Risto Stefov - Articles, Translations & Collaborations

[George S.]

Macedonia faces delay in the EU as Greece is dragged screaming to the principal´s office
Alexandra AleksovskaDecember 17, 2009
When you are a little kid at school – you are afraid of the principal. You see him as some kind of ogre who is responsible for punishing both kids and teachers. When you get to high school you realize that principals are much more vulnerable and struggle to maintain order with students and keep teachers from killing each other. When you get to university you almost feel sorry for principals when you realize they were jaded ex-teachers stuck at the top of their job ladder counting down the days to retirement.

But apparently principals have a new career path. In the EU it seems, principals are allowed to dictate accession conditions to candidate countries. Don´t believe me? The Australian 'Macedonian' Advisory Council´s recent article "FYROM´s inability to adhere to EU principals ends in delay of accession talks" seems to indicate so. And you were thinking principals were there to council children about not smoking on school premises!

Apart from their inability to tell the difference between the words ´principal´ and ´principle´, the Australian 'Macedonian' Advisory Council has some other interesting characteristics. It isn´t 'Macedonian' (as most of the world understands it) but is actually rabidly Greek. It isn´t really Australian in that most of it´s handful of people that comment on its website are from other countries. It doesn´t really 'advise' as much as it cuts and pastes from other Greek propaganda sites and it really isn´t a 'council' in that until a few months ago it wasn´t a registered organization and it solely consisted of a bulletin board. So it´s real name should probably be something like 'Global Greek Cut and Paste Bulletin Board´ – but lets get back to their article.

They tried to portray the delay of the EU´s Macedonian accession discussion until March as an EU mandate for Greece´s position on Macedonia. Nothing could be further from the truth. The EU has merely postponed a discussion. Statements that have emerged from the discussions show that the EU was split on the issue – pretty much France and Greece against the rest of Europe. It is true that Greece opposed it, but another part of the issue is that it is close to the end of an EU presidency in 2 weeks and that it may be better to discuss it in the next presidency that is about to start.

But the delay may provide time for other events to help break the deadlock. On 20 January 2010, Greece needs to appear before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to answer whether or not it has violated the 1995 Interim Accord with Macedonia. Macedonia took them to court after the last time they obstructed Macedonia´s accession to an international organization. There has been no legal reason for Greek obstruction.

You see Macedonia has already bought Greek cooperation for its entry into NATO and the EU. They bought it in 1995. Article 11 of the 1995 Interim Accord states:

11. Upon entry into force of this Interim Accord, the Party of the First Part (i.e. Greece) agrees not to object to the application by or the membership of the Party of the Second Part (i.e. Macedonia) in international, multilateral and regional organizations and institutions of which the Party of the First Party is a member (ie. NATO and the EU)

In obtaining this agreement, Macedonia agreed to change its flag and alter its constitution to appease its neighbor – something that no other nation has done. It also was required to apply for registration to international organizations under the temporary designation – which Macedonia has done for both NATO and the EU. Greece has not held up its side of the bargain. All Greece was required to do was to "not to object to" Macedonia´s entry into international organizations. Greece has repeatedly objected.

In 2008 Greece objected to Macedonia´s entry to NATO. That is what sparked this current court case. The ICJ will look for evidence of Greek objections to Macedonia´s entry into international organizations. They won´t have to look far.

The Greek foreign minister at the time, Dora Bakoyannis stated in the Greek media:

"It should be clear that no Greek government can accept the existence of a so-called Macedonian ethnicity, identity and language. This was in fact the spirit of the NATO summit veto"

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis boasted about Greece´s veto:"Raising a veto at the NATO Alliance was a case that required boldness and courage."

If we are to believe the two politicians responsible for the NATO veto – they both claimed that they exercised a veto and this veto was exercised because they can´t accept a Macedonian identity. This is the real problem.



We don´t have to look far to see more evidence that this is really about ethnicity. The UN, and each major global human rights organization, has stated that Greece has a Macedonian minority. Greece denies they exist. Greece is afraid of acknowledging them – they dislike the idea of a Macedonian ethnicity in Greece and in Macedonia. There appears no way of satisfying Greece short of renaming ourselves, our country and our language something else to appease them. This is ridiculous – but it is what Greece is really seeking.

The so-called 'name problem' is not going to go away. Anybody who has seen what Greek politicians say in Greek media knows it is nothing about a name. It is about Macedonian identity. Greece is insisting on the changes being made in every public building, on passports, the name of the language, even how people refer to themselves and is trying to dictate how the 127 countries who use Macedonia´s constitutional name refer to Macedonia. Even if Macedonia changed its name as part of a deal – who can trust the Greek government not to seek more of the Macedonian identity next time? They got Macedonia´s flag changed in 1995 and reneged on that deal. Macedonia got nothing out of it; Greece got Macedonia´s flag for free.

If you can´t accept someone´s identity you are denying their human rights. Greece is abusing its positions in both NATO and the EU in order to force a denial of human rights upon a neighboring country. It can also be argued that Greece is trying to force Macedonia to change its constitutional name – which is outside the context of the original UN process. The original agreement related to the name used at the UN – not the constitutional name.

What can the ICJ do? Well the ICJ has no power to make anything binding on a nation. It does however have influence on the UN – it is the UN´s court. If the ICJ shows that Greece has failed to abide by the Interim Accord, we can use this, with our friends, to launch a motion in the UN to allow our membership under our constitutional name. Macedonia has 127 countries supporting it; Greece has 14. If this resolution were to go to the UN, the UN name issue would be instantly solved. With no argument in the UN about Macedonia´s name – the NATO and EU issues would disappear. It is very doubtful that either NATO or the EU would create a 'NATO use' name or an 'EU use' name merely to appease nationalist sentiments in Greece, one of their weakest and poorest members.

This would probably suit the current Greek government. The issue is burning a lot of goodwill in NATO and the EU. Given Greece´s opposition to NATO policies in Serbia and Afghanistan and the fact that they contribute very little militarily to the alliance, the type of drama they are creating in NATO is not endearing them to the others. In the EU, Greece´s lying in relation to the true nature of its economy has burnt a lot of goodwill. If the Macedonia issue is taken out of the Greek government´s hands – it enables Greek public opinion to blame "world powers" rather than their government. Greek PM Papandreou can give a speech about NATO or EU betrayal then get back on with trying to dig Greece out of its economic hole.

Maybe the Australian 'Macedonian' (actually Greek) Advisory Council was correct when they misused the word ´principal´. Although rather than the ´EU Principal´ – it is technically the ´UN Principal´, as on 20 January Greece is being dragged to the UN´s ´principal´s office´ to explain themselves. An ICJ judgment against Greece will further show the injustice that Macedonia is suffering. The world is on our side; France´s token (and paid by military contract) support aside – Greece is isolated on this issue.

We don´t need to sacrifice our identity to participate in international organizations with the rest of the world. Greek denial of our identity has gone back a century – and this is just the latest attack. But now have a lot of supporters, and if we stick to the human rights we enjoy - and make sure that we don´t sell these for more empty Greek promises – the world will see the injustices we have suffered. From the first struggles of Macedonian nationalism, the blood spilt by oppressors who denied our existence, and now the abuse of international process by the children of those very same oppressors – we have paid more than almost anybody for our own identity. We should never forget that and soon, with an ICJ judgment in our hands, we can remind the UN of the first sentence of their International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

"All peoples have the right of self-determination."
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Alexandra Aleksovska

I am a Macedonian girl in my late 20s. I studied journalism in both Australia and Japan. I have written for a number of major Australian newspapers and magazines and a few Japanese ones.
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[George S.]

President Ivanov: Macedonia achieves significant success in 2009, open issues to be settled through unity
Skopje, December 21 (MIA) - Macedonia achieved significant success in 2009. A stable multiethnic coalition and functional democracy operated within the country. Pertaining to international relations, the country achieved some of the objectives in obtaining the visa liberalization and EC recommendation for beginning of European Union accession negotiations, along with enhancement of relations with neighbors and other countries, settlement of the Kosovo border demarcation issue etc. However, open issues and serious problems, which will easily be solved through unity, remain, assessed Monday President Gjorge Ivanov in his first annual address before the MPs.

President Ivanov said one of the open issues was the dispute with Greece over Macedonia's constitutional name, which is an impediment to the country's Euro-Atlantic integration.

"In the course of 2009, Macedonia achieved significant success in the field of Euro-integration. It managed to obtain a positive European Commission report and a recommendation for beginning of negotiations. The date was not obtained due to the irrational opposition by the political elite of our southern neighbor to Macedonia's EU and NATO accession", stated Ivanov.

According to him, this has demonstrated that policy based on power can exist in such circumstances, even through abuse of regulations set to protect those which meet conditions in being part of a community. However, Ivanov added that Macedonia would continue its search for a solution to the problem.

"Macedonia is part of the 21st century when taking into account respect of human rights and rights of communities! Macedonia is part of the 21st century because it wants open space, offers freedom and competition of cultural and civilizational values! Macedonia is part of the 21st century because the identity of the other is equally sacred as one's own! Macedonia will find a solution to the open issues with all those who live the 21st century in this way! The ones outside of the civilizational and democratic benefits of our time will not be part of our agenda!", emphasized President Ivanov.

He reiterated Macedonia's 'red lines' in the name dispute, in case someone was not familiar with them by now.

"Is there anyone in this country who does not know the red lines regarding the issues of identity, language, culture, tradition. Those individual red lines are our national red lines. Macedonia's place is in NATO and EU, with a common contribution of all in achieving the strategic objective. You are all aware of the red lines, as are the Macedonian citizens - no concessions from the Macedonian identity, no changes in the Constitution, a solution that will not violate our national, cultural and language identity", underlined Ivanov.

He added that Macedonia has proven its constructiveness in this absurd and imposed dispute through concrete steps of good will.

"Beyond all known standards in constitutional practice, the country has changed its Constitution, stating the commonly known fact that it has no territorial pretensions towards anyone. The Republic of Macedonia took another step by doing the unthinkable and changed its flag", said Ivanov, adding that Macedonia was ready for a solution of compromise, but only regarding things foreseen in UN resolutions.

The President stressed that everyone should strive towards building a Macedonia that takes its interests into account without giving justifications to anyone, but taking into consideration the common European interests.

"This is the ancient way of thinking, which does not bring us closer to Europe. It cannot bring respect if we do not respect ourselves. Macedonia needs to be asked on many things. Macedonia will say a lot. And be heard!", stated Ivanov.

He said the state's leadership has demonstrated its commitment to Macedonia's Euro-Atlantic path through undertaken activities and initiatives.

"The Republic of Macedonia does not ask more than any other state, but will not take anything less", Ivanov emphasized.

Regarding domestic political developments, President Ivanov assessed that Macedonia has demonstrated it was a functional democracy with a successful electoral model, through constructive debates on a number of issues, free expression of positions, functioning of a stable interethnic coalition capable of implementing reforms.

Ivanov added that when undertaking the office, he set himself a task of promoting the Macedonian model of community integration.

"Macedonia deserves to be accepted as a model for other regional countries, being a true microcosm of tolerance, mutual respect and cooperation. Our model of integration without assimilation, through observance of cultural, lingual and religious diversities, represents a large contribution to the European treasury of nations and cultures", he stated.

Ivanov praised the Government for its combat against corruption and crime, as well as successful management of the economic crisis.

"Timely and appropriate reaction based on sound economic principles has resulted in Macedonia avoiding the hardest hit of the crisis. Successful measures have protected citizens from serious economic hardships", said the President.

According to Ivanov, success of Macedonia's foreign policy can be achieved only through harmonization of political stakeholders.

"Republic of Macedonia can realize its foreign policy objectives only through such principle of strong, efficient and productive diplomatic activity, as well as create new partnerships and enhance the existing ones", he stated.

Referring to relations with neighbors, President Ivanov emphasized that all countries should look to the future, things that connect them, common presence and future, but through observance of the other's history.

"All Balkan countries can move forward together by helping each other. I am committed to regular contacts with regional leaders, in the active search for ways of cooperation, but also in removing the obstacles for such cooperation. The building of a new, democratic Balkans is Macedonia's vital commitment. We are setting the foundations of a Balkan without borders. United without domination, united on the basis of mutual respect", underlined President Gjorge Ivanov.

The President's annual address was attended by Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and Government ministers, diplomatic corps, judicial authorities, leaders of religious communities etc. ik/fd/13:55

[George S.]

The Great Lie – Chapter 19



By Petre Nakovski

Translated and edited by Risto Stefov

[email protected]

April 1, 2012



Since then, Risto, along with some of the women, regularly, secretly visited the bunker storehouses and kitchens. Secretly during the night, before they were burned, they collected all the paper bags in a hurry, placed them into a single bag and hid them. During the day, when they were resting from the night’s work of carrying logs, Risto fetched the bags and one by one, placing them on a flat surface, smoothed them out removing all wrinkles.



Flattened out he folded the bags and with his dagger, which he always carried on his belt, cut them into straight, rectangular pieces as wide as his hand. He then blew off the dust, placed them on top of one another and put a stone on top to keep them flat.



Then during rest time, at lunch or at dinner, the women would gather around Risto and tell him their problems and pains and beg him to give them a larger piece of paper so that they could write a longer letter with many words. When he did, he cut the paper from the scraps because he knew they couldn’t write. They were illiterate.



But they took the paper anyway, kept it in their hands and caressed it on their knees, just as they would caress their children who were sent to the [Eastern European] countries. They caressed the paper because on it they wanted to send their children their love and warmth and hope that soon they would receive the letter, along with their love, wishes and prayers.



Every day the women begged Risto to write a letter for them, thanked him and every day kept asking when they would receive a reply.



“Oh, Risto, God bless you, why don’t you write a letter to my Paskal,” she said and then continued:



“Paskal, my dear son, my beloved child, my light, my dewy May flower...” Angelina whispered warm words, words of affection, hopeful words, repeating them again and again…



With tears in her eyes she looked far away at the hills, at the forest, into the sky, at the clouds, at the birds and caressing the grass and the flowers by her legs, she lifted her head, looked at Risto’s face, moved closer and looked at the paper to see how much space was left. Her face became sad and her wrinkles filled with tears when Risto said: “There is no more space…”



“How can that be Risto?” she asked, surprised. “Yesterday I told you more and the paper was smaller. Please just a little bit more, please write a little bit more right here at the corner so it won’t be empty and, here on this side write, make a cross like a prayer to God to protect my Paskal, my dear boy, my happiness, my most beloved… my falcon, my eagle, my strength… Here, Risto,” she touched the edge of the paper and with tears in her eyes and a choked up voice continued: “Write something from yourself, tell him to be good and to study hard… write… and when you finish, let me kiss the letter…”



The woman undid her black kerchief and covered her crying face with it. Her shoulders trembled from her crying. She got up quietly and walked away and from the distance she thanked Risto: “May God bless you with good health and peace, Risto… Thank you and be well…”



“Who is next?” Risto asked without raising his head.


“I am...” said the woman.



“Forgive me, but I don’t know your name...” replied Risto.



“Stoia. My name is Stoia. I was named after my grandfather Stoian. My oldest son’s name is Traiko, named after my father’s grandfather. My daughter’s name is Traianka, she was named after my mother. My second son’s name is Trpo, he was named after his uncle, and my husband’s name is Zhivko… Everything comes from grandfather and grandmother and from father and mother. And that way we are Stoianovtsi, Traikovtsi, Trpovtsi, Zhivkovtsi… And after the last war we adopted some new names like Slobodanka, Pobeda, Slobodan, Mirka… And after this war? Maybe there will be a Traiko and a Traianka, a Stoian and a Stoianka to give birth, so that our roots are not lost… What names will there be, only God knows… There are not many Stoianovtsi, Traikovtsi, Zhivkovtsi, Trpovtsi left in our village now… Some left their bones at Gramos, some at Mali-Madi, some at Voden, some at Lerin. A total of forty-eight dead up to now and I have no idea how many wounded and crippled. Everyone young is dead… gone… These are bad times… Is this our fate, is this what has been written for us?” Risto’s hand began to shake. A muscle in his right cheek began to quiver. His forehead began to wrinkle. His throat contracted. His stare was pointed somewhere far, far away. He was silent…



“Risto, are you listening to me?” asked Stoianka.



“Yes, I…” replied Risto with a choked up voice.



“Oh, not today… We will write mine tomorrow then,” said Stoianka and left.



“Who is next?” asked Risto after he composed himself.



Lina sat beside him and took out a piece of paper from her chest. It was folded in four. The yellowed paper shook in her hand as she extended it to Risto and said: “That’s all I could get my hands on. The others were quicker than me… The women were ripping from the bags, but the commissar, who forgot his briefcase in front of the bunker, got annoyed with them, and began to yell and chase them… When I saw all those pencils neatly arranged in his briefcase, I took one. Here it is…” She reached into her chest and pulled it out.



Risto, showing her with his facial expressions that he was not happy, shook his moustache and with reproach in his voice said: “So you are the one who stole the commissar’s pencil?”



“I hope nothing bad comes from this, please don’t talk like that Risto, I took just one pencil… And why does he need so many pencils anyway? Do you think he is smarter than you? He had so many in his leather briefcase and they were lined up like machine gun cartridges… Here, take the pencil, you need it more than him. He only struts around with those pencils and who knows what he writes about us to those above him.” She stopped talking for a moment, looked into his eyes and with an inquiring glance, whispered:



“Don’t look at me like that… So I took the pencil and what, the world fell apart? I did not steal it… I took it. If I stole it I wouldn’t have told you… The women had had an eye open for the commissar’s pencils for a long time. They were saying why does he need so many pencils? Our Risto has only one and that is enough to write all our letters. Isn’t that right Risto?



I didn’t take the pencil for myself, I took it for the women, for you, to write our letters. They deserve to have a pencil like that. That’s what I thought and said to myself, ‘I will give Risto the pencil’. Here, take it and stop frowning at me…”



Risto looked at her harshly and threatened her with his finger and after a long silence, asked: “What do you want me to write?”



“First write that,” she spread her hand wide open and began to list on her fingers one by one, “I wish them to be well and I am hopeful that they are alive and in good health, I love them very much, my love for them is great, greater, I warmly kiss them on the mouth, cheeks and eyes and I want them to be clean and beautiful in body, spirit and mind, I want them to be happy and cheerful as the spring is joyous and merry, to be blessed with peace and kindness, to be fair and merciful, to have understanding for all, to not be envious or jealous, to not want power over others, to not be blind to evil, to love everyone and to be blessed... May the sun shine on them, may God protect them… may they always be safe and protected... They are my eyes…



Tell them not to forget their mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, their numerous relatives, our Christian Orthodox faith, our blue sky, green meadows, forests, our home, vineyards and fields, and to look at the world before them with wide open eyes.



Tell them to believe in God and to pray to God for the wellbeing of everyone. Tell them not to forget to cross themselves and to be good, smart, brave, proud and without fear of looking into people’s eyes…



Tell them not to forget our songs and dances and that they are always in my thoughts, which fly towards them and nothing can prevent them from getting there, not the wind, nor the clouds, nor lightning, nor thunder. Tell them that my soul hurts and aches for them when I think of them and that my concern for them is great... I want them to return to me as soon as possible....”



She paused and looked far into the distance as if looking for her children there.



“Ah, if only I was a bird I would fly there to see them… And here in my chest I have a great big lump, here it brews in me and torments me, the sorrow is biting my insides, the pain is eating away in me, the anguish is poisoning me… with tears in my eyes I beg God to keep them safe and to return them to me, to fill my arms with them… they are my dreams, I dream about them and they appear in my dreams, they keep me company in my thoughts… The heart can’t keep silent when we are separated like this and they are gone so far away in unknown alien lands… can the mind be darkened and the thoughts be frozen…? Can they?



Let them be alive and well and clean like a tear, in body, spirit and mind… just let them be alive and well… a mother will endure… a mother will always endure like a stone, a boulder, or a mountain endures… each with their own problems… with their own pain…”



Her words started to come out broken from her lips. Her voice became quieter resembling the fluttering of trembling leaves. She paused and to Risto it seemed like her voice just died and her breathing come to an end. Inquiringly Risto looked at her face and realized that everything in her had turned upside down, she was covered by a shadow of immense sadness and depression.



She moved and leaned her chin on her stiff and hardened hands marred with premature wrinkles and speechlessly stared ahead. Her stare pleadingly flew downhill in search, searching, shifting and probing, greedily pressing into the cracks of time and returning disappointed. She let out a long and deep sigh, waved her hand as if chasing away a bad thought, moved her head slowly and let her eyes relax. There was a barely visible gentle smile beaming from her eyes into her brightened face. She spread her arms as if wanting to hug someone, but to Risto it seemed like she was hugging her children sitting on her lap. She remained that way for a moment and then, after taking a long and peaceful sigh, she crossed her arms, lifted up her eyes towards heaven, and in a humble quiet voice she recited a warm prayer.



Risto stirred with his head, looked at the piece of paper, turned it several times and said: “And you think everything you said I can put in this little piece of paper?”



“Yes Risto, it can be done, why not?” she answered.



“How can I accommodate so many words that you told me?” inquired Risto.



“Well, Risto, then don’t write words…” she replied.



“Not write words? What then should I write? Words are written in a letter because words speak… What kind of a letter would it be if it had no words? Words my dear woman, words speak…” added Risto.



“So it is… words speak, but you don’t need to write words…” she replied.



“So then, what should I write?” asked Risto.



“Write a flower, an eye, a tear, a bird, a heart…” replied the woman.



Risto wrote exactly what Lina told him.



“Okay. Here is a flower, an eye, a tear, a bird and a heart. I wrote them…” answered Risto.



“Let me see them,” she said and took the piece of paper, looked at it, and a hidden smile appeared in her eyes. “Not like this, not like this, write a flower… write a flower, like that, like the one that grows by your feet… Do you see it?” replied the woman.



“Do you mean I should draw a flower?” inquired Risto.



“Yes, like that… Did you write it? Good, but make the leaves a little longer… Now write an eye… Here, write my eye… Under the eye now write a tear, my tear that fell and beside it write a bird… write a bird with an open beak and open wings… Did you write it? Now write a heart… write a heart… and under it a drop…” ordered the woman, but before she could finish talking a painful sigh and a moan cut off her voice, tears filled her eyes, overflowed and glistened like pearls on her long, thick dark eyelashes...



She bowed her head down and stared at her crossed hands lying in her lap. The shaking of a leaf in a tree was loud, the buzzing of a bee flying around a flower was noisy, the water running down the brook was thundering… the wind became wicked, infuriating and started howling, the sky went dark, the roads and highways became narrow and screams were pouring, flooding the valleys, a blunt blow to the plough pushed it further into the ground, a crow crowed on the crest of the oak tree… silent whimpers, distant shouts and pleading cries…



Lina wiped the hanging tear, searched in her chest, took out a crumpled up piece of paper and, extending it to Risto, said: “Now put in this…”



“And what is this?” asked Risto.



“It is, how they say… It is the place where their father lives. There the way it is written, lives their father. So they can write him a letter, but with words… Put it inside and fold it like you fold all the letters and throw it over there in the bags… The women said the man from the big post is coming today…” replied the woman.



It is like this every day, at midday, under the thunderous roar of aircraft, under the thick shadows of the beech trees, Risto writes the letters and adds more from himself than they tell him. He knows their wishes, their great and immense pain and love for their children, their concern and care and the hundreds of doubts they have and questions they want to ask.



He knows what words will make them secretly smile and which ones will make them sigh a long sigh and remove their black kerchiefs and wipe their tears with its corner. He knows when they lose their voice and how long it takes before it comes back and before they can say more kind and gentle words…



He knows the secrets that hide in their hearts and thoughts, he comforts them, he reassures them and he implores them not to worry so much, to be calm and to hope and believe… He knows how a woman will speak to her child or children and what words she will use to express her love and concern, what prayers and wishes and how to end the letter.



From himself Risto adds that they should be good and study hard, behave and appreciate the mothers who care for them very much.



And when there are no replies to the letters, Risto tells the worried and anxious women: “What do you think; those countries that your children were sent to are close by? Believe me, it is a long road from here to there with many bridges and it takes a long time to get there. These countries are far, very, very far…”

[George S.]

The Great Lie – Chapter 19



By Petre Nakovski

Translated and edited by Risto Stefov

[email protected]

April 1, 2012



Since then, Risto, along with some of the women, regularly, secretly visited the bunker storehouses and kitchens. Secretly during the night, before they were burned, they collected all the paper bags in a hurry, placed them into a single bag and hid them. During the day, when they were resting from the night’s work of carrying logs, Risto fetched the bags and one by one, placing them on a flat surface, smoothed them out removing all wrinkles.



Flattened out he folded the bags and with his dagger, which he always carried on his belt, cut them into straight, rectangular pieces as wide as his hand. He then blew off the dust, placed them on top of one another and put a stone on top to keep them flat.



Then during rest time, at lunch or at dinner, the women would gather around Risto and tell him their problems and pains and beg him to give them a larger piece of paper so that they could write a longer letter with many words. When he did, he cut the paper from the scraps because he knew they couldn’t write. They were illiterate.



But they took the paper anyway, kept it in their hands and caressed it on their knees, just as they would caress their children who were sent to the [Eastern European] countries. They caressed the paper because on it they wanted to send their children their love and warmth and hope that soon they would receive the letter, along with their love, wishes and prayers.



Every day the women begged Risto to write a letter for them, thanked him and every day kept asking when they would receive a reply.



“Oh, Risto, God bless you, why don’t you write a letter to my Paskal,” she said and then continued:



“Paskal, my dear son, my beloved child, my light, my dewy May flower...” Angelina whispered warm words, words of affection, hopeful words, repeating them again and again…



With tears in her eyes she looked far away at the hills, at the forest, into the sky, at the clouds, at the birds and caressing the grass and the flowers by her legs, she lifted her head, looked at Risto’s face, moved closer and looked at the paper to see how much space was left. Her face became sad and her wrinkles filled with tears when Risto said: “There is no more space…”



“How can that be Risto?” she asked, surprised. “Yesterday I told you more and the paper was smaller. Please just a little bit more, please write a little bit more right here at the corner so it won’t be empty and, here on this side write, make a cross like a prayer to God to protect my Paskal, my dear boy, my happiness, my most beloved… my falcon, my eagle, my strength… Here, Risto,” she touched the edge of the paper and with tears in her eyes and a choked up voice continued: “Write something from yourself, tell him to be good and to study hard… write… and when you finish, let me kiss the letter…”



The woman undid her black kerchief and covered her crying face with it. Her shoulders trembled from her crying. She got up quietly and walked away and from the distance she thanked Risto: “May God bless you with good health and peace, Risto… Thank you and be well…”



“Who is next?” Risto asked without raising his head.


“I am...” said the woman.



“Forgive me, but I don’t know your name...” replied Risto.



“Stoia. My name is Stoia. I was named after my grandfather Stoian. My oldest son’s name is Traiko, named after my father’s grandfather. My daughter’s name is Traianka, she was named after my mother. My second son’s name is Trpo, he was named after his uncle, and my husband’s name is Zhivko… Everything comes from grandfather and grandmother and from father and mother. And that way we are Stoianovtsi, Traikovtsi, Trpovtsi, Zhivkovtsi… And after the last war we adopted some new names like Slobodanka, Pobeda, Slobodan, Mirka… And after this war? Maybe there will be a Traiko and a Traianka, a Stoian and a Stoianka to give birth, so that our roots are not lost… What names will there be, only God knows… There are not many Stoianovtsi, Traikovtsi, Zhivkovtsi, Trpovtsi left in our village now… Some left their bones at Gramos, some at Mali-Madi, some at Voden, some at Lerin. A total of forty-eight dead up to now and I have no idea how many wounded and crippled. Everyone young is dead… gone… These are bad times… Is this our fate, is this what has been written for us?” Risto’s hand began to shake. A muscle in his right cheek began to quiver. His forehead began to wrinkle. His throat contracted. His stare was pointed somewhere far, far away. He was silent…



“Risto, are you listening to me?” asked Stoianka.



“Yes, I…” replied Risto with a choked up voice.



“Oh, not today… We will write mine tomorrow then,” said Stoianka and left.



“Who is next?” asked Risto after he composed himself.



Lina sat beside him and took out a piece of paper from her chest. It was folded in four. The yellowed paper shook in her hand as she extended it to Risto and said: “That’s all I could get my hands on. The others were quicker than me… The women were ripping from the bags, but the commissar, who forgot his briefcase in front of the bunker, got annoyed with them, and began to yell and chase them… When I saw all those pencils neatly arranged in his briefcase, I took one. Here it is…” She reached into her chest and pulled it out.



Risto, showing her with his facial expressions that he was not happy, shook his moustache and with reproach in his voice said: “So you are the one who stole the commissar’s pencil?”



“I hope nothing bad comes from this, please don’t talk like that Risto, I took just one pencil… And why does he need so many pencils anyway? Do you think he is smarter than you? He had so many in his leather briefcase and they were lined up like machine gun cartridges… Here, take the pencil, you need it more than him. He only struts around with those pencils and who knows what he writes about us to those above him.” She stopped talking for a moment, looked into his eyes and with an inquiring glance, whispered:



“Don’t look at me like that… So I took the pencil and what, the world fell apart? I did not steal it… I took it. If I stole it I wouldn’t have told you… The women had had an eye open for the commissar’s pencils for a long time. They were saying why does he need so many pencils? Our Risto has only one and that is enough to write all our letters. Isn’t that right Risto?



I didn’t take the pencil for myself, I took it for the women, for you, to write our letters. They deserve to have a pencil like that. That’s what I thought and said to myself, ‘I will give Risto the pencil’. Here, take it and stop frowning at me…”



Risto looked at her harshly and threatened her with his finger and after a long silence, asked: “What do you want me to write?”



“First write that,” she spread her hand wide open and began to list on her fingers one by one, “I wish them to be well and I am hopeful that they are alive and in good health, I love them very much, my love for them is great, greater, I warmly kiss them on the mouth, cheeks and eyes and I want them to be clean and beautiful in body, spirit and mind, I want them to be happy and cheerful as the spring is joyous and merry, to be blessed with peace and kindness, to be fair and merciful, to have understanding for all, to not be envious or jealous, to not want power over others, to not be blind to evil, to love everyone and to be blessed... May the sun shine on them, may God protect them… may they always be safe and protected... They are my eyes…



Tell them not to forget their mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, their numerous relatives, our Christian Orthodox faith, our blue sky, green meadows, forests, our home, vineyards and fields, and to look at the world before them with wide open eyes.



Tell them to believe in God and to pray to God for the wellbeing of everyone. Tell them not to forget to cross themselves and to be good, smart, brave, proud and without fear of looking into people’s eyes…



Tell them not to forget our songs and dances and that they are always in my thoughts, which fly towards them and nothing can prevent them from getting there, not the wind, nor the clouds, nor lightning, nor thunder. Tell them that my soul hurts and aches for them when I think of them and that my concern for them is great... I want them to return to me as soon as possible....”



She paused and looked far into the distance as if looking for her children there.



“Ah, if only I was a bird I would fly there to see them… And here in my chest I have a great big lump, here it brews in me and torments me, the sorrow is biting my insides, the pain is eating away in me, the anguish is poisoning me… with tears in my eyes I beg God to keep them safe and to return them to me, to fill my arms with them… they are my dreams, I dream about them and they appear in my dreams, they keep me company in my thoughts… The heart can’t keep silent when we are separated like this and they are gone so far away in unknown alien lands… can the mind be darkened and the thoughts be frozen…? Can they?



Let them be alive and well and clean like a tear, in body, spirit and mind… just let them be alive and well… a mother will endure… a mother will always endure like a stone, a boulder, or a mountain endures… each with their own problems… with their own pain…”



Her words started to come out broken from her lips. Her voice became quieter resembling the fluttering of trembling leaves. She paused and to Risto it seemed like her voice just died and her breathing come to an end. Inquiringly Risto looked at her face and realized that everything in her had turned upside down, she was covered by a shadow of immense sadness and depression.



She moved and leaned her chin on her stiff and hardened hands marred with premature wrinkles and speechlessly stared ahead. Her stare pleadingly flew downhill in search, searching, shifting and probing, greedily pressing into the cracks of time and returning disappointed. She let out a long and deep sigh, waved her hand as if chasing away a bad thought, moved her head slowly and let her eyes relax. There was a barely visible gentle smile beaming from her eyes into her brightened face. She spread her arms as if wanting to hug someone, but to Risto it seemed like she was hugging her children sitting on her lap. She remained that way for a moment and then, after taking a long and peaceful sigh, she crossed her arms, lifted up her eyes towards heaven, and in a humble quiet voice she recited a warm prayer.



Risto stirred with his head, looked at the piece of paper, turned it several times and said: “And you think everything you said I can put in this little piece of paper?”



“Yes Risto, it can be done, why not?” she answered.



“How can I accommodate so many words that you told me?” inquired Risto.



“Well, Risto, then don’t write words…” she replied.



“Not write words? What then should I write? Words are written in a letter because words speak… What kind of a letter would it be if it had no words? Words my dear woman, words speak…” added Risto.



“So it is… words speak, but you don’t need to write words…” she replied.



“So then, what should I write?” asked Risto.



“Write a flower, an eye, a tear, a bird, a heart…” replied the woman.



Risto wrote exactly what Lina told him.



“Okay. Here is a flower, an eye, a tear, a bird and a heart. I wrote them…” answered Risto.



“Let me see them,” she said and took the piece of paper, looked at it, and a hidden smile appeared in her eyes. “Not like this, not like this, write a flower… write a flower, like that, like the one that grows by your feet… Do you see it?” replied the woman.



“Do you mean I should draw a flower?” inquired Risto.



“Yes, like that… Did you write it? Good, but make the leaves a little longer… Now write an eye… Here, write my eye… Under the eye now write a tear, my tear that fell and beside it write a bird… write a bird with an open beak and open wings… Did you write it? Now write a heart… write a heart… and under it a drop…” ordered the woman, but before she could finish talking a painful sigh and a moan cut off her voice, tears filled her eyes, overflowed and glistened like pearls on her long, thick dark eyelashes...



She bowed her head down and stared at her crossed hands lying in her lap. The shaking of a leaf in a tree was loud, the buzzing of a bee flying around a flower was noisy, the water running down the brook was thundering… the wind became wicked, infuriating and started howling, the sky went dark, the roads and highways became narrow and screams were pouring, flooding the valleys, a blunt blow to the plough pushed it further into the ground, a crow crowed on the crest of the oak tree… silent whimpers, distant shouts and pleading cries…



Lina wiped the hanging tear, searched in her chest, took out a crumpled up piece of paper and, extending it to Risto, said: “Now put in this…”



“And what is this?” asked Risto.



“It is, how they say… It is the place where their father lives. There the way it is written, lives their father. So they can write him a letter, but with words… Put it inside and fold it like you fold all the letters and throw it over there in the bags… The women said the man from the big post is coming today…” replied the woman.



It is like this every day, at midday, under the thunderous roar of aircraft, under the thick shadows of the beech trees, Risto writes the letters and adds more from himself than they tell him. He knows their wishes, their great and immense pain and love for their children, their concern and care and the hundreds of doubts they have and questions they want to ask.



He knows what words will make them secretly smile and which ones will make them sigh a long sigh and remove their black kerchiefs and wipe their tears with its corner. He knows when they lose their voice and how long it takes before it comes back and before they can say more kind and gentle words…



He knows the secrets that hide in their hearts and thoughts, he comforts them, he reassures them and he implores them not to worry so much, to be calm and to hope and believe… He knows how a woman will speak to her child or children and what words she will use to express her love and concern, what prayers and wishes and how to end the letter.



From himself Risto adds that they should be good and study hard, behave and appreciate the mothers who care for them very much.



And when there are no replies to the letters, Risto tells the worried and anxious women: “What do you think; those countries that your children were sent to are close by? Believe me, it is a long road from here to there with many bridges and it takes a long time to get there. These countries are far, very, very far…”

[George S.]

Racism in Greece

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archive...sm-and-greece/

My blogging began because of a racist attack that had happened here in Greece six years earlier. It shocked the country then, not just because it was so horrific but also because the country had to wake up and see that racism exists here, contrary to popular opinion.

It is a commonly held belief that Greeks are not racist. It is also common to hear people say, “We don’t mind Black people, it’s the Albanians, Turks or Gypsies, we have a problem with. In more recent times, the Chinese have joined the list of baddies because of the small shops selling cheap clothing that have sprung up all over the big cities. This is a country where it is still acceptable to put your house up to rent and to specify that foreigners need not apply. This is a place where the media will accuse any crime on Albanians before any facts are known. There is no shortage of stories here about racism and xenophobia. There is more material than I could possibly cover myself.

I understand that it is often difficult for people to face up to racism. It is not an enjoyable experience to be accused of racism. And here I was accusing a whole country of the racism they didn’t want to see or acknowledge. There has been a collective temper tantrum and an avalanche of denial. How dare a foreigner call us racist? And worse still, a black one!

The problem is that you cannot tackle racism unless there is an admission of its existence and a willingness to accept responsibility and to change it. It is pointless to say that the racism in England or France is worse than here. That is not helpful to the Roma or Albanian (or other foreign) people who are beaten up on a regular basis by the police. That doesn’t help the asylum seekers who are locked up and treated worse than animals. That doesn’t assist the hundreds of African children who cannot get birth certificates issued when they are born here leading to problems getting health care, education or a passport.

There are many Greek bloggers who are tackling the same issues that I am. There are hundreds of people here who are working for change. Unfortunately, the mainstream media seems to have its head buried firmly in the sand. And the politicians are mainly just being politicians. They do absolutely nothing at best. The nationalist party is gaining ground, with its leader being seen regularly on TV, spouting his racist garbage. There are reasons that this is happening. The hysteria about the rising numbers of immigrants here (now at around 10% of the population) that is fueled by the media. There are the usual accusations that the nationals are losing their jobs because of foreigners. The rising crime figures are blamed on us regardless of information that this is not true. And on and on and on…

The main problem I see is that we are now seeing second and third generation of “foreigners” who are not immigrants. They are Greek and they are growing up and they are demanding equality and opportunity. Unless Greece as a country can grow up and acknowledge that there is a problem of racism, I can see only trouble ahead. You only have to look at what has happened in other countries to see the result of ignoring, ghettoizing and generally abusing those who are “other” Lessons can be learned from the experiences of other countries if only there was a willingness to do so. I do not see that happening here. It seems to me that we are on a well-trodden path to more serious problems in the very near future. People can only be poked for so long and then they bite back.

We will hear more angry protests about the treatment of foreigners and Greeks of different backgrounds. We will see people taking to the streets (a common pastime here for any grievance) demanding their rights as citizens of this country. We will see support for the struggle here from people outside the country. More international condemnation of the abuses that occur here. Whether the powers that be will sit up and take notice and then have the guts to actually do something about it, remains to be seen.

I feel compelled to keep scratching away at this issue regardless of what I am being accused of (from trying to undermine the country, to being a terrorist, to the classic “you’re the racist”). I have seen small shifts even on my humble blog and have many Greek blog friends who support this effort. The outpouring of support when the nationalists targeted me was incredible. Perhaps the change can come from us, the little people who care about big things and are letting the world know what is happening.

[George S.]

Racism and Discrimination against Immigrants and Minorities in Greece

http://www.i-red.eu/?i=institute.en.publications.38

One of the most widely known aspects of the Greek migration management system in the years 2001-2004, which is rather indicative of its inefficiency, is that due to long delays and administrative dysfunctions, residence and work permits were delivered to immigrants after their expiration date.

Furthermore, a strict bureaucratic system for admission to enter the country for work purposes has lead to hundreds of thousand of undeclared immigrant workers. Therefore, in 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006 successive legalization programs took place in an effort to regularize irregular immigrants. These legalization campaigns provide employers’ amnesty, while immigrant workers are called to pay social security contributions and expensive fees in order to regularize their work and residence status for 1 year.

The migration policy that prolongs the perennial insecurity of the suspended immigrant status, preserves the subaltern and vulnerable position of the immigrants in the labour market. It seems that there is an absence of a specific integration policy on immigration and that there are a rather fragmentary measures and contradictory policies instead. The National Action Plan for Employment still does not include immigrants as a target group. Surveys and researches on integration of immigrants and minorities’ in the labor market show that they receive lower wages and pay higher social security contributions. There are however increasing claims of higher wages backed by the unions of national and local workers. There are also increasing legislative limitations and restrictions in their entrepreneurship, concerning access to certain professions.

Regarding the reception policies, the living conditions in the refugee reception and detention centres, especially in the Aegean Sea islands and the police departments throughout the country still remain unacceptable in many cases and degrading for human dignity, as depicted by a long list of international and national organizations.

The rapidly increasing participation of 2nd generation immigrant children in education is accompanied by an ever larger dropout rate, which remains higher for immigrant children in relation to the total students’ population in primary and secondary education, though it is not to attribute to school performance. Isolated incidents of exclusion and discrimination against them are recorded, especially in relation to national festivities and parades, mainly due to the strongly ethnocentric aspects of Greek education.

The state intercultural education consists of providing language support by specialized teachers and is implemented only in 26 intercultural schools which are operating throughout the country. It serves the needs of the children of over a million of immigrants. Measures for immigrant children in school do not challenge the structural and systemic role of the education system in the Greek society, which is still based on exclusion rather than inclusion and on ethnocentrism rather than multiculturalism.

Irregular immigrants are excluded from the provision of public health, unless and as long they are at immediate risk of life loss, while their appearance in the public hospitals should be signalled to the police. In reality, the medical staff of public hospitals does provide medical services irrespective of the residence status of the patient.

Regular immigrants are holders of similar rights to those of Greek citizens, for a narrow field of social protection, namely provisions for natural disaster victims, and are not eligible for regular disability and subsistence welfare programs, which are connected to Greek citizenship and/or ethnic origin.

There are no provisions in place for granting voting rights in local municipal elections to subjects who are not Greek or EU nationals (third country). Nevertheless, there are isolated exceptions – in some municipalities in rural Greece, the non-voting consultative bodies representative of immigrant residents were created.

The Greek citizenship code does not provide a distinct path to citizenship to third country nationals, neither if they were born, nor if they lived their entire life in the country. Instead, the common procedure is an application after 12 years of legal residence in Greece, supported by expensive fees (1500€), with no deadline or even an obligation of the state to provide an answer. Such requests are frequently not responded to before a decade after the application date.

The Long Term Residence status EC Directive is yet to be fully transposed into the Greek legal order, while the application for such a status is possible only after paying a hefty 900€ fee, and passing an exam following a year-long course of Greek language, history and culture. However, there is a ‘numerus clausus’ for taking part in these courses, to an extent that in the best of cases, no more than 5-10.000 immigrants will be able to apply for LTR status until 2011. This is an extremely low percentage of long term residing immigrants in the country (estimated roughly between half and one million, and on the basis of the 2001 census records on the duration of residence).

There are no diversity management policies in place, neither in public nor in private sector, while no percentage of job posts is reserved to ethnic cultural minorities whatsoever. Believers of religions other than Christian Orthodox are not allowed to abstain from work to exercise their religion. No other religions’ festivities are recognised for employment and leave purposes.

According to available data, there has been a net improvement of the situation concerning the education of Roma and Muslim minority children since the 1990s. However, there are contradictory reports about Roma children enrolment and dropout rates.

A persisting trend is that enrollment of Roma children in ordinary community schools continues to cause tensions, intolerance and violent reactions, in some cases obliging the Roma children to attend special Roma school units, despite the firm commitment of the administration to avoid segregation of minorities in education.

Over the last couple of years (2004-2005) there has been an increase of evictions of Roma dwellings in the areas where major cultural and sport events had taken place or are going to take place in the near future (2004 Olympic Games of Athens, Patras Cultural Capital of Europe 2006, Votanikos area, site of a new Football Stadium). These are inevitably accompanied by tensions, local society intolerance and violent attacks against Roma.

Despite the efforts of the state, the Roma living, health and sanitary conditions in improvised settlements still remain a major social and humanitarian emergency.

In early 2005 the anti-discrimination directives have been transposed into the Greek legal order and a set of equality bodies with complementary mandates has been provided, some of which do not fully conform to the Paris Principles. After 2 years of implementation of the anti-discrimination legislation there are extremely few discrimination cases within the field of the anti-discrimination law, almost all of them handled by the Greek Ombudsman, which seems to be the only fully operative Equality Body in Greece. No official case of racist violence and crime is recorded on the basis of the relevant anti-racist penal legislation (law 927/1979), although violence against immigrants and minorities, in many cases by police officers, is a reality.

Negative stereotypes against minority groups and legitimisation of racial violence have proven difficult to extinguish. A football game between Greece and Albania readily sets off racist tensions that lead to clashes between Greeks and Albanians and even murders of immigrants among the largest immigrant group in Greece. What raises concerns is that the episodes cannot be attributed to a few nationalist and fascist groups, but that they are legitimised through a mainstream anti-Albanian attitude, tolerated or shared by a large proportion of the Greek society.

The problem of police and portual corps violence against immigrants-refugees and minorities is exacerbated by the fact that the internal police audit control and investigations procedures often lead to the offenders’ impunity. Only in a very small and insignificant number of cases has the investigation led to disciplinary measures, while in the absolute majority the complaint cases close as unfounded.

The Olympic policing-racial profiling of Muslims and their surveillance because of anti-terrorist measures has lead to a major incident of mass abduction and interrogation under undefined circumstances by Greek and foreign secret services in summer 2004. This issue has lead to a heated debate in the Parliament and has been under the focus of international media in 2005.

The religion-oriented racism is not usually the case in the Greek society and intolerance towards Muslims or islamophobia incidents have not been detected or reported. The public policies are not terror-fear driven and no particular security measures have been taken towards Muslim religious minority group in Greece.

Notwithstanding the great numbers of immigrants of Muslim religion and the practical absence of racist tensions against them, no official mosque still exists outside of the Western Thrace Region, while a notable number of unofficial mosques operate in Athens informally but without intolerance problems.

The ‘Greek majority priority’ principle, a perception deeply rooted in Greek society, provides the base for discrimination against minority groups and foreigners and constitutes an obstacle for development of the society on the basis of equality and non-discrimination. The hard-to-die negative stereotypes against minority groups legitimize racist violence. These are accompanied by the resolute and contradictory emerging attitudes versus the foreigners (co-existence of positive/negative views).

A major challenge for the future is a decisive role of the representatives of the political spectrum in shielding the public sphere from extreme right-wing xenophobic and racist discourse and practices legitimized in the name of a nationalist patriotism and the preservation of the ‘Greekness’. While public condemnations against such views are frequent and generalized as rhetoric, the main arguments and repertoires of racist discourse permeate a great part of the political class and parties, while media offer ground to xenophobic and racist discourse, encouraging similar opinions and practices.

A number of noteworthy good practices and civil society’s voluntary activities depict a rather robust and dynamic landscape of anti-discrimination action, some having significant impact on the public sphere. Civil society organisations and agencies are conducting a strongly anti-racist and pro-integration activity and a considerable part of substantial good practices concern promotion of multicultural society through high impact cultural activities. A significant number of local initiatives by civil society organizations are focused at intercultural contact and exchanges as well as at provision of specialized support to vulnerable groups, especially immigrant and refugees-asylum seekers, women and minors in major cities such as Athens, Thessaloniki, and Rethymno. After a decade of immigration, Greek cinematography is producing more films with a strong reference to the migration phenomena and the way it shapes Greek modern society, while special cinema tributes are dedicated to migration.

Under the light of public discussion regarding the management of migration it is obvious that some things have changed indeed in terms of dealing with immigrants as subjects entitled to basic rights, while the declarative perspective is their integration into, rather than their exclusion from, the Greek society.

The debate about concession of political rights to immigrants has been initiated, and all parliamentary parties propose full political rights especially to long-term residents and at the local or national elections, except for the right majority party in government.

As the newly elected president of the Hellenic Republic has put it at his first presidential address to the nation for the occasion of national independence anniversary of 25/3/2005, integration of immigrants is one of the main future challenges for Greek democracy: ‘(…) the protection of human rights and personal freedoms without discrimination and smooth integration of immigrants, are serious challenges for modern Greece’.

[George S.]

Racism and Discrimination against Immigrants and Minorities in Greece

http://www.i-red.eu/?i=institute.en.publications.38

One of the most widely known aspects of the Greek migration management system in the years 2001-2004, which is rather indicative of its inefficiency, is that due to long delays and administrative dysfunctions, residence and work permits were delivered to immigrants after their expiration date.

Furthermore, a strict bureaucratic system for admission to enter the country for work purposes has lead to hundreds of thousand of undeclared immigrant workers. Therefore, in 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006 successive legalization programs took place in an effort to regularize irregular immigrants. These legalization campaigns provide employers’ amnesty, while immigrant workers are called to pay social security contributions and expensive fees in order to regularize their work and residence status for 1 year.

The migration policy that prolongs the perennial insecurity of the suspended immigrant status, preserves the subaltern and vulnerable position of the immigrants in the labour market. It seems that there is an absence of a specific integration policy on immigration and that there are a rather fragmentary measures and contradictory policies instead. The National Action Plan for Employment still does not include immigrants as a target group. Surveys and researches on integration of immigrants and minorities’ in the labor market show that they receive lower wages and pay higher social security contributions. There are however increasing claims of higher wages backed by the unions of national and local workers. There are also increasing legislative limitations and restrictions in their entrepreneurship, concerning access to certain professions.

Regarding the reception policies, the living conditions in the refugee reception and detention centres, especially in the Aegean Sea islands and the police departments throughout the country still remain unacceptable in many cases and degrading for human dignity, as depicted by a long list of international and national organizations.

The rapidly increasing participation of 2nd generation immigrant children in education is accompanied by an ever larger dropout rate, which remains higher for immigrant children in relation to the total students’ population in primary and secondary education, though it is not to attribute to school performance. Isolated incidents of exclusion and discrimination against them are recorded, especially in relation to national festivities and parades, mainly due to the strongly ethnocentric aspects of Greek education.

The state intercultural education consists of providing language support by specialized teachers and is implemented only in 26 intercultural schools which are operating throughout the country. It serves the needs of the children of over a million of immigrants. Measures for immigrant children in school do not challenge the structural and systemic role of the education system in the Greek society, which is still based on exclusion rather than inclusion and on ethnocentrism rather than multiculturalism.

Irregular immigrants are excluded from the provision of public health, unless and as long they are at immediate risk of life loss, while their appearance in the public hospitals should be signalled to the police. In reality, the medical staff of public hospitals does provide medical services irrespective of the residence status of the patient.

Regular immigrants are holders of similar rights to those of Greek citizens, for a narrow field of social protection, namely provisions for natural disaster victims, and are not eligible for regular disability and subsistence welfare programs, which are connected to Greek citizenship and/or ethnic origin.

There are no provisions in place for granting voting rights in local municipal elections to subjects who are not Greek or EU nationals (third country). Nevertheless, there are isolated exceptions – in some municipalities in rural Greece, the non-voting consultative bodies representative of immigrant residents were created.

The Greek citizenship code does not provide a distinct path to citizenship to third country nationals, neither if they were born, nor if they lived their entire life in the country. Instead, the common procedure is an application after 12 years of legal residence in Greece, supported by expensive fees (1500€), with no deadline or even an obligation of the state to provide an answer. Such requests are frequently not responded to before a decade after the application date.

The Long Term Residence status EC Directive is yet to be fully transposed into the Greek legal order, while the application for such a status is possible only after paying a hefty 900€ fee, and passing an exam following a year-long course of Greek language, history and culture. However, there is a ‘numerus clausus’ for taking part in these courses, to an extent that in the best of cases, no more than 5-10.000 immigrants will be able to apply for LTR status until 2011. This is an extremely low percentage of long term residing immigrants in the country (estimated roughly between half and one million, and on the basis of the 2001 census records on the duration of residence).

There are no diversity management policies in place, neither in public nor in private sector, while no percentage of job posts is reserved to ethnic cultural minorities whatsoever. Believers of religions other than Christian Orthodox are not allowed to abstain from work to exercise their religion. No other religions’ festivities are recognised for employment and leave purposes.

According to available data, there has been a net improvement of the situation concerning the education of Roma and Muslim minority children since the 1990s. However, there are contradictory reports about Roma children enrolment and dropout rates.

A persisting trend is that enrollment of Roma children in ordinary community schools continues to cause tensions, intolerance and violent reactions, in some cases obliging the Roma children to attend special Roma school units, despite the firm commitment of the administration to avoid segregation of minorities in education.

Over the last couple of years (2004-2005) there has been an increase of evictions of Roma dwellings in the areas where major cultural and sport events had taken place or are going to take place in the near future (2004 Olympic Games of Athens, Patras Cultural Capital of Europe 2006, Votanikos area, site of a new Football Stadium). These are inevitably accompanied by tensions, local society intolerance and violent attacks against Roma.

Despite the efforts of the state, the Roma living, health and sanitary conditions in improvised settlements still remain a major social and humanitarian emergency.

In early 2005 the anti-discrimination directives have been transposed into the Greek legal order and a set of equality bodies with complementary mandates has been provided, some of which do not fully conform to the Paris Principles. After 2 years of implementation of the anti-discrimination legislation there are extremely few discrimination cases within the field of the anti-discrimination law, almost all of them handled by the Greek Ombudsman, which seems to be the only fully operative Equality Body in Greece. No official case of racist violence and crime is recorded on the basis of the relevant anti-racist penal legislation (law 927/1979), although violence against immigrants and minorities, in many cases by police officers, is a reality.

Negative stereotypes against minority groups and legitimisation of racial violence have proven difficult to extinguish. A football game between Greece and Albania readily sets off racist tensions that lead to clashes between Greeks and Albanians and even murders of immigrants among the largest immigrant group in Greece. What raises concerns is that the episodes cannot be attributed to a few nationalist and fascist groups, but that they are legitimised through a mainstream anti-Albanian attitude, tolerated or shared by a large proportion of the Greek society.

The problem of police and portual corps violence against immigrants-refugees and minorities is exacerbated by the fact that the internal police audit control and investigations procedures often lead to the offenders’ impunity. Only in a very small and insignificant number of cases has the investigation led to disciplinary measures, while in the absolute majority the complaint cases close as unfounded.

The Olympic policing-racial profiling of Muslims and their surveillance because of anti-terrorist measures has lead to a major incident of mass abduction and interrogation under undefined circumstances by Greek and foreign secret services in summer 2004. This issue has lead to a heated debate in the Parliament and has been under the focus of international media in 2005.

The religion-oriented racism is not usually the case in the Greek society and intolerance towards Muslims or islamophobia incidents have not been detected or reported. The public policies are not terror-fear driven and no particular security measures have been taken towards Muslim religious minority group in Greece.

Notwithstanding the great numbers of immigrants of Muslim religion and the practical absence of racist tensions against them, no official mosque still exists outside of the Western Thrace Region, while a notable number of unofficial mosques operate in Athens informally but without intolerance problems.

The ‘Greek majority priority’ principle, a perception deeply rooted in Greek society, provides the base for discrimination against minority groups and foreigners and constitutes an obstacle for development of the society on the basis of equality and non-discrimination. The hard-to-die negative stereotypes against minority groups legitimize racist violence. These are accompanied by the resolute and contradictory emerging attitudes versus the foreigners (co-existence of positive/negative views).

A major challenge for the future is a decisive role of the representatives of the political spectrum in shielding the public sphere from extreme right-wing xenophobic and racist discourse and practices legitimized in the name of a nationalist patriotism and the preservation of the ‘Greekness’. While public condemnations against such views are frequent and generalized as rhetoric, the main arguments and repertoires of racist discourse permeate a great part of the political class and parties, while media offer ground to xenophobic and racist discourse, encouraging similar opinions and practices.

A number of noteworthy good practices and civil society’s voluntary activities depict a rather robust and dynamic landscape of anti-discrimination action, some having significant impact on the public sphere. Civil society organisations and agencies are conducting a strongly anti-racist and pro-integration activity and a considerable part of substantial good practices concern promotion of multicultural society through high impact cultural activities. A significant number of local initiatives by civil society organizations are focused at intercultural contact and exchanges as well as at provision of specialized support to vulnerable groups, especially immigrant and refugees-asylum seekers, women and minors in major cities such as Athens, Thessaloniki, and Rethymno. After a decade of immigration, Greek cinematography is producing more films with a strong reference to the migration phenomena and the way it shapes Greek modern society, while special cinema tributes are dedicated to migration.

Under the light of public discussion regarding the management of migration it is obvious that some things have changed indeed in terms of dealing with immigrants as subjects entitled to basic rights, while the declarative perspective is their integration into, rather than their exclusion from, the Greek society.

The debate about concession of political rights to immigrants has been initiated, and all parliamentary parties propose full political rights especially to long-term residents and at the local or national elections, except for the right majority party in government.

As the newly elected president of the Hellenic Republic has put it at his first presidential address to the nation for the occasion of national independence anniversary of 25/3/2005, integration of immigrants is one of the main future challenges for Greek democracy: ‘(…) the protection of human rights and personal freedoms without discrimination and smooth integration of immigrants, are serious challenges for modern Greece’.

[George S.]

Racism and Discrimination against Immigrants and Minorities in Greece

http://www.i-red.eu/?i=institute.en.publications.38

One of the most widely known aspects of the Greek migration management system in the years 2001-2004, which is rather indicative of its inefficiency, is that due to long delays and administrative dysfunctions, residence and work permits were delivered to immigrants after their expiration date.

Furthermore, a strict bureaucratic system for admission to enter the country for work purposes has lead to hundreds of thousand of undeclared immigrant workers. Therefore, in 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006 successive legalization programs took place in an effort to regularize irregular immigrants. These legalization campaigns provide employers’ amnesty, while immigrant workers are called to pay social security contributions and expensive fees in order to regularize their work and residence status for 1 year.

The migration policy that prolongs the perennial insecurity of the suspended immigrant status, preserves the subaltern and vulnerable position of the immigrants in the labour market. It seems that there is an absence of a specific integration policy on immigration and that there are a rather fragmentary measures and contradictory policies instead. The National Action Plan for Employment still does not include immigrants as a target group. Surveys and researches on integration of immigrants and minorities’ in the labor market show that they receive lower wages and pay higher social security contributions. There are however increasing claims of higher wages backed by the unions of national and local workers. There are also increasing legislative limitations and restrictions in their entrepreneurship, concerning access to certain professions.

Regarding the reception policies, the living conditions in the refugee reception and detention centres, especially in the Aegean Sea islands and the police departments throughout the country still remain unacceptable in many cases and degrading for human dignity, as depicted by a long list of international and national organizations.

The rapidly increasing participation of 2nd generation immigrant children in education is accompanied by an ever larger dropout rate, which remains higher for immigrant children in relation to the total students’ population in primary and secondary education, though it is not to attribute to school performance. Isolated incidents of exclusion and discrimination against them are recorded, especially in relation to national festivities and parades, mainly due to the strongly ethnocentric aspects of Greek education.

The state intercultural education consists of providing language support by specialized teachers and is implemented only in 26 intercultural schools which are operating throughout the country. It serves the needs of the children of over a million of immigrants. Measures for immigrant children in school do not challenge the structural and systemic role of the education system in the Greek society, which is still based on exclusion rather than inclusion and on ethnocentrism rather than multiculturalism.

Irregular immigrants are excluded from the provision of public health, unless and as long they are at immediate risk of life loss, while their appearance in the public hospitals should be signalled to the police. In reality, the medical staff of public hospitals does provide medical services irrespective of the residence status of the patient.

Regular immigrants are holders of similar rights to those of Greek citizens, for a narrow field of social protection, namely provisions for natural disaster victims, and are not eligible for regular disability and subsistence welfare programs, which are connected to Greek citizenship and/or ethnic origin.

There are no provisions in place for granting voting rights in local municipal elections to subjects who are not Greek or EU nationals (third country). Nevertheless, there are isolated exceptions – in some municipalities in rural Greece, the non-voting consultative bodies representative of immigrant residents were created.

The Greek citizenship code does not provide a distinct path to citizenship to third country nationals, neither if they were born, nor if they lived their entire life in the country. Instead, the common procedure is an application after 12 years of legal residence in Greece, supported by expensive fees (1500€), with no deadline or even an obligation of the state to provide an answer. Such requests are frequently not responded to before a decade after the application date.

The Long Term Residence status EC Directive is yet to be fully transposed into the Greek legal order, while the application for such a status is possible only after paying a hefty 900€ fee, and passing an exam following a year-long course of Greek language, history and culture. However, there is a ‘numerus clausus’ for taking part in these courses, to an extent that in the best of cases, no more than 5-10.000 immigrants will be able to apply for LTR status until 2011. This is an extremely low percentage of long term residing immigrants in the country (estimated roughly between half and one million, and on the basis of the 2001 census records on the duration of residence).

There are no diversity management policies in place, neither in public nor in private sector, while no percentage of job posts is reserved to ethnic cultural minorities whatsoever. Believers of religions other than Christian Orthodox are not allowed to abstain from work to exercise their religion. No other religions’ festivities are recognised for employment and leave purposes.

According to available data, there has been a net improvement of the situation concerning the education of Roma and Muslim minority children since the 1990s. However, there are contradictory reports about Roma children enrolment and dropout rates.

A persisting trend is that enrollment of Roma children in ordinary community schools continues to cause tensions, intolerance and violent reactions, in some cases obliging the Roma children to attend special Roma school units, despite the firm commitment of the administration to avoid segregation of minorities in education.

Over the last couple of years (2004-2005) there has been an increase of evictions of Roma dwellings in the areas where major cultural and sport events had taken place or are going to take place in the near future (2004 Olympic Games of Athens, Patras Cultural Capital of Europe 2006, Votanikos area, site of a new Football Stadium). These are inevitably accompanied by tensions, local society intolerance and violent attacks against Roma.

Despite the efforts of the state, the Roma living, health and sanitary conditions in improvised settlements still remain a major social and humanitarian emergency.

In early 2005 the anti-discrimination directives have been transposed into the Greek legal order and a set of equality bodies with complementary mandates has been provided, some of which do not fully conform to the Paris Principles. After 2 years of implementation of the anti-discrimination legislation there are extremely few discrimination cases within the field of the anti-discrimination law, almost all of them handled by the Greek Ombudsman, which seems to be the only fully operative Equality Body in Greece. No official case of racist violence and crime is recorded on the basis of the relevant anti-racist penal legislation (law 927/1979), although violence against immigrants and minorities, in many cases by police officers, is a reality.

Negative stereotypes against minority groups and legitimisation of racial violence have proven difficult to extinguish. A football game between Greece and Albania readily sets off racist tensions that lead to clashes between Greeks and Albanians and even murders of immigrants among the largest immigrant group in Greece. What raises concerns is that the episodes cannot be attributed to a few nationalist and fascist groups, but that they are legitimised through a mainstream anti-Albanian attitude, tolerated or shared by a large proportion of the Greek society.

The problem of police and portual corps violence against immigrants-refugees and minorities is exacerbated by the fact that the internal police audit control and investigations procedures often lead to the offenders’ impunity. Only in a very small and insignificant number of cases has the investigation led to disciplinary measures, while in the absolute majority the complaint cases close as unfounded.

The Olympic policing-racial profiling of Muslims and their surveillance because of anti-terrorist measures has lead to a major incident of mass abduction and interrogation under undefined circumstances by Greek and foreign secret services in summer 2004. This issue has lead to a heated debate in the Parliament and has been under the focus of international media in 2005.

The religion-oriented racism is not usually the case in the Greek society and intolerance towards Muslims or islamophobia incidents have not been detected or reported. The public policies are not terror-fear driven and no particular security measures have been taken towards Muslim religious minority group in Greece.

Notwithstanding the great numbers of immigrants of Muslim religion and the practical absence of racist tensions against them, no official mosque still exists outside of the Western Thrace Region, while a notable number of unofficial mosques operate in Athens informally but without intolerance problems.

The ‘Greek majority priority’ principle, a perception deeply rooted in Greek society, provides the base for discrimination against minority groups and foreigners and constitutes an obstacle for development of the society on the basis of equality and non-discrimination. The hard-to-die negative stereotypes against minority groups legitimize racist violence. These are accompanied by the resolute and contradictory emerging attitudes versus the foreigners (co-existence of positive/negative views).

A major challenge for the future is a decisive role of the representatives of the political spectrum in shielding the public sphere from extreme right-wing xenophobic and racist discourse and practices legitimized in the name of a nationalist patriotism and the preservation of the ‘Greekness’. While public condemnations against such views are frequent and generalized as rhetoric, the main arguments and repertoires of racist discourse permeate a great part of the political class and parties, while media offer ground to xenophobic and racist discourse, encouraging similar opinions and practices.

A number of noteworthy good practices and civil society’s voluntary activities depict a rather robust and dynamic landscape of anti-discrimination action, some having significant impact on the public sphere. Civil society organisations and agencies are conducting a strongly anti-racist and pro-integration activity and a considerable part of substantial good practices concern promotion of multicultural society through high impact cultural activities. A significant number of local initiatives by civil society organizations are focused at intercultural contact and exchanges as well as at provision of specialized support to vulnerable groups, especially immigrant and refugees-asylum seekers, women and minors in major cities such as Athens, Thessaloniki, and Rethymno. After a decade of immigration, Greek cinematography is producing more films with a strong reference to the migration phenomena and the way it shapes Greek modern society, while special cinema tributes are dedicated to migration.

Under the light of public discussion regarding the management of migration it is obvious that some things have changed indeed in terms of dealing with immigrants as subjects entitled to basic rights, while the declarative perspective is their integration into, rather than their exclusion from, the Greek society.

The debate about concession of political rights to immigrants has been initiated, and all parliamentary parties propose full political rights especially to long-term residents and at the local or national elections, except for the right majority party in government.

As the newly elected president of the Hellenic Republic has put it at his first presidential address to the nation for the occasion of national independence anniversary of 25/3/2005, integration of immigrants is one of the main future challenges for Greek democracy: ‘(…) the protection of human rights and personal freedoms without discrimination and smooth integration of immigrants, are serious challenges for modern Greece’.

[George S.]

Medvedev presents Order of Friendship to honorary consul in Bitola


Monday, 20 February 2012

http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/20380/45/

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev presented Friday in Moscow the Order of Friendship to Darinka Krstanova - country's honorary consul in Bitola.

The decree was signed by President Medvedev in December 2011, while the main ceremony where Krstanova was decorated with the order was held on Friday.

The honorary consulate of the Russian Federation was opened 10 years ago in Bitola and Krstanova was elected honorary consul to promote Russia's culture in this Macedonian city, organise various scientific and business manifestations aiming to bring the two nations closer.

Russia holds annual events in Bitola to mark the Diplomats' Day.

[George S.]

Poetry





MACEDONIAN ROOTS IN CANADIAN SOIL

(Makedonci vo Kanada)

Spero Thompson



Canada, you are indeed a land of multi-cultural Immigrants

Many people heard your call and they came

Macedonians leave their beloved homeland

Your promise of hope and freedom they come to claim.



You invite them, come people from Aegean, Pirrin, Vardar

Come; join other new life seeking peoples

Leave Macedonia, as children will one day leave home

Come; build families, homes, businesses, Churches with steeples.



You counsel them, embrace me and I will embrace you

Nothing will be given to you, nothing here is free

Macedonians are not strangers to hard times or hard work

Things will go well here, endure you will see.



You persuade them, give me your youth, muscle, sweat

Give me your hopes, dreams, your plans, your brain

Establishing a foothold in this new country will be hard

Remember immigrant, it's your children who will reap and gain.



And work they did, daytime, night time, part time, overtime

In slaughterhouses, tanneries, factories, restaurants and mill

No work was too hard, or beneath such a hardy people

As these freedom loving Macedonians, of intelligence and will.



They rub shoulders with the multiracial people of Canada

Learn the English language; retain culture and procure them a place

Their honest, and religious character, prove them second to none

In Business, Arts, Academics, and Politics, they bring honor to their Race.



One day when we sons and daughters, stand at our parents graves

After those hope seeking immigrants, have ended their days of toil

Then we will understand it is our roots we plant; for far from Macedonia

Our parent’s bodies will become part of Canada's soil.

[George S.]

Update From Pollitecon Publications

13 March 2012

________________________________________________
A number of new books, reports and articles have been added to the Pollitecon web site or are available from other publishers. See below for details.

Life in Aegean Macedonia

Interview With Tanas Mechkarov
The latest addition to the Life in Aegean Macedonia collection is Interview With Tanas Mechkarov. A Macedonian Australian businessman, Mr Mechkarov was born in the Macedonian village of Neret (Polipotamos) in northern Greece. As a young boy he lived through the Second World War and the Greek Civil War and came to Australia in 1950 at the age of 14. He discusses in detail these events and this early period of his life in an interview with Pollitecon Publications editor, Victor Bivell. Click Here.

Reprints Page

United Nations on Macedonians in Bulgaria
The United Nations' 2012 Report of the Independent Expert on Minority Issues in Bulgaria says that in accordance with its Constitution, the Bulgarian Government should ensure and protect the right of its minorities including the Macedonian minority to develop their own culture in accordance with their ethnic self-identification.

"Article 54 of the Bulgarian Constitution states that "everyone shall have the right to avail himself of the national and universal human cultural values and to develop his own culture in accordance with his ethnic self-identification, which shall be recognized and guaranteed by the law." However, the Government denies the existence of an ethnic Macedonian minority," says the United Nations.

"In accordance with its Constitutional provisions to respect the right to ethnic self-identification, the Government should ensure and protect this right, as well as the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of association of members of the Macedonian and Pomak minorities," it says.

"Ethnic Macedonians consider it of crucial importance that their ethnic identity and distinctiveness be officially recognized. Community representatives strongly dispute census findings reflecting very low and declining numbers of Macedonians, and claim that the true population is many times higher. The Macedonian language is not recognized or taught in schools and Macedonians are not represented on the National Council for Cooperation on Ethnic and Integration Issues," says the report.

The United Nations urges the Bulgarian Government to consider introducing bilingual education, including for Macedonians, and to ratify the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.

The full report is on the Pollitecon web site under Reprints and then Reports. Click Here.

Links Page

Slave Nikolovski-Katin Books
The Links section now has links to two web sites associated with Macedonian author Slave Nikolovski-Katin.

Mr Nikolovski-Katin's personal web site has information on over 50 of his books, monographs and translations on a wide range of Macedonian subjects including language and dictionaries; modern and ancient Macedonian history; the Macedonian diaspora in Australia, North America and Europe; the Macedonian Orthodox Church; and literature. The books are in Macedonian and English.

The second web site is Makedonska Iskra or Macedonian Spark, a publisher of a large number and wide range of educational books. The web site is in Macedonian.

To visit both links Click Here and then look under Books And Sites By Other Publishers.

MakMedia Videos
The Links section has a new link to MakMedia, a Toronto based web site with numerous video clips on Macedonian music, art, cultural events, sport, business, communities and successful Macedonians from around the world. Click Here then look under News and Information.

New Books

Young Brides - Old Treasures
Pollitecon Publications has available three copies of the book Young Brides - Old Treasures published by the Macedonian Arts Council in New York and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe.

This is a lavish, large format, hard cover, full color book with many beautiful photographs of Macedonian costumes. The 170 page book includes 100 pages of information and scholarship on Macedonian costumes, weaving and embroidery.

To help make this book more widely available in Australia, Pollitecon has three copies that can be bought at cost price plus postage to anywhere within Australia. You can order the book by clicking Here. You can also call Pollitecon on 02 9705 0578.

New Loring Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten Book on Child Refugees
Authors Loring Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten have published a book entitled Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory.

The book deals with the 38,000 children were evacuated from their homes in the mountains of northern Greece. The Greek Communist Party relocated half of the children to orphanages in Eastern Europe, while the rest were placed by the national government in children's homes elsewhere in Greece.

The authors present for the first time a comprehensive study of the two evacuation programs and the lives of the children they so dramatically transformed.

The book covers the Association of Child Refugees From Aegean Macedonia, the role of national identity in the civil war, and the experiences of detsa begaltsi in Eastern Europe. It has long life history narratives in the words of the detsa begaltsi themselves.

The authors say the study breaks new ground in several areas: in its methodology, its style, and its topic. Historically and ethnographically, the book tells a duplex tale: by two authors writing about two opposed camps and exploring the vicissitudes of two states and two ethnicities.

Loring Danforth is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology at Bates College and the author of several books, including The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World. Riki Van Boeschoten is associate professor of social anthropology and oral history at the University of Thessaly, Greece.

Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory is published by the University of Chicago Press. Further information Here. Email orders can be placed Here.

The Macedonians: Their Past and Present
Author Ernest N. Damianopoulos has published The Macedonians: Their Past and Present, a book that looks at "Who are the Macedonians?"

The author uses historical documentation, self-description reports, and sociocultural features to demonstrate that the Macedonians are a unique, non-Slav, non-Greek, ethnic identity.

According to the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, the book sees through the confusion, conflict, misinterpretation, and denial of the Macedonians as a people and sheds new light on Macedonian ethnicity and nationhood.

The book becomes available this month.

The author has spent more than 50 years in academia and research, and has taught at several universities. He has published more than 40 papers and articles in internationally recognized journals, including the Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, Behavioral Brain Research, and Psychological Review.

The Macedonians is the result of his interest in the question of Macedonian identity, and stems from the years he lived in Aegean Macedonia.

The book can be ordered by clicking Here

Translation of Goli Otok Book
Dr Michael Seraphinoff has translated and made available for free the book Mind and Spirit Under Siege - A historical memoir by Toma Batev.

The book is an autobiography that centres around the author's conviction by Tito's Yugoslav secret police and his sentence to the island of Goli Otok. The rehabilitation camp was a place of extraordinary cruelty and barbarism. The conviction of the author when he was an idealistic student and his experiences, like the secret police, followed him until his death many decades later.

The book is a free download, along with an English language translation of the folktale Silyan the Stork and a number of papers and articles. Click Here.

11 Free Books by Risto Stefov
Author Risto Stefov now has 11 books in English that are available for free in PDF format. The books are:

- The Little Book of Big Greek Lies
- History of the Macedonian People from Ancient Times to the Present
- English – Macedonian Dialectal Dictionary Based on the Lerin-Kostur Dialects As Spoken by Oshchimians
- Biographies from the Chronicles of the Oshchima Book
- Macedonia in Ancient Times (With Academic Antionije Skokljev-Doneo and Slave Nikolovski-Katin)
- Macedonia the Land of Legends - My First Trip to Macedonia
- Macedonian Struggle for Independence
- Macedonians in Greece 1939 - 1949
- Oshchima - The Story of a Small Village in Western Macedonia
- Recovering Macedonia
- Short History of Macedonia
- Very Short History of the Macedonian People from Prehistory to the Present

Several of these books are available on the author's web site Here, and any of the books can be requested from the author by emailing him Here.

Little Book of Big Greek Lies and Ancient Testimonies about the Ancient Macedonians
A review of the two books Little Book of Big Greek Lies by Risto Stefov and Ancient Greek and other Ancient Testimonies about the Unique Ethnic Distinctiveness of the Ancient Macedonians by Alexander Donski is available Here.

Both books expose many of the myths and untruths of Greek propaganda about the ancient and modern Macedonians.

Both books can be purchased from Dushan Ristevski at the Australian Macedonian Literary Association Grigor Prlichev by clicking Here or phoning 0425 231 335.

New Book by Sam Vaknin
Author Dr Sam Vaknin has published a collection of articles and essays titled A Macedonian Medley. Topics include politics, economics, history, the Albanian minority, the Macedonian Jews, the Macedonian media and the so called name issue. The eight pieces in the 27 page PDF book range from thoughtful to provocative.

The author says "The Republic of Macedonia is 20 years old: an adult with the problems and promises that characterize early puberty. The country now has a young and dynamic leadership which has succeeded to transform Macedonia's image both domestically and abroad for better and for worse. According to repeated polls, for the first time in two decades, people are optimistic and investors sanguine.

"But there are troubling currents afoot. Macedonia is undergoing a worrisome change of character. If not reversed, these malignant processes will backfire and Macedonia's hopes will be cruelly dashed. Under Nikola Gruevski, Macedonia, for the first time, stands a chance of becoming a prosperous member of Europe and the international community. Its history of self-destructive self-defeating behavior can be avoided."

Click Here to download the PDF file.

Victor Bivell
Pollitecon Publications
PO Box 3102
Wareemba NSW 2046 Australia
Ph 02 9705 0578
Fx 02 9713 1004
Email [email protected]
Web www.pollitecon.com

[George S.]

US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope:

US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:
* making the world safe for American corporations;
* enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;
* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;
* extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a "great power."
This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.

The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.

China, 1945-49:
Intervened in a civil war, taking the side of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists, even though the latter had been a much closer ally of the United States in the world war. The U.S. used defeated Japanese soldiers to fight for its side. The Communists forced Chiang to flee to Taiwan in 1949.


Italy, 1947-48:
Using every trick in the book, the U.S. interfered in the elections to prevent the Communist Party from coming to power legally and fairly. This perversion of democracy was done in the name of "saving democracy" in Italy. The Communists lost. For the next few decades, the CIA, along with American corporations, continued to intervene in Italian elections, pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars and much psychological warfare to block the specter that was haunting Europe.


Greece, 1947-49:
Intervened in a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left which had fought the Nazis courageously. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a new internal security agency, KYP. Before long, KYP was carrying out all the endearing practices of secret police everywhere, including systematic torture.


Philippines, 1945-53:
U.S. military fought against leftist forces (Huks) even while the Huks were still fighting against the Japanese invaders. After the war, the U. S. continued its fight against the Huks, defeating them, and then installing a series of puppets as president, culminating in the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.


South Korea, 1945-53:
After World War II, the United States suppressed the popular progressive forces in favor of the conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. This led to a long era of corrupt, reactionary, and brutal governments.


Albania, 1949-53:
The U.S. and Britain tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the communist government and install a new one that would have been pro-Western and composed largely of monarchists and collaborators with Italian fascists and Nazis.


Germany, 1950s:
The CIA orchestrated a wide-ranging campaign of sabotage, terrorism, dirty tricks, and psychological warfare against East Germany. This was one of the factors which led to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.


Iran, 1953:
Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown in a joint U.S./British operation. Mossadegh had been elected to his position by a large majority of parliament, but he had made the fateful mistake of spearheading the movement to nationalize a British-owned oil company, the sole oil company operating in Iran. The coup restored the Shah to absolute power and began a period of 25 years of repression and torture, with the oil industry being restored to foreign ownership, as follows: Britain and the U.S., each 40 percent, other nations 20 percent.


Guatemala, 1953-1990s:
A CIA-organized coup overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of death-squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling well over 100,000 victims -indisputably one of the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century. Arbenz had nationalized the U.S. firm, United Fruit Company, which had extremely close ties to the American power elite. As justification for the coup, Washington declared that Guatemala had been on the verge of a Soviet takeover, when in fact the Russians had so little interest in the country that it didn't even maintain diplomatic relations. The real problem in the eyes of Washington, in addition to United Fruit, was the danger of Guatemala's social democracy spreading to other countries in Latin America.


Middle East, 1956-58:
The Eisenhower Doctrine stated that the United States "is prepared to use armed forces to assist" any Middle East country "requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism." The English translation of this was that no one would be allowed to dominate, or have excessive influence over, the middle east and its oil fields except the United States, and that anyone who tried would be, by definition, "Communist." In keeping with this policy, the United States twice attempted to overthrow the Syrian government, staged several shows-of-force in the Mediterranean to intimidate movements opposed to U.S.-supported governments in Jordan and Lebanon, landed 14,000 troops in Lebanon, and conspired to overthrow or assassinate Nasser of Egypt and his troublesome middle-east nationalism.


Indonesia, 1957-58:
Sukarno, like Nasser, was the kind of Third World leader the United States could not abide. He took neutralism in the cold war seriously, making trips to the Soviet Union and China (though to the White House as well). He nationalized many private holdings of the Dutch, the former colonial power. He refused to crack down on the Indonesian Communist Party, which was walking the legal, peaceful road and making impressive gains electorally. Such policies could easily give other Third World leaders "wrong ideas." The CIA began throwing money into the elections, plotted Sukarno's assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war against the government. Sukarno survived it all.


British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64:
For 11 years, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths to prevent a democratically elected leader from occupying his office. Cheddi Jagan was another Third World leader who tried to remain neutral and independent. He was elected three times. Although a leftist-more so than Sukarno or Arbenz-his policies in office were not revolutionary. But he was still a marked man, for he represented Washington's greatest fear: building a society that might be a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model. Using a wide variety of tactics-from general strikes and disinformation to terrorism and British legalisms, the U. S. and Britain finally forced Jagan out in 1964. John F. Kennedy had given a direct order for his ouster, as, presumably, had Eisenhower.
One of the better-off countries in the region under Jagan, Guyana, by the 1980s, was one of the poorest. Its principal export became people.


Vietnam, 1950-73:
The slippery slope began with siding with ~ French, the former colonizers and collaborators with the Japanese, against Ho Chi Minh and his followers who had worked closely with the Allied war effort and admired all things American. Ho Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of Communist. He had written numerous letters to President Truman and the State Department asking for America's help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French and finding a peaceful solution for his country. All his entreaties were ignored. Ho Chi Minh modeled the new Vietnamese declaration of independence on the American, beginning it with "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with ..." But this would count for nothing in Washington. Ho Chi Minh was some kind of Communist.
Twenty-three years and more than a million dead, later, the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam. Most people say that the U.S. lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, and poisoning the earth and the gene pool for generations, Washington had achieved its main purpose: preventing what might have been the rise of a good development option for Asia. Ho Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of communist.


Cambodia, 1955-73:
Prince Sihanouk was yet another leader who did not fancy being an American client. After many years of hostility towards his regime, including assassination plots and the infamous Nixon/Kissinger secret "carpet bombings" of 1969-70, Washington finally overthrew Sihanouk in a coup in 1970. This was all that was needed to impel Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces to enter the fray. Five years later, they took power. But five years of American bombing had caused Cambodia's traditional economy to vanish. The old Cambodia had been destroyed forever.
Incredibly, the Khmer Rouge were to inflict even greater misery on this unhappy land. To add to the irony, the United States supported Pol Pot, militarily and diplomatically, after their subsequent defeat by the Vietnamese.


The Congo/Zaire, 1960-65:
In June 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the Congo's first prime minister after independence from Belgium. But Belgium retained its vast mineral wealth in Katanga province, prominent Eisenhower administration officials had financial ties to the same wealth, and Lumumba, at Independence Day ceremonies before a host of foreign dignitaries, called for the nation's economic as well as its political liberation, and recounted a list of injustices against the natives by the white owners of the country. The man was obviously a "Communist." The poor man was obviously doomed.
Eleven days later, Katanga province seceded, in September, Lumumba was dismissed by the president at the instigation of the United States, and in January 1961 he was assassinated at the express request of Dwight Eisenhower. There followed several years of civil conflict and chaos and the rise to power of Mobutu Sese Seko, a man not a stranger to the CIA. Mobutu went on to rule the country for more than 30 years, with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers. The Zairian people lived in abject poverty despite the plentiful natural wealth, while Mobutu became a multibillionaire.


Brazil, 1961-64:
President Joao Goulart was guilty of the usual crimes: He took an independent stand in foreign policy, resuming relations with socialist countries and opposing sanctions against Cuba; his administration passed a law limiting the amount of profits multinationals could transmit outside the country; a subsidiary of ITT was nationalized; he promoted economic and social reforms. And Attorney-General Robert Kennedy was uneasy about Goulart allowing "communists" to hold positions in government agencies. Yet the man was no radical. He was a millionaire land-owner and a Catholic who wore a medal of the Virgin around his neck. That, however, was not enough to save him. In 1964, he was overthrown in a military coup which had deep, covert American involvement. The official Washington line was...yes, it's unfortunate that democracy has been overthrown in Brazil...but, still, the country has been saved from communism.
For the next 15 years, all the features of military dictatorship that Latin America has come to know were instituted: Congress was shut down, political opposition was reduced to virtual extinction, habeas corpus for "political crimes" was suspended, criticism of the president was forbidden by law, labor unions were taken over by government interveners, mounting protests were met by police and military firing into crowds, peasants' homes were burned down, priests were brutalized...disappearances, death squads, a remarkable degree and depravity of torture...the government had a name for its program: the "moral rehabilitation" of Brazil.
Washington was very pleased. Brazil broke relations with Cuba and became one of the United States' most reliable allies in Latin America.


Dominican Republic, 1963-66:
In February 1963, Juan Bosch took office as the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic since 1924. Here at last was John F. Kennedy's liberal anti-Communist, to counter the charge that the U.S. supported only military dictatorships. Bosch's government was to be the long sought " showcase of democracy " that would put the lie to Fidel Castro. He was given the grand treatment in Washington shortly before he took office.
Bosch was true to his beliefs. He called for land reform, low-rent housing, modest nationalization of business, and foreign investment provided it was not excessively exploitative of the country and other policies making up the program of any liberal Third World leader serious about social change. He was likewise serious about civil liberties: Communists, or those labeled as such, were not to be persecuted unless they actually violated the law.
A number of American officials and congress people expressed their discomfort with Bosch's plans, as well as his stance of independence from the United States. Land reform and nationalization are always touchy issues in Washington, the stuff that "creeping socialism" is made of. In several quarters of the U.S. press Bosch was red-baited.
In September, the military boots marched. Bosch was out. The United States, which could discourage a military coup in Latin America with a frown, did nothing.
Nineteen months later, a revolt broke out which promised to put the exiled Bosch back into power. The United States sent 23,000 troops to help crush it.


Cuba, 1959 to present:
Fidel Castro came to power at the beginning of 1959. A U.S. National Security Council meeting of March 10, 1959 included on its agenda the feasibility of bringing "another government to power in Cuba." There followed 40 years of terrorist attacks, bombings, full-scale military invasion, sanctions, embargoes, isolation, assassinations...Cuba had carried out The Unforgivable Revolution, a very serious threat of setting a "good example" in Latin America.
The saddest part of this is that the world will never know what kind of society Cuba could have produced if left alone, if not constantly under the gun and the threat of invasion, if allowed to relax its control at home. The idealism, the vision, the talent were all there. But we'll never know. And that of course was the idea.


Indonesia, 1965:
A complex series of events, involving a supposed coup attempt, a counter-coup, and perhaps a counter-counter-coup, with American fingerprints apparent at various points, resulted in the ouster from power of Sukarno and his replacement by a military coup led by General Suharto. The massacre that began immediately-of Communists, Communist sympathizers, suspected Communists, suspected Communist sympathizers, and none of the above-was called by the New York Times "one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history." The estimates of the number killed in the course of a few years begin at half a million and go above a million.
It was later learned that the U.S. embassy had compiled lists of "Communist" operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, as many as 5,000 names, and turned them over to the army, which then hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. "It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands," said one U.S. diplomat. "But that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment. "


Chile, 1964-73:
Salvador Allende was the worst possible scenario for a Washington imperialist. He could imagine only one thing worse than a Marxist in power-an elected Marxist in power, who honored the constitution, and became increasingly popular. This shook the very foundation stones on which the anti-Communist tower was built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population.
After sabotaging Allende's electoral endeavor in 1964, and failing to do so in 1970, despite their best efforts, the CIA and the rest of the American foreign policy machine left no stone unturned in their attempt to destabilize the Allende government over the next three years, paying particular attention to building up military hostility. Finally, in September 1973, the military overthrew the government, Allende dying in the process.
They closed the country to the outside world for a week, while the tanks rolled and the soldiers broke down doors; the stadiums rang with the sounds of execution and the bodies piled up along the streets and floated in the river; the torture centers opened for business; the subversive books were thrown into bonfires; soldiers slit the trouser legs of women, shouting that "In Chile women wear dresses!"; the poor returned to their natural state; and the men of the world in Washington and in the halls of international finance opened up their check- books. In the end, more than 3,000 had been executed, thousands more tortured or disappeared.


Greece, 1964-74:
The military coup took place in April 1967, just two days before the campaign for national elections was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected in February 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. The successful machinations to unseat him had begun immediately, a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, and the American military and CIA stationed in Greece. The 1967 coup was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a "Communist takeover." Corrupting and subversive influences in Greek life were to be removed. Among these were miniskirts, long hair, and foreign newspapers; church attendance for the young would be compulsory.
It was torture, however, which most indelibly marked the seven-year Greek nightmare. James Becket, an American attorney sent to Greece by Amnesty International, wrote in December 1969 that "a conservative estimate would place at not less than two thousand" the number of people tortured, usually in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States.
Becket reported the following: Hundreds of prisoners have listened to the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance: "You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans."
George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-Communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.


East Timor, 1975 to present:
In December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, which lies at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, and which had proclaimed its independence after Portugal had relinquished control of it. The invasion was launched the day after U. S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia after giving Suharto permission to use American arms, which, under U.S. Iaw, could not be used for aggression. Indonesia was Washington's most valuable tool in Southeast Asia.
Amnesty International estimated that by 1989, Indonesian troops, with the aim of forcibly annexing East Timor, had killed 200,000 people out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000. The United States consistently supported Indonesia's claim to East Timor (unlike the UN and the EU), and downplayed the slaughter to a remarkable degree, at the same time supplying Indonesia with all the military hardware and training it needed to carry out the job.


Nicaragua, 1978-89:
When the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1978, it was clear to Washington that they might well be that long-dreaded beast-"another Cuba." Under President Carter, attempts to sabotage the revolution took diplomatic and economic forms. Under Reagan, violence was the method of choice. For eight terribly long years, the people of Nicaragua were under attack by Washington's proxy army, the Contras, formed from Somoza's vicious National Guard and other supporters of the dictator. It was all-out war, aiming to destroy the progressive social and economic programs of the government, burning down schools and medical clinics, raping, torturing, mining harbors, bombing and strafing. These were Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters." There would be no revolution in Nicaragua.


Grenada, 1979-84:
What would drive the most powerful nation in the world to invade a country of 110,000? Maurice Bishop and his followers had taken power in a 1979 coup, and though their actual policies were not as revolutionary as Castro's, Washington was again driven by its fear of "another Cuba," particularly when public appearances by the Grenadian leaders in other countries of the region met with great enthusiasm.
U. S. destabilization tactics against the Bishop government began soon after the coup and continued until 1983, featuring numerous acts of disinformation and dirty tricks. The American invasion in October 1983 met minimal resistance, although the U.S. suffered 135 killed or wounded; there were also some 400 Grenadian casualties, and 84 Cubans, mainly construction workers.
At the end of 1984, a questionable election was held which was won by a man supported by the Reagan administration. One year later, the human rights organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, reported that Grenada's new U.S.-trained police force and counter-insurgency forces had acquired a reputation for brutality, arbitrary arrest, and abuse of authority, and were eroding civil rights.
In April 1989, the government issued a list of more than 80 books which were prohibited from being imported. Four months later, the prime minister suspended parliament to forestall a threatened no-confidence vote resulting from what his critics called "an increasingly authoritarian style."


Libya, 1981-89:
Libya refused to be a proper Middle East client state of Washington. Its leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, was uppity. He would have to be punished. U.S. planes shot down two Libyan planes in what Libya regarded as its air space. The U.S. also dropped bombs on the country, killing at least 40 people, including Qaddafi's daughter. There were other attempts to assassinate the man, operations to overthrow him, a major disinformation campaign, economic sanctions, and blaming Libya for being behind the Pan Am 103 bombing without any good evidence.


Panama, 1989:
Washington's bombers strike again. December 1989, a large tenement barrio in Panama City wiped out, 15,000 people left homeless. Counting several days of ground fighting against Panamanian forces, 500-something dead was the official body count, what the U.S. and the new U.S.-installed Panamanian government admitted to; other sources, with no less evidence, insisted that thousands had died; 3,000-something wounded. Twenty-three Americans dead, 324 wounded.
Question from reporter: "Was it really worth it to send people to their death for this? To get Noriega?"
George Bush: "Every human life is precious, and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it."
Manuel Noriega had been an American ally and informant for years until he outlived his usefulness. But getting him was not the only motive for the attack. Bush wanted to send a clear message to the people of Nicaragua, who had an election scheduled in two months, that this might be their fate if they reelected the Sandinistas. Bush also wanted to flex some military muscle to illustrate to Congress the need for a large combat-ready force even after the very recent dissolution of the "Soviet threat." The official explanation for the American ouster was Noriega's drug trafficking, which Washington had known about for years and had not been at all bothered by.


Iraq, 1990s:
Relentless bombing for more than 40 days and nights, against one of the most advanced nations in the Middle East, devastating its ancient and modern capital city; 177 million pounds of bombs falling on the people of Iraq, the most concentrated aerial onslaught in the history of the world; depleted uranium weapons incinerating people, causing cancer; blasting chemical and biological weapon storage and oil facilities; poisoning the atmosphere to a degree perhaps never matched anywhere; burying soldiers alive, deliberately; the infrastructure destroyed, with a terrible effect on health; sanctions continued to this day multiplying the health problems; perhaps a million children dead by now from all of these things, even more adults.
Iraq was the strongest military power among the Arab states. This may have been their crime. Noam Chomsky has written: "It's been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the United States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent, indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price."


Afghanistan, 1979-92:
Everyone knows of the unbelievable repression of women in Afghanistan, carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, even before the Taliban. But how many people know that during the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, Afghanistan had a government committed to bringing the incredibly backward nation into the 20th century, including giving women equal rights? What happened, however, is that the United States poured billions of dollars into waging a terrible war against this government, simply because it was supported by the Soviet Union. Prior to this, CIA operations had knowingly increased the probability of a Soviet intervention, which is what occurred. In the end, the United States won, and the women, and the rest of Afghanistan, lost. More than a million dead, three million disabled, five million refugees, in total about half the population.


El Salvador, 1980-92:
El Salvador's dissidents tried to work within the system. But with U.S. support, the government made that impossible, using repeated electoral fraud and murdering hundreds of protesters and strikers. In 1980, the dissidents took to the gun, and civil war.
Officially, the U.S. military presence in El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military and CIA personnel played a more active role on a continuous basis. About 20 Americans were killed or wounded in helicopter and plane crashes while flying reconnaissance or other missions over combat areas, and considerable evidence surfaced of a U.S. role in the ground fighting as well. The war came to an official end in 1992; 75,000 civilian deaths and the U.S. Treasury depleted by six billion dollars. Meaningful social change has been largely thwarted. A handful of the wealthy still own the country, the poor remain as ever, and dissidents still have to fear right-wing death squads.


Haiti, 1987-94:
The U.S. supported the Duvalier family dictatorship for 30 years, then opposed the reformist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Meanwhile, the CIA was working intimately with death squads, torturers, and drug traffickers. With this as background, the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend-because of all their rhetoric about "democracy"-that they supported Aristide's return to power in Haiti after he had been ousted in a 1991 military coup. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that he would not help the poor at the expense of the rich, and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving literally starvation wages.


Yugoslavia, 1999:
The United States is bombing the country back to a pre-industrial era. It would like the world to believe that its intervention is motivated only by "humanitarian" impulses. Perhaps the above history of U.S. interventions can help one decide how much weight to place on this claim.
***

I like to add.

Macedonia 2001: By order by Bush Junior the 51st US Battalion rescued 800 Terrorists who surrendered. With this act the War was extended for another 8 months through continued covert support through private armies like MPRI



Posted by Zarni

[George S.]

US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope:

US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:
* making the world safe for American corporations;
* enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;
* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;
* extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a "great power."
This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.

The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.

China, 1945-49:
Intervened in a civil war, taking the side of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communists, even though the latter had been a much closer ally of the United States in the world war. The U.S. used defeated Japanese soldiers to fight for its side. The Communists forced Chiang to flee to Taiwan in 1949.


Italy, 1947-48:
Using every trick in the book, the U.S. interfered in the elections to prevent the Communist Party from coming to power legally and fairly. This perversion of democracy was done in the name of "saving democracy" in Italy. The Communists lost. For the next few decades, the CIA, along with American corporations, continued to intervene in Italian elections, pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars and much psychological warfare to block the specter that was haunting Europe.


Greece, 1947-49:
Intervened in a civil war, taking the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left which had fought the Nazis courageously. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a new internal security agency, KYP. Before long, KYP was carrying out all the endearing practices of secret police everywhere, including systematic torture.


Philippines, 1945-53:
U.S. military fought against leftist forces (Huks) even while the Huks were still fighting against the Japanese invaders. After the war, the U. S. continued its fight against the Huks, defeating them, and then installing a series of puppets as president, culminating in the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos.


South Korea, 1945-53:
After World War II, the United States suppressed the popular progressive forces in favor of the conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. This led to a long era of corrupt, reactionary, and brutal governments.


Albania, 1949-53:
The U.S. and Britain tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the communist government and install a new one that would have been pro-Western and composed largely of monarchists and collaborators with Italian fascists and Nazis.


Germany, 1950s:
The CIA orchestrated a wide-ranging campaign of sabotage, terrorism, dirty tricks, and psychological warfare against East Germany. This was one of the factors which led to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.


Iran, 1953:
Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown in a joint U.S./British operation. Mossadegh had been elected to his position by a large majority of parliament, but he had made the fateful mistake of spearheading the movement to nationalize a British-owned oil company, the sole oil company operating in Iran. The coup restored the Shah to absolute power and began a period of 25 years of repression and torture, with the oil industry being restored to foreign ownership, as follows: Britain and the U.S., each 40 percent, other nations 20 percent.


Guatemala, 1953-1990s:
A CIA-organized coup overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of death-squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and unimaginable cruelty, totaling well over 100,000 victims -indisputably one of the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century. Arbenz had nationalized the U.S. firm, United Fruit Company, which had extremely close ties to the American power elite. As justification for the coup, Washington declared that Guatemala had been on the verge of a Soviet takeover, when in fact the Russians had so little interest in the country that it didn't even maintain diplomatic relations. The real problem in the eyes of Washington, in addition to United Fruit, was the danger of Guatemala's social democracy spreading to other countries in Latin America.


Middle East, 1956-58:
The Eisenhower Doctrine stated that the United States "is prepared to use armed forces to assist" any Middle East country "requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism." The English translation of this was that no one would be allowed to dominate, or have excessive influence over, the middle east and its oil fields except the United States, and that anyone who tried would be, by definition, "Communist." In keeping with this policy, the United States twice attempted to overthrow the Syrian government, staged several shows-of-force in the Mediterranean to intimidate movements opposed to U.S.-supported governments in Jordan and Lebanon, landed 14,000 troops in Lebanon, and conspired to overthrow or assassinate Nasser of Egypt and his troublesome middle-east nationalism.


Indonesia, 1957-58:
Sukarno, like Nasser, was the kind of Third World leader the United States could not abide. He took neutralism in the cold war seriously, making trips to the Soviet Union and China (though to the White House as well). He nationalized many private holdings of the Dutch, the former colonial power. He refused to crack down on the Indonesian Communist Party, which was walking the legal, peaceful road and making impressive gains electorally. Such policies could easily give other Third World leaders "wrong ideas." The CIA began throwing money into the elections, plotted Sukarno's assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war against the government. Sukarno survived it all.


British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64:
For 11 years, two of the oldest democracies in the world, Great Britain and the United States, went to great lengths to prevent a democratically elected leader from occupying his office. Cheddi Jagan was another Third World leader who tried to remain neutral and independent. He was elected three times. Although a leftist-more so than Sukarno or Arbenz-his policies in office were not revolutionary. But he was still a marked man, for he represented Washington's greatest fear: building a society that might be a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model. Using a wide variety of tactics-from general strikes and disinformation to terrorism and British legalisms, the U. S. and Britain finally forced Jagan out in 1964. John F. Kennedy had given a direct order for his ouster, as, presumably, had Eisenhower.
One of the better-off countries in the region under Jagan, Guyana, by the 1980s, was one of the poorest. Its principal export became people.


Vietnam, 1950-73:
The slippery slope began with siding with ~ French, the former colonizers and collaborators with the Japanese, against Ho Chi Minh and his followers who had worked closely with the Allied war effort and admired all things American. Ho Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of Communist. He had written numerous letters to President Truman and the State Department asking for America's help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French and finding a peaceful solution for his country. All his entreaties were ignored. Ho Chi Minh modeled the new Vietnamese declaration of independence on the American, beginning it with "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with ..." But this would count for nothing in Washington. Ho Chi Minh was some kind of Communist.
Twenty-three years and more than a million dead, later, the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam. Most people say that the U.S. lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, and poisoning the earth and the gene pool for generations, Washington had achieved its main purpose: preventing what might have been the rise of a good development option for Asia. Ho Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of communist.


Cambodia, 1955-73:
Prince Sihanouk was yet another leader who did not fancy being an American client. After many years of hostility towards his regime, including assassination plots and the infamous Nixon/Kissinger secret "carpet bombings" of 1969-70, Washington finally overthrew Sihanouk in a coup in 1970. This was all that was needed to impel Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces to enter the fray. Five years later, they took power. But five years of American bombing had caused Cambodia's traditional economy to vanish. The old Cambodia had been destroyed forever.
Incredibly, the Khmer Rouge were to inflict even greater misery on this unhappy land. To add to the irony, the United States supported Pol Pot, militarily and diplomatically, after their subsequent defeat by the Vietnamese.


The Congo/Zaire, 1960-65:
In June 1960, Patrice Lumumba became the Congo's first prime minister after independence from Belgium. But Belgium retained its vast mineral wealth in Katanga province, prominent Eisenhower administration officials had financial ties to the same wealth, and Lumumba, at Independence Day ceremonies before a host of foreign dignitaries, called for the nation's economic as well as its political liberation, and recounted a list of injustices against the natives by the white owners of the country. The man was obviously a "Communist." The poor man was obviously doomed.
Eleven days later, Katanga province seceded, in September, Lumumba was dismissed by the president at the instigation of the United States, and in January 1961 he was assassinated at the express request of Dwight Eisenhower. There followed several years of civil conflict and chaos and the rise to power of Mobutu Sese Seko, a man not a stranger to the CIA. Mobutu went on to rule the country for more than 30 years, with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers. The Zairian people lived in abject poverty despite the plentiful natural wealth, while Mobutu became a multibillionaire.


Brazil, 1961-64:
President Joao Goulart was guilty of the usual crimes: He took an independent stand in foreign policy, resuming relations with socialist countries and opposing sanctions against Cuba; his administration passed a law limiting the amount of profits multinationals could transmit outside the country; a subsidiary of ITT was nationalized; he promoted economic and social reforms. And Attorney-General Robert Kennedy was uneasy about Goulart allowing "communists" to hold positions in government agencies. Yet the man was no radical. He was a millionaire land-owner and a Catholic who wore a medal of the Virgin around his neck. That, however, was not enough to save him. In 1964, he was overthrown in a military coup which had deep, covert American involvement. The official Washington line was...yes, it's unfortunate that democracy has been overthrown in Brazil...but, still, the country has been saved from communism.
For the next 15 years, all the features of military dictatorship that Latin America has come to know were instituted: Congress was shut down, political opposition was reduced to virtual extinction, habeas corpus for "political crimes" was suspended, criticism of the president was forbidden by law, labor unions were taken over by government interveners, mounting protests were met by police and military firing into crowds, peasants' homes were burned down, priests were brutalized...disappearances, death squads, a remarkable degree and depravity of torture...the government had a name for its program: the "moral rehabilitation" of Brazil.
Washington was very pleased. Brazil broke relations with Cuba and became one of the United States' most reliable allies in Latin America.


Dominican Republic, 1963-66:
In February 1963, Juan Bosch took office as the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic since 1924. Here at last was John F. Kennedy's liberal anti-Communist, to counter the charge that the U.S. supported only military dictatorships. Bosch's government was to be the long sought " showcase of democracy " that would put the lie to Fidel Castro. He was given the grand treatment in Washington shortly before he took office.
Bosch was true to his beliefs. He called for land reform, low-rent housing, modest nationalization of business, and foreign investment provided it was not excessively exploitative of the country and other policies making up the program of any liberal Third World leader serious about social change. He was likewise serious about civil liberties: Communists, or those labeled as such, were not to be persecuted unless they actually violated the law.
A number of American officials and congress people expressed their discomfort with Bosch's plans, as well as his stance of independence from the United States. Land reform and nationalization are always touchy issues in Washington, the stuff that "creeping socialism" is made of. In several quarters of the U.S. press Bosch was red-baited.
In September, the military boots marched. Bosch was out. The United States, which could discourage a military coup in Latin America with a frown, did nothing.
Nineteen months later, a revolt broke out which promised to put the exiled Bosch back into power. The United States sent 23,000 troops to help crush it.


Cuba, 1959 to present:
Fidel Castro came to power at the beginning of 1959. A U.S. National Security Council meeting of March 10, 1959 included on its agenda the feasibility of bringing "another government to power in Cuba." There followed 40 years of terrorist attacks, bombings, full-scale military invasion, sanctions, embargoes, isolation, assassinations...Cuba had carried out The Unforgivable Revolution, a very serious threat of setting a "good example" in Latin America.
The saddest part of this is that the world will never know what kind of society Cuba could have produced if left alone, if not constantly under the gun and the threat of invasion, if allowed to relax its control at home. The idealism, the vision, the talent were all there. But we'll never know. And that of course was the idea.


Indonesia, 1965:
A complex series of events, involving a supposed coup attempt, a counter-coup, and perhaps a counter-counter-coup, with American fingerprints apparent at various points, resulted in the ouster from power of Sukarno and his replacement by a military coup led by General Suharto. The massacre that began immediately-of Communists, Communist sympathizers, suspected Communists, suspected Communist sympathizers, and none of the above-was called by the New York Times "one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history." The estimates of the number killed in the course of a few years begin at half a million and go above a million.
It was later learned that the U.S. embassy had compiled lists of "Communist" operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, as many as 5,000 names, and turned them over to the army, which then hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. "It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands," said one U.S. diplomat. "But that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment. "


Chile, 1964-73:
Salvador Allende was the worst possible scenario for a Washington imperialist. He could imagine only one thing worse than a Marxist in power-an elected Marxist in power, who honored the constitution, and became increasingly popular. This shook the very foundation stones on which the anti-Communist tower was built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population.
After sabotaging Allende's electoral endeavor in 1964, and failing to do so in 1970, despite their best efforts, the CIA and the rest of the American foreign policy machine left no stone unturned in their attempt to destabilize the Allende government over the next three years, paying particular attention to building up military hostility. Finally, in September 1973, the military overthrew the government, Allende dying in the process.
They closed the country to the outside world for a week, while the tanks rolled and the soldiers broke down doors; the stadiums rang with the sounds of execution and the bodies piled up along the streets and floated in the river; the torture centers opened for business; the subversive books were thrown into bonfires; soldiers slit the trouser legs of women, shouting that "In Chile women wear dresses!"; the poor returned to their natural state; and the men of the world in Washington and in the halls of international finance opened up their check- books. In the end, more than 3,000 had been executed, thousands more tortured or disappeared.


Greece, 1964-74:
The military coup took place in April 1967, just two days before the campaign for national elections was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected in February 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. The successful machinations to unseat him had begun immediately, a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, and the American military and CIA stationed in Greece. The 1967 coup was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a "Communist takeover." Corrupting and subversive influences in Greek life were to be removed. Among these were miniskirts, long hair, and foreign newspapers; church attendance for the young would be compulsory.
It was torture, however, which most indelibly marked the seven-year Greek nightmare. James Becket, an American attorney sent to Greece by Amnesty International, wrote in December 1969 that "a conservative estimate would place at not less than two thousand" the number of people tortured, usually in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States.
Becket reported the following: Hundreds of prisoners have listened to the little speech given by Inspector Basil Lambrou, who sits behind his desk which displays the red, white, and blue clasped-hand symbol of American aid. He tries to show the prisoner the absolute futility of resistance: "You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we? Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans."
George Papandreou was not any kind of radical. He was a liberal anti-Communist type. But his son Andreas, the heir-apparent, while only a little to the left of his father had not disguised his wish to take Greece out of the Cold War, and had questioned remaining in NATO, or at least as a satellite of the United States.


East Timor, 1975 to present:
In December 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, which lies at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago, and which had proclaimed its independence after Portugal had relinquished control of it. The invasion was launched the day after U. S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia after giving Suharto permission to use American arms, which, under U.S. Iaw, could not be used for aggression. Indonesia was Washington's most valuable tool in Southeast Asia.
Amnesty International estimated that by 1989, Indonesian troops, with the aim of forcibly annexing East Timor, had killed 200,000 people out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000. The United States consistently supported Indonesia's claim to East Timor (unlike the UN and the EU), and downplayed the slaughter to a remarkable degree, at the same time supplying Indonesia with all the military hardware and training it needed to carry out the job.


Nicaragua, 1978-89:
When the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1978, it was clear to Washington that they might well be that long-dreaded beast-"another Cuba." Under President Carter, attempts to sabotage the revolution took diplomatic and economic forms. Under Reagan, violence was the method of choice. For eight terribly long years, the people of Nicaragua were under attack by Washington's proxy army, the Contras, formed from Somoza's vicious National Guard and other supporters of the dictator. It was all-out war, aiming to destroy the progressive social and economic programs of the government, burning down schools and medical clinics, raping, torturing, mining harbors, bombing and strafing. These were Ronald Reagan's "freedom fighters." There would be no revolution in Nicaragua.


Grenada, 1979-84:
What would drive the most powerful nation in the world to invade a country of 110,000? Maurice Bishop and his followers had taken power in a 1979 coup, and though their actual policies were not as revolutionary as Castro's, Washington was again driven by its fear of "another Cuba," particularly when public appearances by the Grenadian leaders in other countries of the region met with great enthusiasm.
U. S. destabilization tactics against the Bishop government began soon after the coup and continued until 1983, featuring numerous acts of disinformation and dirty tricks. The American invasion in October 1983 met minimal resistance, although the U.S. suffered 135 killed or wounded; there were also some 400 Grenadian casualties, and 84 Cubans, mainly construction workers.
At the end of 1984, a questionable election was held which was won by a man supported by the Reagan administration. One year later, the human rights organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs, reported that Grenada's new U.S.-trained police force and counter-insurgency forces had acquired a reputation for brutality, arbitrary arrest, and abuse of authority, and were eroding civil rights.
In April 1989, the government issued a list of more than 80 books which were prohibited from being imported. Four months later, the prime minister suspended parliament to forestall a threatened no-confidence vote resulting from what his critics called "an increasingly authoritarian style."


Libya, 1981-89:
Libya refused to be a proper Middle East client state of Washington. Its leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, was uppity. He would have to be punished. U.S. planes shot down two Libyan planes in what Libya regarded as its air space. The U.S. also dropped bombs on the country, killing at least 40 people, including Qaddafi's daughter. There were other attempts to assassinate the man, operations to overthrow him, a major disinformation campaign, economic sanctions, and blaming Libya for being behind the Pan Am 103 bombing without any good evidence.


Panama, 1989:
Washington's bombers strike again. December 1989, a large tenement barrio in Panama City wiped out, 15,000 people left homeless. Counting several days of ground fighting against Panamanian forces, 500-something dead was the official body count, what the U.S. and the new U.S.-installed Panamanian government admitted to; other sources, with no less evidence, insisted that thousands had died; 3,000-something wounded. Twenty-three Americans dead, 324 wounded.
Question from reporter: "Was it really worth it to send people to their death for this? To get Noriega?"
George Bush: "Every human life is precious, and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it."
Manuel Noriega had been an American ally and informant for years until he outlived his usefulness. But getting him was not the only motive for the attack. Bush wanted to send a clear message to the people of Nicaragua, who had an election scheduled in two months, that this might be their fate if they reelected the Sandinistas. Bush also wanted to flex some military muscle to illustrate to Congress the need for a large combat-ready force even after the very recent dissolution of the "Soviet threat." The official explanation for the American ouster was Noriega's drug trafficking, which Washington had known about for years and had not been at all bothered by.


Iraq, 1990s:
Relentless bombing for more than 40 days and nights, against one of the most advanced nations in the Middle East, devastating its ancient and modern capital city; 177 million pounds of bombs falling on the people of Iraq, the most concentrated aerial onslaught in the history of the world; depleted uranium weapons incinerating people, causing cancer; blasting chemical and biological weapon storage and oil facilities; poisoning the atmosphere to a degree perhaps never matched anywhere; burying soldiers alive, deliberately; the infrastructure destroyed, with a terrible effect on health; sanctions continued to this day multiplying the health problems; perhaps a million children dead by now from all of these things, even more adults.
Iraq was the strongest military power among the Arab states. This may have been their crime. Noam Chomsky has written: "It's been a leading, driving doctrine of U.S. foreign policy since the 1940s that the vast and unparalleled energy resources of the Gulf region will be effectively dominated by the United States and its clients, and, crucially, that no independent, indigenous force will be permitted to have a substantial influence on the administration of oil production and price."


Afghanistan, 1979-92:
Everyone knows of the unbelievable repression of women in Afghanistan, carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, even before the Taliban. But how many people know that during the late 1970s and most of the 1980s, Afghanistan had a government committed to bringing the incredibly backward nation into the 20th century, including giving women equal rights? What happened, however, is that the United States poured billions of dollars into waging a terrible war against this government, simply because it was supported by the Soviet Union. Prior to this, CIA operations had knowingly increased the probability of a Soviet intervention, which is what occurred. In the end, the United States won, and the women, and the rest of Afghanistan, lost. More than a million dead, three million disabled, five million refugees, in total about half the population.


El Salvador, 1980-92:
El Salvador's dissidents tried to work within the system. But with U.S. support, the government made that impossible, using repeated electoral fraud and murdering hundreds of protesters and strikers. In 1980, the dissidents took to the gun, and civil war.
Officially, the U.S. military presence in El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military and CIA personnel played a more active role on a continuous basis. About 20 Americans were killed or wounded in helicopter and plane crashes while flying reconnaissance or other missions over combat areas, and considerable evidence surfaced of a U.S. role in the ground fighting as well. The war came to an official end in 1992; 75,000 civilian deaths and the U.S. Treasury depleted by six billion dollars. Meaningful social change has been largely thwarted. A handful of the wealthy still own the country, the poor remain as ever, and dissidents still have to fear right-wing death squads.


Haiti, 1987-94:
The U.S. supported the Duvalier family dictatorship for 30 years, then opposed the reformist priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Meanwhile, the CIA was working intimately with death squads, torturers, and drug traffickers. With this as background, the Clinton White House found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend-because of all their rhetoric about "democracy"-that they supported Aristide's return to power in Haiti after he had been ousted in a 1991 military coup. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that he would not help the poor at the expense of the rich, and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving literally starvation wages.


Yugoslavia, 1999:
The United States is bombing the country back to a pre-industrial era. It would like the world to believe that its intervention is motivated only by "humanitarian" impulses. Perhaps the above history of U.S. interventions can help one decide how much weight to place on this claim.
***

I like to add.

Macedonia 2001: By order by Bush Junior the 51st US Battalion rescued 800 Terrorists who surrendered. With this act the War was extended for another 8 months through continued covert support through private armies like MPRI



Posted by Zarni

[George S.]

Dragi Risto!

For your information, here is the link to my latest paper:

http://aklyosov.home.comcast.net/~aklyosov/5-2%202012.pdf

pp. 38-94

With best wishes,
A. Perdih



Dragi Risto,

Here is some additional information:


A hard copy of the issue with the paper below is available at

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/proceedings-of-the-academy-of-dna-genealogy-2012-february-vol-5-no-2/18900048

Lep pozdrav,
Tone

[George S.]

George M.



Hi George,



Just wanted to let you know that Alexander the Great's body sat for years in the soma or tomb in Alexandria and we know this to be true because of many historical accounts. The soma may have been destroyed around 265ad by an earthquake and tsunami. The body however was publicly seen around 391- 2 AD and then disappeared but around the same time the remains of St. Mark appeared and apparently over the old soma they built the St. Mark's Church. Around 827AD two Venetian sailors (this is a historical fact) stole the remains of St. Mark from the church in Alexandria and brought them back to Venice but in order to get the remains out of Alexandria since Egypt had become Muslim by that time, they covered the remains of St. Mark with pig meat since this would turn off the muslims; the Venetians were afraid that the smell of the mummified body would arouse suspicion. The remains of St. Mark made it back to Venice and went to one Church which as destroyed I think by fire and then the remains were taken to the present San Marco church in Venice. 200 years ago because of the flooding, they moved the remains up to the upper alter from the crypt in the basement; we know that there is a skull and various body parts. The thinking is that we know that Alexander was mummified with embalming spice which must have stank but St. Mark who I believe was martyred in 167ad or there abouts, was burned at the stake. There is a theory that the remains in San Marco's church are those of Alexander however, even if they are not and are in fact those of St. Mark, because of the flooding and other possible problems, the remains should be conserved and perhaps should be allowed a full archeological forensic investigation. Of course if the carbon 14 says anything other than 167ad we can assume that it is not St. Mark. There are also facial reconstruction of the skull which would be very accurate to the way the person looked, the wounds if any on the body; we know of 17 wounds that Alexander had, the teeth can be examined since they can show the place where the person lived, also dna, and also an investigation of the stomach content etc. We were in San Marco in 2010, it could have been the closest that any of my family has been to Alexander since the old days...you know... when we had the world by the balls.

Have a nice day.

Mike



PS. they found a sculptural relief in the foundations of the church which showed a Macedonian sun and weapons.