding villages, which took place on August 2nd, 1913 and thus commenced the refugee Golgotha and its resettling, predominantly in the southeastern part of Macedonia in “Bezhanska Maala”.

Notes:

(1) Dimitar Galev, Beliot teror vo jugoistochna Makedonija 1912-1941 godina, kniga prva, Drushtvo za nauka i umetnost, Shtip. 1991, 437.
(2) Osnovana vo 1910 godina, imenuvana po amerikanskiot industrijalec Matju Karnegi.
(3) Komisijata bila sostavena od sedum chlenovi: D-r Semjuel T. Daton (SAD), Frensis V. Hirst, d-r H.N. Brajlsford (Velika Britanija), d-r Valtershiking (Germanija), d-r Jozef Redlik (Avstro-Ungarija), prof. Pavel Miljukov (Rusija), Baron d Esturnel de Konstan, G. Zhisten Godar (Francija). Pretsedatelstvuvanjeto mu bilo dovereno nachlenot od Francija, baronot D'Esturnel de Konstan. Poraneshnite balkanski vojni (1912-1913), uzveshtaj na Karnegievata balkanska komisija, Kultura, Skopje , 2000, 12.
(4) Poraneshnite balkanski...17.
(5) Isto.
(6) Todor Simovski, Naselenite mesta vo Egejska Makedonija (geografski, etnichki i stopanski karakteristiki), INI, Skopje , 1978, 12.
(7) Igjilar, Aliodzhalar, Goliabashe, Salamanli, Ambar-kjoj, Karadzha-Kadar, Alchaklikj, Seslovo, Shikirlija, Irikli, Gramadna, Aleksovo, Morarci, Rochlevo, Motolevo, Planica (delumno), Nimanci, Posotlar, Jensko (Zhensko b.m.), Kuzhumarli, Biglirija, Kazanovo, Dragomirci, Gavalanci, Krecovo, Mihajlovo, Kalinovo, Cigunci, Harsovo, Novoselani (delumno), Malovci, Vragoturci, Garbachel, Hajdrali, Dautli, Chtemnica, Rajahovo (delumno), i Gola. Poraneshnite balkanski...361.
(8) Nikulcite na makedonskata prerodba vo kukushko se pojavile vo 60-te godini na 19 vek a se manifestirale glavno niz borbata protiv Patrijarshijata i fanariotskoto sveshtenstvo, shto vo isto vreme znachela i borba za voveduvanje na narodniot jazik vo crkvite i uchilishtata. Dokaz za toa e pokanata na kukushanite do Dimitar Miladinov vo koja go povikuvaat da uchitelstvuva vo nivniot grad. Miladinov vo Kukush uchitelstvuval vo periodot 1840-1842 godina. Negova zasluga e budenjeto na nacionalnite chuvstva kaj naselenieto. Gi prevel molitvite koi najchesto se upotrebuvale od grchki na naroden jazik. Dimitar Miladinov vo 1857 godina po vtor pat bil povikan da uchitelstvuva vo Kukush, zaedno so Rajko Zhinzifov. Nivnata dejnost go napravila Kukush centar za nacionalnata prerodba vo Makedonija. Vo toj kontekst, treba da se spomne i dejnosta na vladikata Partenija Zografski, naznachen za vladika na Kukush vo 1859 godina, koj osven za demokratizacija na crkvata i voveduvanje na slovenski jazik vo bogosluzhbata, se zalagal i za izveduvanje na nastava na naroden jazik, otvaranje na novi uchilishta i sl. Prerodbenskata dejnost vo ovoj kraj ja prodolzhil i Kuzman Shapkarev, koj vo 1865 godina bil naznachen za uchitel Vo Kukush. Ne sluchajno Shapkarev dodeka uchitelstvuval vo Kukush se odluchil svoite uchebnici da gi napishe na narechje razbirlivo za tamoshnoto naselenie. Kosta Peev, Kukush -grad so zgroben makedonski zdiv, Etnichkite promeni vo Egejska Makedonija vo XX vek, Zdruzhenie na decata-begalci od Egejskiot del na Makedonija, Skopje , 2001, 154-156.
(9) Vsushnost stanuva zbor za granati koi po eksplodiranjeto predizvikuvaat pozhar na mestata kade shto kje padnat. Ova ja potvrduva celta na grchkite vojski, ne samo da go razrushat gradot Kukush tuku i da go zapalat.
(10)Dedo Stojan, bratot na mojata baba Elena dozhivea dlaboka starost. Imashe govorna mana. Spored kazhuvanjata na baba mi toa mu bilo posledica od prekumernoto plachenje denta koga bil ostaven pokraj patot. Sekjavanje na Elena Dimova od s. Ilovica. (sopstvenost na avtorot).
(11) Sekjavanja na Ilija Dimov od s. Ilovica. (sopstvenost na avtorot)
(12)Kosta Peev, Kukush-grad so zgroben Makedonski zdiv, Etnichkite promeni vo Egejska Makedonija vo XX vek, Zdruzhenie na decata-begalci od Egejskiot del na Makedonija, Skopje , 2001, 158.
(13) Poraneshnite Balkanski...187.
(14) Poraneshnite Balkanski... 224.
(15) Istoto.
(16) Kosta Peev, Genocidot vo Kukush i Kukushko vo Vtorata Balkanska Vojna, Nova Makedonija, 24 April-5 Maj 1991, Skopje , 1991.

Other articles by Risto Stefov:

http://www.maknews.com/html/articles.html#stefov

http://www.americanchronicle.com/authors/view/3446

Free electronic books by Risto Stefov available at:

http://makedonskakafana.com/risto_stefov_ebooks.html

Our Name is Macedonia

https://www.mhrmi.org/our_name_is_macedonia

You can contact the author at [email protected]

Doc. d-r Qubica Jan~eva
INI, Skopje, RM

POGROMOT NA MAKEDONSKOTO NASELENIE OD KUKU[KO VO TEKOT NA VTORATA BALKANSKA VOJNA

U`asi, stradawa, razurnati gradovi, sela, genocid, se karakteristikite na sekoja vojna.
Makedonskiot narod vo tekot na svojata vekovna istorija pominal niz mnogu vojni, stradawa, progonstva. Na po~etokot na minatiot vek, vo tekot na Prvata, a osobeno Vtorata balkanska vojna, od strana na gr~kite vojski bil izvr{en pogrom na naselenieto od jugoisto~niot del na Makedonija, posebno vo Kuku{ko i Demirhisarsko. Ona {to pred bez malku eden vek go do`iveale `itelite na Kuku{ i Kuku{ko i denes ne ostava bez zdiv. I ona {to niz umot na sekoj normalen ~ovek, pacifist po ubeduvawe provejuva ~itajki za sudbinata na kuku{anite e konstatacijata da ne se povtori.
U{te od po~etokot na vojnata, gr~kata armija nasproti bugarskata, bila vo podem: broj~ano bila posilna (okolu 100.000 vojnici) i moralno pojaka poradi faktot {to so armijata komanduval kralot Konstantin. Vo ovoj region dejstvuvala Vtorata bugarska armija, komanduvana od generalot Ivanov. Posle pretrpenite porazi kaj Lahna, Kuku{ i Dojran, taa se povlekla vo pravec na rekata Struma i Rodopite. Pred gr~kata vojska ostanal neobezbeden prostor za prodor i zavladuvawe, odnosno uni{tuvawe. Taka bile zazemeni gradovite Kuku{, Gevgelija, Dojran i Strumica.[1] Gr~kite vojski izvr{ile neviden masakr nad naselenieto a golem del od gradovite i neselenite mesta bile zapaleni. Gr~kiot teror vo ovoj del od Makedonija bil zabele`an i od me|unarodniot faktor.
Karnegievata fondacija za me|unaroden mir[2] po izbuvnuvaweto na Vtorata balkanska vojna, formirala Karnegieva balkanska komisija,[3] koja podgotvila izve{tai vo koi bile evidentirani site zlostorstva napraveni nad makedonskoto naselenie vo tekot na dvete vojni.
Izve{taite podgotveni od komisijata, pismenite i audio svedo{tvata se primarnite izvori na koi koncepciski e baziran ovoj prilog.
Pogore navedenite karakteristiki za vojnata vo celost se poklopuvaat so delot od izve{tajot na komisijata vo koj stoi konstatacijata: vojnata ja vodat ne samo vojskite tuku i samite nacii...ete zo{to tie se tolku krvavi, zo{to predizvikuvaat tolku golemi zagubi vo lu|e i zavr{uvaat so uni{tuvawe na naselenieto i razurnuvawe na celi regioni...[4] Celta na voeniot sudir, se veli ponatamu vo izve{tajot e celosno istrebuvawe na neprijatelskoto naselenie.[5] Selata i gradovite ne se samo zazemani tuku vo najgolem broj slu~ai i uni{tuvani. @itelite koi seu{te ne bile izbegani, bile istaruvani od domovite a ku}ite im bile zapaluvani. Ograbenoto i obezdomeno naselenie gi napu{tilo svoite rodni ogni{ta vo nepovrat. Ova e edna od karakteristikite na balkanskite vojni. Komisijata konstatirala deka naselenieto na zemjite koi }e bidat okupirani po tradicija, instinkt i od iskustvo znaelo {to go o~ekuva od vojskite...ne gi ~ekalo tuku begalo.... Ova prakti~no zna~elo deka vojskite za da ja izvr{at naredbata za "istrebuvawe" gi palele naselenite mesta.
Se slu~ila masovna preselba na naselenieto, epilog od ovie nastani bile okolu 50.000 raseleni Makedonci od koi 30.000 od egejskiot del na Makedonija.[6]
Naselenieto od gradot Kuku{ i selata ja do`ivealo sudbinata od gorenavedeniot citat. Imeno, gr~kite vojski na 20 juli 1913 godina (star stil) zapalile i uni{tile okolu 40 sela, go i zapalile gradot Kuku{.[7] Cel na nemilosrdnoto bombardirawe na gradot bil i domot i u~ili{teto za siraci i bedni u~enici na milosrdnite sestri. Ovoj dom slu~ajno bil izbegnat da ne bide zapalen iako na nego se veele tri francuski znamiwa, koi gr~kite vojski gi gledale, sepak granatirale kon nego.
Celta bila postignata. Zgasnal `ivotot vo Kuku{ i okolijata, sozdadeni bile uslovi ovaa negr~ka oblast, koja nekoi istra`uva~i ja narekuvaat kolepka na makedonskata prerodba[8], da se elinizira.
Svedo{tvata na be`ancite, onie koi imavme mo`nost da gi intervjuirame se identi~ni. Site so svoi o~i gladale kako gr~kite vojski, so fugasni bombi[9] go zapalile Kuku{ i okolnite sela. Site ka`uvaat deka na nivniot pat vo neizvesnosta bile svedoci na mrtvi i polumrtvi trupovi pokraj patot. Ona {to otskoknuva od ramkite na realniot `ivot se svedo{tvata deka majkite, vo obid da gi spasat svoite postari deca, go `rtvuvale najmaloto ostavajki go pokraj patot. -Mojot brat Stojan, be{e bebe. Majka mi ne mo`e{e da go nosi, go ostavi pokraj patot pod lisjata na edna tikva. Koga prikve~er se zasolnavme vo eden dol, da preno}evame, majka mi po~na da pla~e. Se vrati nazad do mestoto kade {to go ostavi brat mi. Toj be{e `iv...[10]
Vo rabotni ali{ta, nekoi duri i so srpovi vo racete, razdeleni od semejstvata, vo golemi zbegovi naselenieto ja zapo~nalo svojata neizvesna golgota kon sever: po padinite na Kru{a planina, kon Demir Hisar, po dolinata na Struma, vo pirinskiot del na Makedonija kon dene{en Blagoevgrad, duri do Sfija, od sredinata na juli 1913 do Krstovden (27 septemvri).[11] Begalcite, ili kako {to tie sebe si se narekuvaat be`ancite, bile prifa}ani vo prifatili{ta-logori po gradovite kade {to pominuvale: Dupnica, Blagoevgrad, Sofija.[12] ^lenovite na Karnegievata komisija posetile del od tie logori so namera od ustata na begalcite da ja slu{nat pri~inata za begstvoto. Sred begalcite, bez oficijalen preveduva~ otpo~nale razgovor:
-Koi ste vie? -Od kade doa|ate?-Poradi {to ste zaminale?
-Dojdovme od dvaeset i {est razli~ni sela. Celi dvaeset i pet dena pominaa dodeka dojdovme do tuka...
-Zo{to?
-Grcite ne nateraa... Na pra{aweto -Kade odite, koj ve hrani? ^lenot na komisijata ne dobil odgovor, nikoj ne znael.[13] Pri podgotvkata na izve{tajot, vo vrska so raseluvaweto na naselenieto od jugoisto~na Makedonija, komisijata ja navela slednata konstatacija: ...Na sever i jug postapkata za asimilacija (na ne muslimanskoto naselenie b.m.) e ista...metodot na istrabuvawe se povtoruva i na isto~nata granica na Makedonija. Edinstvenata razlika e {to metodot na asimilacija i na istrebuvawe se vr{at so pomalo ~ove~ko ~uvstvo.[14] Komisijata, vo obid da dade objasnuvawe za primenata na vakvite metodi si go postavila slednoto pra{awe: Dali e navistina "~ove~ka rasa" ovoj "valkan" (sale) Sloven? Odgovorot ime se nametnal od svedo{tvata sobrani sred vojnicite: Tie ne se antropi, tie se arkudi (me~ki).[15]
Sli~ni vsedo{tva se zabele`ani i vo pismata na nekoi vojnici do svoite najbliski pi{uvani vo tekot na mesec juli 1913 godina. ...Mi dadoa 16 zarobenici da gi predadadm na divizijata, a jas dovedov samo dvajca; drugite gi izede temnicata...Toa {to sega se lu~uva ne stanalo nikoga{ po Isus Hristos-elinskata armija uni{tuva se...Takva e naredbata: da gi gorime selata, da gi ubivame mladite...[16] Od ova zaklu~uvame kolku nacional-{ovinisti~kata politika gi obezli~uva lu|eto. Toa {to treba da pretstavuva sram se tretira kako gordost, uspeh. U{ta edna potvrda za vakvata politika e izmenetiot demografski sostav na Kuku{kata okolija. Spored podatocite od popisot na naselenieto izvr{en vo 1950 godina brojot na makedonskoto naselenie bil desetkuvan, napu{tenite imoti se neseleni so doselenici od Isto~na Trakija, Kavkaz i Mala Azija. Za izvesen broj sela vo statistikite e zabele`ano deka po Vtorata balkanska vojna `ivotot tamu zgasnal.[17]
Najgolem del od raselenoto naselenie od Kuku{kata okolija, se naselile vo Strumica i Strumi~ko. Sred mesnoto naselenie tie sela i denes se narekuvaat be{anski sela, a vo gradot postoi be`ansko maalo. Moite predci, koi se rodum od kuku{koto selo Postolar se naselile vo strumi~koto selo Ilovica. Mojot dedo Ilija, koj Kuku{ go napu~til kako desetgodi{no mom~e, po~ina vo Ilovica vo svojata 85 godina od `ivotot. Denovite na negovata bezgri`na detska igra: vo dvorot, pred crkva, na sred selo, po kuku{koto pole, za koe vele{e deka vo denovite na `etvata nalikuvalo na zlatno more, ostavija dlaboka traga kaj nego. Iako pogolemiot del od svojot `ivot go pomina vo strumi~ko, sozdade imot, semejstvo... otvoreno kopnee{e po Kuku{ i umre so edna `elba iska`ana kako pra{awe: ]e {i oojme li nekuj p't za Kuku{?
Od seto ova zaklu~uvame: Izve{tajot na Karnegievata komisija, sostaven pred bez malku eden vek e relevanten primer kako ne treba da se odnesuvame i e eden od najelokventnite i najsilni povici za priznavawe na site gluposti {to so sebe gi nosi sekoja vojna, za su{tinata na me|unarodniot mir, kako i za izgradbata na podobar me|unaroden poredok vo Evropa bez granici.
Vo tekot na Vtorata balkanska vojna makedonskiot narod u{te edna{, po kojznae koj pat, be{e meta na {ovinisti~ki golemodr`avni aspiracii. Makedonskoto naselenie od Jugoisto~na Makedonija be{e cel na vakvite dejstvija sprovedeni od gr~kata vojska. Fokusot na na{eto obrazlagawe e sudbinata na makedonskoto naselenie od Kuku{ko po napadot i opo`aruvaweto na gradot i na okolu 40 sela, na 20 juni 1913 godina (star stil) odnosno 2 avgust 1913 godina (nov stil). Be`anskata golgota kako i naseluvaweto, prete`no vo jugoisto~niot del od Makedonija vo t.n. be`anski maala.

Pogromot na makedonskoto naselenie od Kuku{ko vo tekot na Vtorata balkanska vojna

U`asi, stradawa, razurnati gradovi, sela, genocid, se karakteristikite na sekoja vojna.
Makedonskiot narod vo tekot na svojata vekovna istorija pominal niz mnogu vojni, stradawa, progonstva. Na po~etokot na minatiot vek, vo tekot na Prvata, a osobeno Vtorata balkanska vojna, od strana na gr~kite vojski bil izvr{en pogrom na naselenieto od jugoisto~niot del na Makedonija, posebno vo Kuku{ko i Demirhisarsko. Ona {to pred bez malku eden vek go do`iveale `itelite na Kuku{ i Kuku{ko i denes ne ostava bez zdiv. I ona {to niz umot na sekoj normalen ~ovek, pacifist po ubeduvawe provejuva ~itajki za sudbinata na kuku{anite e konstatacijata da ne se povtori.
So takva namera Karnegievata fondacija za me|unaroden mir[18] po izbuvnuvaweto na Vtorata balkanska vojna, ja formirala Karnegievata balkanska komisija.[19]
Izve{taite podgotveni od komisijata, pismenite i audio svedo{tvata se primarnite izvori na koi koncepciski e baziran ovoj prilog.
Pogore navedenite karakteristiki za vojnata vo celost se poklopuvaat so delot od izve{tajot na komisijata vo koj stoi konstatacijata: vojnata ja vodat ne samo vojskite tuku i samite nacii...ete zo{to tie se tolku krvavi, zo{to predizvikuvaat tolku golemi zagubi vo lu|e i zavr{uvaat so uni{tuvawe na naselenieto i razurnuvawe na celi regioni...[20] Celta na voeniot sudir, se veli ponatamu vo izve{tajot e celosno istrebuvawe na neprijatelskoto naselenie.[21] Selata i gradovite ne se samo zazemani







Vo tekot na Vtorata balkanska vojna makedonskiot narod u{te edna{, po kojznae koj pat, be{e meta na {ovinisti~ki golemodr`avni aspiracii. Makedonskoto naselenie od Jugoisto~na Makedonija be{e cel na vakvite dejstvija sprovedeni od gr~kata vojska. Fokusot na na{eto obrazlagawe e sudbinata na makedonskoto naselenie od Kuku{ko po napadot i opo`aruvaweto na gradot i na okolu 40 sela, na 20 juni 1913 godina (star stil) odnosno 2 avgust 1913 godina (nov stil). Be`anskata golgota kako i naseluvaweto, prete`no vo jugoisto~niot del od Makedonija vo t.n. be`anski maala.





[1] Dimitar Galev, Beliot teror vo jugoisto~na Makedonija 1912-1941 godina, kniga prva, Dru{tvo za nauka i umetnost, [tip. 1991, 437.
[2] Osnovana vo 1910 godina, imenuvana po amerikanskiot industrijalec Matju Karnegi.
[3] Komisijata bila sostavena od sedum ~lenovi: D-r Semjuel T. Daton (SAD), Frensis V. Hirst, d-r H.N. Brajlsford (Velika Britanija), d-r Valter [iking (Germanija), d-r Jozef Redlik (Avstro-Ungarija), prof. Pavel Miljukov (Rusija), Baron d Esturnel de Konstan, G. @isten Godar (Francija). Pretsedatelstvuvaweto mu bilo dovereno na ~lenot od Francija, baronot D'Esturnel de Konstan. Porane{nite balkanski vojni (1912-1913), uzve{taj na Karnegievata balkanska komisija, Kultura, Skopje, 2000, 12.
[4] Porane{nite balkanski...17.
[5] Isto.
[6] Todor Simovski, Naselenite mesta vo Egejska Makedonija (geografski, etni~ki i stopanski karakteristiki), INI, Skopje, 1978, 12.
[7] I|ilar, Alioxalar, Goliaba{e, Salamanli, Ambar-]oj, Karaxa-Kadar, Al~akli{, Seslovo, [ikirlija, Irikli, Gramadna, Aleksovo, Morarci, Ro~levo, Motolevo, Planica (delumno), Nimanci, Posotlar, Jensko (@ensko b.m.), Ku`umarli, Biglirija, Kazanovo, Dragomirci, Gavalanci, Krecovo, Mihajlovo, Kalinovo, Cigunci, Harsovo, Novoselani (delumno), Malovci, Vragoturci, Garba~el, Hajdrali, Dautli, ^temnica, Rajahovo (delumno), i Gola. Porane{nite balkanski...361.
[8] Nikulcite na makedonskata prerodba vo kuku{ko se pojavile vo 60-te godini na 19 vek a se manifestirale glavno niz borbata protiv Patrijar{ijata i fanariotskoto sve{tenstvo, {to vo isto vreme zna~ela i borba za voveduvawe na narodniot jazik vo crkvite i u~ili{tata. Dokaz za toa e pokanata na kuku{anite do Dimitar Miladinov vo koja go povikuvaat da u~itelstvuva vo nivniot grad. Miladinov vo Kuku{ u~itelstvuval vo periodot 1840-1842 godina. Negova zasluga e budeweto na nacionalnite ~uvstva kaj naselenieto. Gi prevel molitvite koi naj~esto se upotrebuvale od gr~ki na naroden jazik. Dimitar Miladinov vo 1857 godina po vtor pat bil povikan da u~itelstvuva vo Kuku{, zaedno so Rajko @inzifov. Nivnata dejnost go napravila Kuku{ centar za nacionalnata prerodba vo Makedonija. Vo toj kontekst, treba da se spomne i dejnosta na vladikata Partenija Zografski, nazna~en za vladika na Kuku{ vo 1859 godina, koj osven za demokratizacija na crkvata i voveduvawe na slovenski jazik vo bogoslu`bata, se zalagal i za izveduvawe na nastava na naroden jazik, otvarawe na novi u~ili{ta i sl. Prerodbenskata dejnost vo ovoj kraj ja prodol`il i Kuzman [apkarev, koj vo 1865 godina bil nazna~en za u~itel Vo Kuku{. Ne slu~ajno [apkarev dodeka u~itelstvuval vo Kuku{ se odlu~il svoite u~ebnici da gi napi{e na nare~je razbirlivo za tamo{noto naselenie. Kosta Peev, Kuku{ -grad so zgroben makedonski zdiv, Etni~kite promeni vo Egejska Makedonija vo XX vek, Zdru`enie na decata-begalci od Egejskiot del na Makedonija, Skopje, 2001, 154-156.
[9] Vsu{nost stanuva zbor za granati koi po eksplodiraweto predizvikuvaat po`ar na mestata kade {to }e padnat. Ova ja potvrduva celta na gr~kite vojski, ne samo da go razru{at gradot Kuku{ tuku i da go zapalat.
[10] Dedo Stojan, bratot na mojata baba Elena do`ivea dlaboka starost. Ima{e govorna mana. Spored ka`uvawata na baba mi toa mu bilo posledica od prekumernoto pla~ewe denta koga bil ostaven pokraj patot. Se}avawe na Elena Dimova od s. Ilovica. (sopstvenost na avtorot).
[11] Se}avawa na Ilija Dimov od s. Ilovica. (sopstvenost na avtorot)
[12] Kosta Peev, Kuku{-grad so zgroben makedonski zdiv, Etni~kite promeni vo Egejska Makedonija vo XX vek, Zdru`enie na decata-begalci od Egejskiot del na Makedonija, Skopje, 2001, 158.
[13] Porane{nite balkanski...187.
[14] Porane{nite balkanski... 224.
[15] Istoto.
[16] Kosta Peev, Genocidot vo Kuku{ i Kuku{ko vo Vtorata balkanska vojna, Nova Makedonija, 24 april-5 maj 1991, Skopje, 1991.
[17] Todor Smovski, citirano delo, 298-378.
[18] Osnovana vo 1910 godina, imenuvana po amerikanskiot industrijalec Matju Karnegi.
[19] Komisijata bila sostavena od sedum ~lenovi: D-r Semjuel T. Daton (SAD), Frensis V. Hirst, d-r H.N. Brajlsford (Velika Britanija), d-r Valter [iking (Germanija), d-r Jozef Redlik (Avstro-Ungarija), prof. Pavel Miljukov (Rusija), Baron d Esturnel de Konstan, G. @isten Godar (Francija). Pretsedatelstvuvaweto mu bilo dovereno na ~lenot od Francija, baronot D'Esturnel de Konstan. Porane{nite balkanski vojni (1912-1913), uzve{taj na Karnegievata balkanska komisija, Kultura, Skopje, 2000, 12.
[20] Porane{nite balkanski...17.
[21] Isto.

[Makedonska_Kafana]

NATO to Pull Out of Macedonia, Castro Brothers' Feud

December 19, 2010

1. NATO Shuns Macedonia

In view of the interminable name dispute (the Greeks demand that the Republic of Macedonia changes its name), NATO decided to effectively abandon Macedonia and withdraw most of its personnel from the country. Administrative, logistical, and military capacities and assets will be gradually transferred, over the next few weeks, to neighboring countries, including Bulgaria, Albania, and even Serbia. This would be a serious blow, as inter-ethnic tranquility and the long-term cohesion of Macedonia depend on its ultimate membership in the Alliance.

At the same time, the US State Department is "very concerned" with Macedonian overtures towards unsavory regimes - some of which are still on America's Terrorism Watch List or are considered foes and adversaries of the USA: Syria, Iran, Libya, Cuba, China, Belarus, and Russia among them. High-level state visits, economic and cultural exchanges, and other gestures of goodwill and amity between Gruevski and leaders of these pariah states and contestants for global power have not gone unnoticed in Washington's corridors of power.

The West believes that - disappointed with the EU and USA reluctance to pressure Greece into a reasonable compromise - the Macedonian government has opted for an anti-Western orientation in a multipolar world. "Spontaneous" hunger strikes calling on the Macedonian government to withdraw from the name negotiations are believed to be orchestrated by the ruling party, VMRO-DPMNE.

The EU is in the throes of a life-threatening crisis and the entire enlargement project is in ever-growing doubt. Even if the EU were to emerge unscathed from this predicament, its harried officials still regard the Western Balkans as a cesspit, an Ottoman-Byzantine-Oriental Muslim-infested relic in the heart of an otherwise civilized, genteel, and Christian Europe (read: West). The more bigoted of the EU members are going to drag the negotiations with the likes of Macedonia as they have been doing with Turkey for decades now.

Macedonia currently enjoys all the benefits of EU membership without incurring any of its costs: it has free trade, visa-free travel, and access to regional development funds and EU tenders. The costs of accession are bound to be crippling: Macedoniaīs sheltered and inefficient industries will crumble in the face of European competition; its judiciary and legislature will be buried under the 84,000 pages of the acquis communautaire; environmental, sanitation, and labour rules will render the private sector, such as it is in this benighted place, all but dysfunctional and insolvent; brain drain will likely reach epic proportions. Macedonia is not ready for EU accession. For the time being, it is better off as it is.

In the long-term, accession will bring with it sizable benefits in the transfer of technological knowledge and management skills and in encouraging foreign direct investment. But these welcome side-effects and by-products of EU membership depend crucially on an all-pervading internal transformation. Macedonains lack the skills, the knowledge, the emotional maturity, and the cultural background to have a state of their own, let alone a democracy. They have yet to develop a sense of being part of a cohesive collective. Their rampant individualism is malignant and they all perceive the state and any form of authority as potential and actual enemies.

So, why are Macedonians so keen on joining the EU?

Some of them hope to turn a quick profit as asset prices (shares, real-estate) react to the good news. Others canīt wait to abandon ship and join the throngs of economic immigrants from Bulgaria and Poland. Recent polls show that more half the youth will emigrate given the first opportunity. Not one Macedonian I have met realizes the full implications of EU accession and not one of them gives a fig. They all perceive the EU as a "get-rich-quick" scheme.

2. Castro Brothers Feud

Fidel Castro is furious with his brother's "reforms" and with the ousting of most of his loyalists from Cuba's structures of power. He bitterly resents the backdoor, China-like introduction of minor "capitalist" tweaks to long-established doctrines of socialism and self-sufficiency. Fidel is planning a major policy speech in which he will call upon his brother to step down. Aware of these plans, Raul's counter-attack is ready. Following the "disloyal and traitorous" address by Fidel, he will be placed under house arrest. If this won't do the trick, more "drastic measures" will be adopted. What are these is anyone's guess.

Sam Vaknin (END)

MACEDONIA DOESN'T NEED THE USA THE USA NEEDS MACEDONIA AND SOMEWHERE TO PARK THEIR KILLING MACHINES FOR FREE. SAY NO TO TERRORISTS!!

[Risto the Great]

That is huge news MK.
Very interesting times ahead.