Risto Stefov - Articles, Translations & Collaborations

[George S.]

From the Once Classified Files - Part 5

Here is Balkan States – Report 5

Balkan States – Report 5
May 17th, 1945

Mr. Stevenson to Mr. Eden
Belgrade, 13th April, 1945.

(No. 74.)

Sir,

I HAVE the honour to transmit to you herewith an interesting and useful memorandum on the partisan movement in Macedonia and its opponents, by Mr. Stephen Clissold, press secretary at this embassy.

I am sending copies of this -dispatch to the Resident Minister, Central Mediterranean. His Majesty's Ambassador at Athens and His Majesty's Political Representative at Sofia.

I have, &c. R. C. SKRINE STEVENSON.

Enclosure

The Partisan movement in Macedonia and its Opponents

MACEDONIA bas always presented one of the most complex and confusing issues in Balkan politics, and it cannot be said that recent events there have done much to clarify it.

The Yugoslav partisans claim somewhat naively that the problem has been finally “solved” by granting Macedonia the status of one of the federal units of the Yugoslav State. Apart from the highly controversial international implications of this “so1ution,” as far as Bulgaria and Greece are concerned, its acceptance within Macedonia itself has not been so unanimously approved as the partisans would have us believe. They have had to meet formidable opposition from two sides; from the exponents of the old centralist thesis that Macedonia is but an extension of Serbia and should be given no regional autonomy whatever, and from the separatists who claim that Macedonia should be given the status of an entirely independent State. It is in the light of these two opposing schools of thought that the development of the partisan movement in Macedonia may best be reviewed.

Annexation by Bulgaria

It is generally admitted that the entry of Bulgarian troops into Macedonia was welcomed by the mass of the population as a prelude to national liberation. Official Yugoslavia had denied the existence of a Macedonian people and had regarded the inhabitants of “South Serbia” as Serbs corrupted by Bulgar influence. A strict policy of Serbianisation and centralism had therefore been pursued. Serbian co1onists were settled on the land and Serbian officials- often or a very inferior grade- sent to administer the province. What the Macedonians regarded with perhaps, pardonable exaggeration as their national culture was ruthlessly harried by the Serbs as an expression of Bulgarian irredentist propaganda. It is scarcely surprising that the sudden collapse of this unpopular regime should have been hailed as the dawn of a new era.

Disillusionment soon followed, as it become clear that Bulgaria cared as little as the Serbs for the national aspirations of the Macedonians. For the centralists of Belgrade there was substituted that of Sofia. But the false hopes with which the Macedonians had started, continued to colour their outlook for some time to come, and rendered the growth of the partisan movement there of peculiar difficulty. Macedonia, it was felt, had already been “liberated” by the Bulgarians; how then, could the insurrectionary movement sweeping over Serbia bring national liberation to them! If the Macedonians grew discontented under Bulgar rule, they sought to better their lot by a struggle for social, not national, resistance. The first Macedonian Insurgents formed themselves into units which they called National Detachments, not National Liberation Detachments, as elsewhere in Yugoslavia. They formed their committees, too, but these were National Committees, not National Liberation Committees. When they chalked up their slogans on the walls of the houses in Skopje and Bitolj, one would see not the customary “Death to the Invader,” but more often “down with the Filov Government.”

The Beginning of Resistance

The resistance movement in Macedonia threatened therefore to develop along entirely different lines from the rest of Yugoslavia. The first and most vital campaign which the partisans had to win was the conversion of all resistance elements to their own programme. They had to ensure that it should be a Yugoslav and not an exclusively Macedonian resistance movement. It must be made to conform to central directives and give full recognition to the authority of Tito and the Partisan Supreme Staff. This issue was fought out until August 1943, and it was only when the capitulation of Italy brought a fresh accession of strength to the partisans that Tito's line found general acceptance. Even so, the old separatist and pro-Bulgar trends continued - and still continue to- day- to trouble the consolidation of the movement.

The first phase of partisan activity in Macedonia - from the summer of 1941 to August 1943-was largely conspiratorial. Detachments were formed, but they lacked the cohesion of a common aim and leadership, and were mostly soon dispersed. Communist influence had always been considerable in Macedonia, especially amongst the workers and intelligentsia, and here, as elsewhere, the Communists took the lead in building up the underground organization. A partisan headquarters was formed consisting of Mihailo Apostolski, a major – in the old Yugoslav army, Lazar Kulisevski, secretary of the Macedonian Communist party, Straso Pindur, Mirce Acev and others. (The latter two have since been killed; Apstolski is now a lieutenant-general and until recently commander-in-chief for Macedonia; Kulisevski is President of the Macedonian Government.)

Military and Political Consolidation

By the autumn of 1943; partisan activity had reached a more serious scale. The partisan detachments assumed the designation (if not the reality) of a regular army-the Army of National Liberation-and nationalists could boast that Macedonia now had the first army of its own since the days of the Tsar Samuel. Public confidence began to grow. The partisans now no longer drew their recruits almost entirely from the ranks of the intelligentsia and workers; the peasants, too, began to take up arms. Non-Communist politicians like Andonov-Cento began to identify themselves with the movement. The first towns (Debar, Tetovo) were liberated, and partisan patrols could steal through the streets of Skopje and Prilep without fear o being denounced by a hostile population.

In the autumn of 1942 Tito had sent his personal delegate Tempo (Svetozar Vukmanovic) to direct the organization of the movement, and during 1943 he established close relations both with the Albanian F.N.C. and with Greek E.A.M./E.L.A.S. (see Bari dispatch No.62 to the Foreign Office and 64 to Caserta of the 16th July, 1944). At the end of the year the second Macedonian Brigade was formed on Greek soil. It was composed of the Pindzur Battalion and the Kristov Batev Battalion of deserters from the Bulgar army under the command of Dico Petrov.

Tile Opposition –Cetniks

Cetnik opposition was mainly confined to the towns and does not seem to have been a serious factor. The anti-Serb feelings of the Macedonian population naturally prevented the Cetniks from obtaining any great measure of popular support. Their plan was not to offer open resistance to the Bulgar authorities but to build up a secret administration to take over from them on the day of their ultimate withdrawal. A group of Cetniks was arrested in Skopje by the Bulgar police in 1942, made little secret of their intentions in court and were subsequently released. The titular head of such armed Cetniks who did resist was Vojo Trbic, son of a wealthy landowner from Prilep, and Mihailovic's personal representative for Macedonia, and Krstic, who commanded a group of Cetniks in E. Macedonia until they were finally liquidated by the partisans in the Koxjak hills in the spring of 1944.

The Pro-Bulgars

A far more serious and persistent problem was provided by the existence of the various pro-Bulgar groups. A vigorous propaganda was carried on among the Macedonian émigrés in Bulgaria by Dr. Stanisevci, Danail Krapcevci and other leaders to induce them to return to their "liberated" homeland. The usual bribes were held out-land confiscated from evicted Serbian tenants, good posts in the Civil Service, &c. To counter the growing popularity of the partisans, the Bulgars even began sponsoring, a rival movement of Macedonian extremists to demand autonomy, or even a greater Macedonia, including Salonica. The former I.M.R.O. terrorist leader, Ivan (“Vanco”) Mihailovic had been living in Zagreb since April 1941 under the protection of his friend Pavelic. He had, however, his henchmen in Macedonia - Ckatrov, Kiril Drangov and others, who readily lent themselves to these Bulgar-inspired plans. In September 1944 he himself visited Skoplje, under German auspices, to assess the possibilities of enlisting support for a Greater Macedonia under his control (see Belgrade dispatch No.45). It was, however, too late. The partisans had stolen his thunder and summoned their anti-fascist Sobranje for the National Liberation of Macedonia (A.S.N.O.M.) at the beginning of August. Macedonia was to be a federal State enjoying full autonomy within the frame work of the New Yugoslavia.

The Experiment of Home-Rule

The first A.S.N.O.M. was elected at Bitolj on the 2nd August; it was superseded on the 20th December by a second A.S.N.O.M. held at Skoplje, which was in turn developed into a full Government at the third session of A.S.N.O.M. in April 1945.

It soon became apparent that the old opponents of the partisans' Macedonian policy- the Serb Centralists and the Macedonian Separatists-had by no means been subdued by the partisans' success. The Centralists, forced to abandon their former posts in Macedonia, have been obliged to confine their activity to expressions of impotent disapproval from Serbia and have been frequently denounced in the partisan press. The Separatists, on the other hand, have been far more active and dangerous. A.S.N:O.M. itself was permeated with them, and Marshal Tito found it expedient to send his right-hand man, Edward Kardelj, to attend the second session of A.S.N.O.M. and issue a strongly worded warning against the dangers of becoming giddy with success and harboring separatist and irredentist tendencies. These warnings have been repeated on subsequent occasions by such authoritative spokesmen all Cuckov, Minister for Macedonia in the Yugoslav Federal Government, and Kulisevski, now head of the Macedonian Government.

The prevailing mood of over-confident nationalism resulting from the expulsion of the Bulgar and German forces of occupation has found expression in many ways. Attempts have been made to close the frontiers to Serbs wishing to enter Macedonia, and the Federal Government in Belgrade was forced to issue a sharp reminder that every Yugoslav subject has the right of access to any of the federal units, regardless of his national origin. To bring the lesson home, a Serb doctor, resident for many years in Macedonia, has been included as Minister of Public Health in Kulisevski's Government. In Church matters too, a marked tendency can be discerned to break away from Serbian influence. The exact position in this respect is not yet altogether clear, but a start has already been made with the holding of a congress of Serb Orthodox priests in Skoplje as a preliminary to the establishment of an autonomous Macedonian Church to be associated with the Serb Orthodox Church in some sort of ecclesiastical federation.

Irredentist ambitions in respect of Greek and Bulgarian Macedonia have increased in proportion with the desire to loosen the ties binding Macedonia to Serbia. As early as November 1944 a Greek Macedonian Brigade had been, formed under Yugoslav auspices in Bitolj and this was followed a few weeks later by the setting up of a commission "to direct the struggle of the Macedonians in Greece." Finally, matters came to a head when certain Yugoslav units in Bitolj demonstrated their preference to fight for the expulsion of the Greeks from Salonica rather then that of the Germans from Yugoslavia.

The reaction of the Yugoslav federal authorities to all these manifestations of irredentism and separation has been vigorous. Whatever the ultimate desires of Marshal Tito and his advisers may be - and there are some grounds for thinking that they do envisage an eventual Great Macedonia, possibly comprising one State member of a Balkan federation - they are at present bent upon steering a middle course between the Scylla of separation and Charybdis of centralism. The extent to which they have succeeded in establishing their authority over the more impetuous elements is not easy to determine. It would seem that they still have a long way to go before those tendencies towards separatism and dependence upon Bulgaria, which have so handicapped their movement in the past, are finally eradicated.

[George S.]

Where did we lose our country? – Open Organizations

Where did we lose our country? – Open Organizations



By Risto Stefov

[email protected]

March 20, 2011



Another factor that has contributed to losing our country to our neighbours is our inability to organize ourselves well because of the constant interference from our enemies.



A Frenchman once serving in Macedonia declared that if he had enough gold pieces he would be able to turn every living Macedonian into a Frenchman!



What does that really tell us?



In economic terms it says that “if anyone is willing to pay good money to purchase something, whatever that something might be, someone will sell it to them”. It works well with commodities in a free market economy, why shouldn’t it work well with peoples’ national identities? After all haven’t we been giving ourselves freely to the countries in which we decide to make our new homes? Think about it! How many Macedonians over the years have been assimilated into countries like Canada, the USA and Australia alone?



This trait (or treachery?) however, I am happy to say, is not “exclusive” to Macedonians because if there are “buyers” in the world looking to purchase “identities” then a lot of people will “sell” their identities for money or for better lives.



In fact to prove that this “idea” is not exclusive to Macedonians, I tested it in Toronto and more than half of the non-Macedonian people I asked said they would sign a paper declaring themselves Macedonians if I paid them enough money. When I asked if they felt that signing such a paper would make them traitors to their own identity, many said no! People are who they are and if I or some other foolish person thinks they can “pay” someone to “change” their identity, so be it!



It seems though that there is something different about the Macedonians! It seems that there have always been buyers ready to purchase Macedonians and turn them into Greeks, Serbians, Bulgarians and Albanians; a process that exists to this day.



Ever since Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian influence infiltrated Macedonia in the late 1800’s, the identity of the Macedonian people had been contested. Everyone it seems wanted them to be something else. All three countries (Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria) were on a mission to turn the “same” Macedonians into “Greeks”, “Serbians”, or “Bulgarians” all at the same time.



Imagine how foolish that might have seemed to the “uneducated” Macedonian peasants when they were “offered” money, real money, by educated and cultured people no less, to put an “x” on a piece of paper that they could not read and were given an explanation that made “no sense” to them?



Many Macedonians did sign such pieces of paper, including all the revolutionary leaders who belonged to the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (MRO) and who worked for the Exarchate schools. Everyone, including Gotse Delchev, who wanted to work for the Exarchate (Bulgarian sponsored) schools had to sign a piece of paper declaring themselves “Bulgarian” in order to be given the job.



Macedonians who signed such documents were then declared and counted by our enemies as “Greeks”, “Serbians”, or “Bulgarians”!



All these revolutionaries are dead and gone now but the pieces of paper they signed still remain and are displayed in archives, museums and on the internet. Pieces of paper which the Bulgarians and Greeks would use over and over again to remind us that our forefathers were “Bulgarian” and also to discredit them for everything they fought for and spilled their blood to accomplish.



Many Macedonians declared themselves “Greek”, “Serbian” and “Bulgarian” because such declarations gave them job opportunities and freedom to move around, which they otherwise could not have. There are Macedonians even today who sign pieces of paper declaring themselves “Bulgarian” for similar opportunities! If such offers are made, people will take them!



Unfortunately “buying” peoples’ identities, as our enemies quickly discovered, did not automatically buy them “loyalty”. Even though a “piece of paper” said they were “Bulgarians”, they still fought against the Bulgarians for the Macedonian cause.



Not being able to trust them, these so-called “Bulgarians” had to be placed under constant watch and their activities monitored; particularly those of the MRO activists who were plotting against the Bulgarians.



Plotting as individuals was one thing, but for any major undertaking to take place, like an uprising or a liberation movement, Macedonians needed to be organized. For that, Macedonians needed to form their own organizations: organizations which the enemy “could not trust” and had a need to monitor.



If there was such a need then there also must have been a lot of money to be spent on spy activities, thus creating new “job opportunities” for people. These spies however had to operate in strict secrecy and needed to be part of the “organization’s community” so that they would not be suspected and could not easily be detected.



I have often had arguments with people about this, people who maintained that there were “too many traitors” among the Macedonians. My point here is that “if there is demand there will always be supply”. In other words, the same would be true in any society if “big money” is spent for “spy activities”. So let us not put all the blame on the Macedonians. The Macedonians are not the ones creating the demands here!



There is a joke circulating that 56% of Greeks today work for the Greek government. So, what could they all possibly be doing? Some say “one in six is a spy, paid for to spy on their neighbours”! I don’t know if this is true but I do know that our enemies spend “big money” to spy on us, which could create “incentives” for our people to become spies!



So if there is a need for “information” particularly from organizations that are deemed “harmful” to the interests of our enemies then you can be certain that these organizations are full of spies. And this has been the case with open Macedonian organizations from the old revolutionary days to today. This is also true for Macedonian organizations operating outside of geographic Macedonia, including Canada, the USA and Australia.



When Macedonians began to flee their homeland and permanently settle in Canada, the USA, Australia and other places, after the 1903 Uprising, they tended to settle in clusters. To help each other economically and socially they formed social clubs and cultural organizations. Organized they were better prepared to help their community as well as raise money for charity and other causes.



Since there was no “country” Macedonia under which to “group themselves” at a national level, most early organizations clustered around village associations. Then as these benevolent and benefit village associations matured they began to offer religious, social and cultural programs promoting the Macedonian culture. Of course this was detrimental to those who were promoting the idea that “Macedonians do not exist”, so such organizations were attacked with ferocity and in many cases, rendered impotent.



Many such organizations also survived but most were literally infiltrated and destroyed. One such Macedonian village organization to be destroyed by our enemies in Toronto, Canada was the powerful “Zhelevo” Association.



“THE RELIEF FRATERNITY OF “ZHELEVO”, an organization belonging to the people originally from Zhelevo, a village near Lerin, [Greek occupied Macedonia], was established in 1907, whereas later a “Zhelevo” charitable fraternity was established on October 1st, 1921. Zhelevo developed a wide range of activities among which in 1928 initiated the construction of the well known “Zhelevski dom” (Zhelevo Hall). In 1929 it founded the “Rodina” youth society. After being closed, the Zhelevo Hall was again opened in 1946.



On August 26, 1946 the Association purchased land to build a number of building which officially opened on July 10, 1948. On the land included were weekend house lots, golf terrains, and other properties. Zhelevo even participated in the planning and construction of the Macedonian Orthodox Church of St. Clement of Ohrid in Toronto.” (THE MACEDONIANS IN USA AND CANADA (HISTORICAL VIEW), By Slave Nikolovski – Katin, [email protected] MACEDONIAN VILLAGE AND REGIONAL SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FRATERNITIES AND SPORTS ASSOCIATIONS)



Like all other Macedonian village organizations that fell prey to our enemies, the Zhelevo organization, seen as a threat to Greek interests, was infiltrated by Macedonians who, unbeknownst to the patriotic Macedonians, worked for the Greek cause and rendered the organization useless.



Tens of organizations were lost in this way including several churches built by Macedonians, which eventually ended up in Greek and Bulgarian hands.



A man once told me that when he was a boy he was chased out of one of these churches by the Bulgarian priest who threw stones at him because he told the priest he was Macedonian.



Even today our Macedonian organizations, including the ones in the Diaspora, are continuously being monitored by our enemies to determine if the organizations are a threat. Our enemies monitor our activities as well as how much money we raise. If they deem that the organization is becoming a threat, they intervene through their Macedonian sleeper agents. Most of the organizations destroyed in this way in the past began with small disagreements between members in the managing committees regarding donations, invitation of guests, or just simply disagreements on varying opinions. When personalities begin to “clash” the committees become dysfunctional and the organization becomes impotent and eventually dies.



Some Macedonian organizations, after being infiltrated by enemy agents, continue to function but are made harmless to the interests of our enemies. These organizations however still raise money from the Macedonian community but now that money is used against the Macedonian cause instead of for it.



There are also “false” Macedonian organizations created by our enemies which pretend to work for the Macedonian cause, but in reality they work against it. These organizations started by our enemies can be very vocal, sympathetic and patriotic but their aim is to divide the Macedonian people and take money away from the Macedonian cause and invest it in anti-Macedonian activities.



In this way our money is being collected by our enemies and used against us! So it is imperative that you know and verify exactly where your hard earned money goes before you make a donation. It could be money that is not only lost but money that can be used to work against you.



Organizations such as these are also created to prevent the Macedonian people from uniting. The more organizations there are, that supposedly serve similar or the same functions, the more divided people become and they are less likely to unite or to maximize their strength and resources.



Pretending that they are working for the Macedonian cause, such organizations can also serve as “steam valves” releasing pressure by giving the Macedonian people the impression that “things are being taken care of”.



This treachery is nothing new; it has been this way since the old revolutionary days. The greatest impact our enemies have had on Macedonian organizations was during the planning stages of the 1903 Ilinden Uprising when almost the entire MRO leadership was jailed by the Ottomans and replaced by Bulgarian agents.



Aside from our enemies betraying our MRO leaders to the Ottomans, the Bulgarians, soon after the MRO leaders were arrested, sent their own agents to infiltrate MRO. Their aim was to start the Uprising before the Macedonian people were ready so that it would fail and at the same time, weaken the Ottomans enough so that Bulgaria could easily invade Macedonia and annex it for itself.



One MRO leader who was betrayed but not caught was Gotse Delchev, who at the time was supreme commander of MRO, and who better than anyone was aware that the Macedonian people were not ready for an Uprising. Unfortunately Delchev’s advice was not only ignored but he himself was betrayed to the Ottomans. His party was ambushed and Delchev was killed before he could influence the Uprising’s outcome.



I don’t believe it was a coincidence that Delchev was ambushed and killed only days before he was about to attend a scheduled meeting where he was to give a speech to make the delegates aware of the dangers of starting the Uprising early.



It was during this time that our enemies became very vocal, spewing patriotic slogans spurring the Macedonian people into action only to have them killed so that Bulgaria could walk in and annex their lands.



In fact it was common for our enemies to interfere in our organizations every time our people gained enough strength and became a threat to their interests.



So, what can we do to slow down or even avoid enemy infiltration in our organizations?



I don’t believe there is an absolute way of stopping our enemies from infiltrating our organizations but there are methods we can employ to slow them down.



The easiest and quickest method to employ is to “close” our organizations to “everyone” who wants to be a member and use “stricter methods” on how we build up membership. For example start an organization with say ten trusted members and then through these trusted members via personal sponsorship bring in new and scrutinized members. In this way no one can walk in from the street, purchase a membership and begin to influence the organization.



A security service also needs to be employed in order to investigate each member of the organization and develop a profile for them. People with criminal records, misplaced loyalties and shady practices should not be allowed to join.



A tighter method for securing an organization would be to carefully draft the organization’s by-laws or constitution with a strict and unchanging set of rules. Officers who are elected to run the organization must then strictly abide by these rules. Careful attention must also be paid as to who is allowed in by having new members investigated, scrutinized and sponsored by existing trusted members.



And finally, if an organization exhibits characteristics that are contrary to the interests of the Macedonian people, do not support it. You should not support organizations you know nothing about anyway because, as I said earlier, it is a shame to give your money to the enemy and it is a greater shame when the enemy uses your money against you.



To be continued.



From personal email from R.S

[George S.]

From the Once Classified Files - Part 6

Here is Balkan States 6

Balkan States – Report 6

December 12, 1946

Notes on Serb-Partisan-Bulgarian Relations during the period August-November 1944. – (Communicated in Beri dispatch No. 209 of the 28th November, received in Foreign Office the 12th December)

THE information and notes set out here below deal solely with the experiences and actual incidents, or reported past incidents, in the areas through which Mission “Mozart” moved during the period under review. The mission landed in Serbia on the 10th August in Barje area south of Lebane, and then moved south to Oruglica and Rozdac, crossing the Morava near Mastanica, and thence to Nesverta. After some time in this area the Mission moved north once more to Crna Trava and thence to Dobro Polje. From there it made its way through Strelac and Babusnica to Pirot, where it was later joined by Mission “Entanglement.” The two Missions then moved with Partisan 13th Corps through Vlasotince and took part in the final advance on and the capture of Nis.

2. The majority of the following information about the Bulgarians and their relations with the Serbs was obtained in the period spent at the east of the Morava. Feeling here among the population were far more pronounced than on the other side of the ricer, and contact with the Bulgarians seemed to have been far more of a reality in this area. As a result of this, it was very noticeable that, as the Mission moved eastwards, so anti-Bulgarian feeling among both Partisans and peasants became more and more apparent.

3. Generally speaking, the Partisan attitude in Serbia to the Bulgarian occupier can be divided into four separate phases, namely; -

(A) An initial period which generally speaking had been going on since hostilities began.
(B) The period immediately before the Russian declaration of war while British negotiations were still taking place.
(C) The Russian declaration of war, armistice and post-armistice period.
(D) The period of actual co-operation between the new Bulgarian army and the Partisans.

The attitude of the Serbian people themselves throughout this period was continuous and forms a background of the whole picture of Partisan-Bulgarian relations in this area. When considering each of the above phases in turn, this attitude of the Serbian peasants and people must be borne in mind as an important factor influencing the local situation, and also it must be remembered that during the first three phases named above, the Mission, as it traveled towards and along the Bulgarian frontier, was moving into territory more and more strongly biased against the Bulgars. (See para. 2 above.) As a result of this, the picture is inclined to become at once more local in character, and cannot be said to reflect the true attitude of the whole of Serbia, but only that of a badly hit section of the country, where feelings may have become distorted and enlarged out of all reasonable proportions by hate stirred up on the spot.

Phase (A)

4. The original Partisan attitude to the Bulgars was that the Bulgarian soldiers were an unenlightened enemy with Fascist leaders, who, as the occupiers, must be driven out of Serbia. Prisoners, when taken, were given the chance to renounce their Fascist leaders, and were allowed to join in the “movement” with the Bulgarian Partisans if groups were operating in the area. Only the leaders, officers, police and secret police organizations were considered completely corrupt, and as the instigators of all crimes and atrocities were executed out of hand when caught. To the ordinary rank and file an attitude of distasteful toleration was adopted, and if the prisoners decided to co-operate they were at once accepted as men, who in past had been lead astray by their leaders, and their lives were usually spared. At the slightest sign of these converts giving trouble, or when the military situation made it impossible to have this rather doubtful element within their midst, the Partisans were forced to dispose of them. This they did purely as a necessity, and without the hate which was sometimes shown to the German prisoners, and would seem to be the only sensible solution to the problem.

Throughout the whole period the Partisans persisted in their policy of co-operation with the Bulgarian Partisan Movement, giving their help wherever possible. The standing arrangement to send all sympathetic Bulgarian prisoners to swell the ranks of the Bulgarian Partisans was only one example of this, and quite definitely serves to illustrate the sincerity of the Partisans as a whole, whose policy it has been since the beginning of the movement to strive continuously for harmony with their Bulgarian neighbours. The Partisan quarrel with Bulgaria was not with her people, but with her leaders and the system they stood for, a system which struck directly at the heart of the Partisan will for a friendly relationship with all Balkan people.

The above attitude of toleration and willingness to cooperate was essentially evident during the Lebane offensive, where the Partisans were able to gain a decisive victory over the Bulgarian army, and at the same time remain consistent in their former attitude towards prisoners.

There were, of course, extremists among the Partisans who contemplated the long list of past Bulgarian misdeeds through the ages, and argued that the whole Bulgar race was at fault. Bulgaria was to these men “the Germany of the Balkans” and would remain a danger until liquidated. That the Bulgars should pay for their past crimes was their slogan.

The present attitude, generally speaking, was one of fear mingled with inborn hatred which grew in intensity with the lessening of the distance to the old frontier. Every village had its stories of house burnings and killings in the district, and some had actual examples to show, getting progressively worst to the east. Perhaps the most antagonizing situation for the peasants was when Partisans came into a village with some ex-Bulgarian soldiers in their midst. The Partisans the people were prepared to feed but the Bulgars they were definitely not.

Phase (B)

5. The period immediately before, and leading up to the Russian declaration of war, when it became increasingly clear that the Bulgars really were on the verge of collapse, witnesses a noticeable stiffening in the Partisan attitude towards the Bulgars. Still the former policy of toleration existed on the surface, and all men realized as they had stated so often in the past that some agreement must be reached with Bulgaria if future peace was to be ensured. Yet, at the same time, the feeling of the impending collapse brought out many expressions of real hatred that had hitherto been suppresses. Men began to recall instances where their own villages had been sacked and burnt, or friends and relations killed, and their women debauched. Formerly they had merely despised the Bulgarians, now they began to show hatred for them, and some even went so far as to express regret that Partisan policy was of necessity a tolerant one. Even such men as Mihailo Djurovic (see Appendix “A”) who was well educated and equally well-informed as to the general picture, besides being a great influence throughout the whole are stretching from Crna Trava to Kriva-Feja, expressed himself in strong terms when referring to the Bulgars. True, his are had suffered more severely than almost any other, and during this transition period even his broad view-point of the war in general, was far from being in line with the former and official policy. To him the Bulgars stood for culture on the German model in the Balkans.

There was much speculation in Partisan ranks as to what was going to happen when the end did in fact come, and all were in agreement that the Bulgarians must withdraw from the country immediately, leaving their arms with the Partisans. Any feeling of hatred the Partisans had hitherto expressed were incensed during this period by the one great fear that the Bulgarian troops, even at the last minute before their collapse, might hand over their arms and material to the Cetnic and Nedic organizations with whom they were known to be in contact in all towns of any size throughout East Serbia.

It was during this period that the peasants’ feelings reached their peak in anti Bulgar intensity, and indeed in the whole are from Kriva-Feja to Crna Trava had good reason to hate. Examples were quoted of Bulgar soldiers coming into villages, shooting three of a family, shutting the remainder into their house and then burning the house and its pitiful intimated with it. Whole villages were seen with every house burnt down and with the villagers still searching among the ruins trying to salvage something from the ashes. In some cases new houses were just being built, but life was a very hand-to-mouth affair, as none of the essentials of the household remained. “Some of the braver individuals were just uncovering their remaining worldly goods from holes in the ground beneath manure heaps that had been their hiding place for the past seven months, and on the other side of the valley smoke could still be seen rising from the ruins of two houses burnt less than ten days ago.” (Mission Diary-Nesverta)

The Bulgar destruction through the whole are had been systematic to a degree. In Novo Selo and Nesverta, for example, there was hardly a cooking utensil in the place, no cups, glasses or cutlery, all had been taken away when the Bulgars passed through. Many of the houses had been burnt or damaged, and their man-folk marched away to Bulgaria for internment or worse. The people from these villages all displayed an air of absolute hopelessness in their adversity.

The smallest incidents were taken by the Bulgarian occupier as an excuse for such action all over the area. If a village sheltered even a Partisan it was considered hostile and as likely as not liable to call down destruction on to itself.

The same situation was evident to an even greater extent in Crna Trava and the surrounding are, although the work was not so recent. In Crna Trava itself only three buildings appeared to be still intact. A typical example of the thoroughness of the Bulgar policy here was that they had even taken the trouble to erase all the names from the stone memorial to the slain of the last war. This type of behaviour can be dismissed as both futile and unimportant, but it assuredly serves to illustrate how deep-rooted the hatred of the peasant for the occupier must necessarily become, since it is connected with every aspect of his daily life, besides being a repetition of centuries of similar occurrences.

This was a period of universal East Serbian hatred for the Bulgars, which developed before Partisan policy and finally crystallized out into its present state. It was a breakaway from the previous Partisan attitude of disdainful toleration, and was due to the sudden possibility of a Bulgarian collapse, combined with the terrible local evidence to be seen an all sides of this particular are.

This condition of terrible fear amongst the peasants, and the newly-aroused hatred on the part of the Partisans, was typical of this phase, and persisted up to and even after the armistice in the case of the latter, while the former still does exist to a greater or less degree according to the locality.

It was during this period that too that the Bulgars themselves first started to show real signs, in a few isolated cases, of working out their own salvation. Desertions to the Partisans increased – 2 officers and over 100 men came over to the Partisans in the Surdulica area from a garrison in the hills. Actual fighting broke out between the Germans and the Bulgars, in Surdulica itself, yet the Bulgarians in Vranje, a few miles distant, declared themselves to be still whole-heartedly in support of the Germans, and the movement did not become general.

The reason given for these desertions were inveritably that, although they did not mind fighting for Bulgaria, they had no wish to remain with the Germans, only to be left with the prospect of being carried off to some obscure front to fight for Germany. They insisted they were not traitors to Bulgaria, but expressed grave concern at what their countrymen might thing of them for their actions which thy held to be completely justifiable, since their country was on the verge of suing for peace. All were most anxious to explain away the past atrocities by saying that it was merely the natural outcome of their own way of life in Bulgaria, where for the past 500 years they had lived in an atmosphere of secret police, killings, and house burning among their own countrymen. As a result of this, human life was rated very low indeed, and it didn’t mean a great deal to a man to have to commit similar crimes in an enemy country when ordered to by his Fascist superiors. (This information and opinion, was volunteered by a Bulgarian officer deserter at Nesverta, who spoke English learned at the American collage in Sofia.)

It was final rush to get into the right party by men who were clever enough to see what was taking shape, and who still sufficiently uncompromised to do so.

Phase (C)

6. The Russian declaration of war, the ensuing armistice, ant the post-armistice period is probably the most interesting of all, in that it may be said to pass through three main stages, viz, :-

(i) A period of complete confusion when Russia declared war on Bulgaria, closely followed by the complete collapse of the latter. No one could be sure during this period just what would happen. News was non-existent, although the Partisans in this area generally were fairly confident that at last the Bulgars would be forced to withdraw from the country at speed. The Russian attack, coupled with lack of directive as to Partisan policy, put local Partisan anti-Bulgar feeling at its highest, and on a genuine hate basis, 70 per cent, of the staff of the Pirot Bde, for example, stated on numerous occasions, and without reserve, what, they intended to do with the Bulgars, how they would be made to pay in full for their past crimes, and of how the attack should be carried into Bulgaria alongside the Russians and the countryside laid waste there as it had been in Serbia. Past atrocities were discussed and speculation ran high. Then came the armistice, and gradually a less irresponsible and more imaginative and realistic attitude began to take shape. This was the beginning of the second stage.

(ii) There was still no news, but as time passed and the Bulgars showed no signs of leaving the country, the Partisans began to look for a deeper meaning behind their prolonged stay and to think once more along the former logical lines of Balkan unity. Personal dislike and hatred generated by the thought of a vanquished Bulgaria was suppressed by all Partisans for the sake of their avowed ideal of friendship within the Balkans. They did not, however, basically alter their attitude to the Bulgars, or forgive the past, but merely looked at the matter in the light of hard facts. They reasoned that, although things would continue to be very vague until new directives came in, it was still certain that the Bulgarians would have to pay their price of their crimes, that the various leaders would be tried for their complicity in the atrocities, and that it now appeared that the Bulgars had been directed to fight against the Germans, since they were not going to leave the country. It was generally considered disappointing that the Bulgars had apparently been selected by the Russians to continue to fight against the Germans instead of being sent home as a defeater army after handing their material and arms over to the Partisans who could then have continued the fight. It was disappointing but it was accepted, for it was obviously the only practical solution. The Partisans even admitted quite openly that, had they been given the tanks and guns, &c., of the Bulgarian army, they could not really have put them to good use, owing to lack of trained personnel to man them; they would obviously be better handled by the proper owners, who must therefore stay. At the same time it was thought and hoped that the Russians would soon find out what rotten and hopeless allies the Bulgarians were.

(iii) Time passed once more and the Bulgars did not see real fighting, but more and more material and men continued to pour into the country in the Pirot area from Carribrod. It was now that directives at last came through, which stated that the new intention of the Bulgars was to conduct a full-size offensive into Serbia against the Germans, and cut once and for all the escape routs through the Morava and Ibar valleys.

However, the scheme did not begin to take shape quickly, and once more criticism was heard. The Partisans began to feel suspicious of this large army on their soil which did nothing to hamper the enemy, but merely ate Serbian food and looked impressive. Concern was expressed over the possible political developments of having a large army in a static role in and around the Pirot area, which was already known to contain many civilians who were sympathetic to the Bulgarians having lived under them for many months without having their conditions of life made radically worse than under their own past.

This was the exception and also the exact opposite of the position elsewhere in eastern Serbia, where universal hatred on the part of the peasants was still the predominant feeling. Could the Bulgarians be here for some sinister political reason was a fear which now began to present itself. Even 13 Corps staff stated that they moved their Headquarters to Barje Civilic because they feared civil trouble with so many Bulgarians and their sympathizers in Pirot. Matters were made no easier by the fact that temporarily all arms had ceased to be sent to the Partisans, as at this time British supplies had been discontinued and Russian support had not began to arrive, while at the same time the Partisans had an ever-growing influx of the “Narod” crying out for arms which were not available, yet when the Partisans looked around they could only see their late enemies with a surplus of material of every type at their disposal. Corps Commander Vuckovic himself stated that the inactivity had gone on too long and was becoming a possible source of future trouble, and that the moment had arrived when either the Bulgars must push through Bela Palanka and Vlasotince to Nis and Leskovac, or else get back to their own country. (The Bulgarians had been sitting across the roads leading to Bela Palanka for some three weeks without making any serious move in either direction.) A “fight or go” attitude was becoming noticeable in Parisian discussions about the Bulgars, and their attitude began to stiffen once more.

(iv) Suddenly this whole situation changed and the attendant tension disappeared overnight. Russian stores arrived for the Partisans and the Bulgars who were now presumably sufficiently prepared for their attack on the Morava and Ibar valley communications, carried out a very large switch of their forces from the Bela Palanka front, where the main effort had previously been concentrated, and thrust their main force into the Morava valley and through Vlasotince. Besides being a considerable military achievement in re-concentration and switching of available forces, despite the shocking difficulties entailed by making such a large movement of men and guns over an almost impossible road, the plan was also a complete success, and Vlasotince, Leskovac and Nis fell to the Bulgars in quick succession.

After the few days doubt on the part of the Partisans as to whether this was going to be a real or half-hearted effort was finally removed, and they admitted that at last things looked like working and genuine co-operation was in view.

After the capture of Nis, the Bulgars continued their advance westwards, chasing the retreating Germans through Prokopulje and onwards through Kursumlija. Their effort here seems to have been a genuine and wholehearted affair, and up to the present moment they have been fighting as hard as they can, as their heavy casualties bear witness.

The civilian population in the towns such as Nis did not appear to be nearly as violent in their hatred of the Bulgars as had the peasants, and through an indefinite dislike was expressed by many, no serious criticism was heard. In a few cases people returning to Nis after the liberation of the town did show disappointment at seeing the recent occupier once more in the town, but this was short lived, as soon the majority of troops had moved on towards the battle and Nis had to begin to think about picking up the threads of its life again.

Short Summary and Appreciation of Existing Relations

7. We have now traced the development and vicissitudes in Partisan-Serb-Bulgar relations during the last stages of the war in Serbia, and we have seen how it was and is still developing along the normal lines necessary for future peace.

First we had the Partisans facing the Bulgarian army as enemies and without showing any great demonstrative hatred towards them, and then, after the reasonable and natural phases of hate and suspicion, we find them eventually co-operating in making war on a common enemy. That this co-operation was a compulsory clause of an armistice agreement does not necessarily mean that any basis for real co-operation could not be built up from this point. In fact, the omens are heavily weighted in favour of future peace and eventual friendship.

The new Bulgarian Government and the purges carried out by the Bulgarian Partisans have effectively removed the main reasons standing in the way of co-operation with the Partisans, for the latter’s policy has been consistently, except for a few local misunderstandings as described above, one of a desire for friendship with Bulgaria, in the hope of obtaining a Balkan unity. This could not begin while Bulgaria was under the late Fascist leadership and while she played the role of occupier in Serbia. However, this is now no longer the case, and the two nations can now face each other on common ground. They will still remain recent enemies, but time, and a carefully-directed policy, should heal and deaden this as far as the Partisan movement and the new Bulgarian army are concerned.

That the peasants of Serbia are still bitter and nourish a great hatred for the recent Bulgar oppressor is both true and natural. It is the result of years of murder, pillage, house burnings and the like that has been carried out in successive wars. It is deeply ingrained into the national character, but should not prove an insurmountable difficulty, for if the Serb Partisans, who are also Serbian to the same degree as the peasants, are prepared to suppress their hatred in order to carry out the policy of a new Yugoslavia which is aiming at friendship and peace in the Balkans, then so also can the peasants and “Narod” generally do the same. Once the later has been absorbed into the Partisan movement and given proper instructions by the means of a gradual policy, then this very real stumbling block should disappear. It is the duty of the Bulgarian Partisan Movement to carry out similar reconstruction within their own country.

The Partisans have made a true noble sacrifice in this way by suppressing all their past hatreds for sake of a cause (see Appendix “B”), and there is no reason why this sacrifice should be set at nought.

The situation should be further assisted by the fact that in years to come, the new Bulgarian army will be remembered for the part it played in the liberation of Serbia, and it should be hard for the Serbs to hate those who came to their aid and who drove out the occupier, and who at a later date sent in food, leather, &c., as laid down in the armistice terms. If this last is done, and the “new army” leaves behind it the reputation of being a liberator, then the former period when the Bulgarians were the occupiers will gradually fade from memory, as the latter is usually a very short-lived affair.

That there is still much to be done, and a great deal of precarious negotiation to be carried out before a firm peace can be established, is obvious, especially on such questions as territory and populations, which cannot be discussed here at this present stage.

Those Bulgars responsible for atrocities in the past will have to be caught and punished. There should be no weakening on this count, but simply proper justice done. But if these and similar storms can be weathered there is every indication now that a possible solution is in sight.

General Stanchev has already given a lead in his tremendous task of bringing the new Bulgarian army into being out of the sorry material of the old, a task which seems to be carrying out with success in the Nis area, and equaled only by his success in dealing with the Partisans themselves. Others like this man should be able to make Yugoslavia-Bulgaria relations at least into a working arrangement between the two nations. A step in the right direction has been made.

The Partisans under the leadership of Marshal Tito have always given “Federation with the Balkans” as one of the first principles of their whole movement. This they have striven for consistently in the past, and in so doing they have to suppress all personal feelings, after entailing great suffering and self-sacrifice to themselves, in order to bring about so great a change. Now, at last, the achievement of their aim is in sight, and the possibility of a real Balkan Federation, such as they have envisaged in the past, can become a reality.

The basis for co-operation has already been laid, and was proved by the joint operations throughout the recent fighting in the Nis area. With careful handling, a real friendship may well grow from these foundations, and Balkan unity would no longer remain a matter for mere speculation or academic discussion.

Appendix “A”

Mihailo Djugovic

CIVIL engineer, well educated, speaks French, and has traveled in France and other parts of Europe. Had experience of Yugoslav political and public life before the war. Interned by Germans, but later set free in order to be repatriated to Bulgaria as he was then subject administratively to the latter owing to frontier changes announced by the Axis.

Joined Partisan movement, where his chief task became civil administration in the south of Crna Trava.

Appendix “B”

Partisan Sacrifices for sake of Balkan Unity

AN example of this suppression of personnel hatred on the part of individual Partisans was well illustrated in the case of the Political Commissar to 13th Corps.

This man came from Crna Trava area and has been with the Partisan movement in Serbia since the early days. He had witnessed all the hardships endured by his countrymen during the Bulgarian occupation, had been forced to live in the hills for many months, and his wife had been killed by the Bulgars during an early reaction in the Crna Trava area. Yet this man could put aside all personal hatred that he must have felt for the Bulgarian, and during the liberation ceremonies in Nis he did his utmost to foster good relations between the Partisans and the new Bulgarian army, and gave frequent demonstrations of his own friendship for them, and in full public view.

[Risto the Great]

Quoted from Balkan States 10

The Vitsi front runs more or less in a straight line from Florina to Kastoria and the triangle of Greek territory north-west of it is entirely in rebel hands. The line is held by two G.N.A. divisions, who depend on their supplies on the two main lines of road communications; Kozani-Ptolemais-Florina and Kozani-Neapolis-Kastoria. Between these roads the Siniatsikon mountains provide a line of communications for the rebels and a jumping-off ground for raids and mine laying expeditions. West of the Aliakmon lies the other main rebel position on Mount Grammos, south of which the Pindus range affords the rebels another line of communications. South of Kozani is a semi-circle of mountains, Vourinos and Flamouri in the bend of the Aliakmon and Kamvounia and Pieria south-east of it, which forms the rebel road to Olympus. This whole semi-circle, together with the Khassia mountains to the south of the Aliakmon bend, is almost entirely under rebel control.

Imagine "Greece" now had it not been for the USA's napalm and UK intelligence.

[sydney]

dispatch 17, section 11 states "the rest of the report is missing". what a shame considering the dispatch was going to make comment on the feelings of the macedonian peasants...

[George S.]

Sydney that's the way we got it if anyone can shed some more light on it i don't know.

Here is Balkan States 7

Balkan States 7

June 18, 1946

Mr. Clutton to Mr. Bevin

No. 223

Belgrade, 6th June, 1946

I HAVE the honour to inform you that the trial took place last February before the Supreme Court of Macedonia of eleven members of a secret organization known as the Democratic Front of Macedonia-Ilinden 1903. The organization was charged with being responsible for drafting a memorandum in favour of the creation of a separate Macedonia, to include Bulgarian and Greek Macedonia, as a protectorate of "certain foreign countries" to whom the document was or was to be addressed. This memorandum was referred to in Marshal Tito's speech at Skopje on the 11th October, 1945 (see Belgrade telegram No. 1872 of the 12th October, 1945). A dementi appeared in the press of the 2nd November, 1945, purporting to come from the committee of the Ilinden organization, denying that it, the committee, was responsible for such a document. The denial went on to say that those of the committee who “by chance have remained alive, true to the ideals of the I.M.R.O. constellation of the time of Delchev, Gruev, Petrov, Sandanski and Hadji-Dimov, consider that the free Federal Vardar Macedonia within the frontiers of Tito's Yugoslavia represents a firm basis for the full union of the Macedonian peoples and the final settlement by democratic means of the Macedonian question which for fifty years poisoned the political atmosphere in the Balkans.

2. According to the press, the activities of the accused men began in August 1945, and it was their intention to work on the lines of Mihailov’s organization, with whom one of them, Dr. Ilija Culev, was at one time associated. Plans included the assassination of national leaders, the disarming of the militia, and the liberation of political prisoners, to be followed by the taking over of authority. Efforts were made to establish connexions over the frontier near Bitolj with the ?itos organization, from whom assistance in the Liberation of Greek Macedonia was to be sought.

3. The accused whose names were: -

Konstantin Hrisimov-Smilee Kiro Pecarov Stjepan Kuzmanov
Atanas Acov Dr. Dimitar Zlatarov Serafim Lazarov
Dr. Ilija Culev Metodi Svitjiev Kosta Dinev
Luka Sekulov

Were sentenced to terms varying from one to twenty years' forced labour.

4. This trial provides, perhaps, a suitable opportunity of reviewing the attitude of the present Yugoslav Government to the Macedonian problem and to the traditional Macedonian parties. Yugoslav Macedonia is a barren and sterile country of small economic value. Its inhabitants throughout their history have been the thorn in the flesh of every Yugoslav Government. Its strategic importance, however, is great as it controls the Vardar Valley and the Monastir Pass. In consequence, ever since its acquisition by Serbia in 1912, the Government of Belgrade has hung on to it with fierce tenacity. From the strategic point of view it was equally important to Bulgaria and the latter, to support its claims at first fostered revolutionary Macedonian organization known as I.M.R.O. When this movement broke out into two warring factions, the Mihailovists and Protoguerovists, the Yugoslav Government found in the later a means to serve their own ends, for the latter were ready to accept Macedonian autonomy within the frontiers of Yugoslavia, besides being opposed to the Bulgarian Government then in power. The Protoguerovists, indeed, received secret subsidies from the Yugoslav Government. The rivals of this faction the Mihailovists on the other hand, who stood for complete Macedonian autonomy or at least the incorporation of Serbian Macedonia within Bulgaria, to form an autonomous state, did not fail, on the other hand, to make contact with the extreme Croat opponents of the Belgrade Government.

5. There is no reason to believe that the present Yugoslav Government was any less determined than its predecessors that Yugoslav Macedonia should be part of Yugoslavia. Indeed, it is more than probable that this is part of the present Soviet plan for South-East Europe, for it is significant that Macedonian autonomy is, according to the reports I have seen from the British political representative at Sofia and His Majesty's Consul-General at Salonica, regarded as a reactionary plan sponsored by "foreign" Powers: It is, also interesting to note that the veteran Protoguerovist leader, Dimitar Vlahov, is a member of the present Presidium of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, and that those who issued the dementi referred to in paragraph 1 so significantly omit the name of Mihailov from the great names of I.M.R.O, which is, in fact, there portrayed as a purely Protoguerovist organization. Indeed, it could not be otherwise, for Mihailov during the occupation of Yugoslavia lived in Zagreb in close personal contact with Pavelic with \V whom, the Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs recently told me, he escaped at the time of the liberation. Mihailov is, therefore, branded in the eyes of the present Yugoslav regime with the same mark as Pavelic. In short, the old Serb alliance with the Protoguerovist faction remains in essence as it was before the war despite the changed circumstances of the time.

6, Nevertheless, Macedonia still remains a problem to the Yugoslav Government. The Federal Republic of Macedonia is, it is true, given greater independence in administration than any other of the Federal units in Yugoslavia. Even so, the present measure of control by Belgrade is, according to the reports I have received, intensely resented and this is somewhat confined by the complaints of the Bulgarian Opposition parties reported by Mr. Houstoun-Boswall in his telegram No.3, Saving, of the 4th February.

7. On the other hand, it must not be taken for granted that the present solution of the Macedonian problem, which has been up to date the Yugoslav Government's policy, and which has eschewed ally demand for the union of Greek and Bulgarian Macedonia with Serbian Macedonia, is the final solution. To judge from His Majesty's Consulate-General's letter to the Chancery at Athens of the 14th April, there is, already on foot a Yugoslav plan for the incorporation of Greek Macedonia within the borders of Yugoslavia. As yet, however such a movement is not officially sponsored, and the general Yugoslav attitude is restricted to one of platonic sympathy with allegedly persecuted blood brothers across the border. Two factors probably militate against the Yugoslav Government officially sponsoring such a movement, let alone a movement for the union inside Yugoslavia of both Greek and Bulgarian Macedonia. The first is the effect of any Yugoslav claim to Bulgarian and Greek territory on the position of the present Bulgarian regime and the opposition in Greece, both of which enjoy vigorous Yugoslav support. In the second place the creation at this stage of a large autonomous Macedonian State might well endanger the position of the present highly centralized Government in Belgrade. On the other hand, in the event of a Yugoslav-Bulgarian union or of Greece coming into the Soviet orbit, the position would be entirely different. The retention of Yugoslav Macedonia by Yugoslavia would then cease to possess any strategic importance and a united Macedonia would be a practical proposition either as a unit of a Greater Yugoslavia, or of a Soviet-controlled Balkan Confederation.

I am sending copies of this dispatch to His Majesty’s Ambassador at Athens and Moscow, His Majesty’s political representative in Sofia, His Majesty’s Council-General at Salonica, and his Majesty’s political advisor to Supreme Allied Command at Caserta.

I have, &c. GEORGE CLUTTON.

[George S.]

The Theft of a King

The Theft of a King

Who Stole Alexander



By J.S.G. Gandeto

March 26, 2011



The aim of this work is to present to my readers the other side of the story, the one that 19th century European intellectuals have forgotten to tell, or purposefully neglected to mention in their portrayal of the Macedonians. I have attempted, with no heed to political correctness, to simply tell our view of the events that have taken place in the last few centuries and to show how these events affected the Macedonian people in general and their existence in particular. The various topics that I have covered and discussed with my opponents represent my views only; my heartfelt feelings and frustrations about the Macedonian plight that to many of you, was, and still is, terra incognita.



I find 19th century European power brokers responsible for our continued sufferings in the hands of our neighbors who, even today, continue to deny our existence as people. I find today's European parliamentarians responsible for their tacit approval of Greece's treatment of Macedonian minority living in Greece. Condoning such an intolerant behavior from members of EU, illustrates lack of respect for their own constitution, lapse in judicial prudence and moral degradation of their own charter on Human Rights.



I am disappointed and frankly disillusioned, by the number of offenses committed against the Macedonian identity and language within EU and even in the UN itself. European parliamentarians can no longer deny that Greece's fight with the Republic of Macedonia is not about the name, but about our existence as ethnic Macedonians. The disappearance of the Macedonian language from the Macedonian ID card in UN cannot be attributed to unintentional oversight or a typographical error. Someone had to go there and erase it and, I am sure, it wasn't a person from Madegascar that did it. To keep silent, when a crime of this magnitude occurs, is nothing else but guilt by association. In my opinion, it is high noon for all interested in justice and humanity to come together to review, analyze and to correct past historical misconceptions. As countries evolve and mature, so should their political and social thinking.



If modern day Greeks succeed in their diplomatic offensive to convince the world that Alexander the Great and his Macedonians were actually Greeks, then such a verdict may accomplish two things: (a) prove that historical evidence can be ignored (and in this case it would be), that records can be manipulated and subverted, and (b) inflict irreparable damage to the confidence and the faith entrusted in the hands of scholars and academic institutions world wide. Such a verdict will amount to nothing less than the theft of a king. On the other hand, if justice prevails, as it should, then we may safely conclude that Alexander and his legacy would continue to rest among his Macedonians whom he considered his natural kinsmen and with whom he shared his troubles, setbacks, sufferings and pain as well as jubilation in his victories.



While one can sympathize with the plight of today's Greeks to hold on to the stolen legacy of the ancient Macedonians (the financial revenues obtained from Alexander's glorious exploits and fame is more than substantial), one cannot, and should not, sacrifice the intellectual integrity of the historical scholarship because of it.



That is why, it is incumbent upon today's historiographers and scholars not to succumb to nationalistically driven political agendas, nor to surrender their integrity to the lure of patriotically motivated self aggrandizements, but instead, uphold the reliability and the honor bestowed in academic scholarship. Their personal convictions should rest strictly and solely on the strength and the quality of the evidentiary documents at hand.



Facts should not be allowed to fall under subjective scrutiny nor should they be exposed to rhetorical manipulations and undue dilution of validity. Comparative analysis, the backbone of any evaluation, and a strict adherence to academic principals and guidelines must be the vanguard of every scholarly research. (l) Science and scientific principals ought not to be placed in the services of politicians nor should they become instruments of nationalistic propaganda.



I am saddened and quite disappointed by the EU scholars and parliamentarians for their frequent insensitivities shown towards Macedonia and the Macedonian citizens. It must be born in mind that historical data is not the sole property of a selected few self-appointed jurors and arbitrators. We must not forget that the less fortunate are not also less deserving, and that human rights and justice is not an inherited commodity reserved for a chosen few. Justice should not trail behind our deeds, but our deeds should pave the way to justice. A passage from Plutarch (Lives) comes to mind:



"Exploits do not always reveal clearly the virtue or vice in men; sometimes a phrase or jest informs us better of their character than the most famous sieges." True indeed, sometimes just a phrase, or even a tacit nod of approval may reveal more about the person's virtue than the whole speech on trivial, bureaucratic matters. Conversely, implicit silence displayed in a public forum may speak much louder then a roar in an empty stadium.



European intellectuals cannot continue to blame the ancient Macedonians for the demise of Athens, and whence, the rest of the classical Greece because of Chaeronea. Philip and his Macedonians were not too far behind the development of the more pedantic and ethnocentric Greeks in the 4th century B.C...



Athens and Greek cities, as a whole, had reached their zenith of development and were, like it or not, on their way down. Macedonians provided the knockout punch only to an already exhausted and demoralized opponent. Western intellectuals should leave their in- grained prejudices behind and distance themselves from Droysen's inverted obsession with "glorious" Greece and reflect upon the legacy and the greatness of the ancient Macedonians. They, the Macedonians, whose exploits have been railroaded by Droysen's "Hellenism" , ought to be given their rightful place in the history of the world and thus, should be seen not through the western colored glass of Hellenism, but through their own Macedonian valor and credibility.



Western philhellenes, eventually, must come to the realization that ancient Macedonians were, indeed, capable and competent enough to envision, plan and execute such a lofty dream and become masters of the ancient world. They did not need the Greeks for this ambitious adventure. Truth is that from the conquered Greeks they got nothing but continuous trouble on the way. One can successfully argue the point that they were an impediment to them. More than 50,000 Greeks were employed in the services of the Persian king and fought Alexander's Macedonians to the bitter end.



The ancient world did not revolve around Athens as you wish to convince us. Things did not originate with the ancient Greeks and, no, Greece was not the center of the universe. The splendor of Babylon, Persopolis, Memphis and the rest of Asia were far superior to anything found in the Aegean. It was Macedon with its disciplined army that opened the gates toward the eastern civilization and wealth, not Greece.



Because of these Macedonians, Western Europe enjoyed an era of enlightenment and economic and spiritual prosperity. It was through the sacrifices that Europe enjoyed financial upheaval and artistic enrichments. Because of Philip's designs and Alexander's energetic exploratory nature, Europeans found them- selves traversing the silk roads to China. Indeed, it was the Macedonian soldiers who opened the markets to Persepolis, Babylon, Alexandria, Antioch and Kandahar. These people, these soldiers, were Alexander's kinsmen; they were his Macedonians, not Greeks. They fought for their king Alexander whom they revered as primus inter pares. There was nothing Greek about them. "The defeat at Chaeronea was a disaster for all the Greeks," wrote Pausanias (9.6.5), true enough, but that must not be taken in its literal sense. Philip neither was the cause for the Greek demise, nor the culprit for the European philhellenes' dissatisfaction.



Similarly, the battle at Thermopylae cannot be equated with the preservation of democracy, rationalism, and the philosophy. (2) Tom Holland's passage in his book Persian Fire, that reads 'Plato would not have existed if the Persians had not been expelled from Europe', is as valid a paradigm as saying that Europeans would have never enjoyed silk and spices if it wasn't for Alexander's conquest of Asia and the eastern influx of luxuries towards the west. Indeed, much has been said about Aristotle's influence on Alexander but not much is recalled what Alexander did for Aristotle. (3) It is equally dangerous to associate and attach sinister connotations to anything coming down from Persia. Persian art and culture, in many respects and concepts, had much surpassed that of which was known and found in Greece. Science, like astrology and mathematics, is one such example.



Western historians, for obvious reasons, I may add, have left the impression that Alexander spread Hellenic culture in Asia and established his empire upon the Greek concepts or model of state; that is certainly not the case. The truth is that his new Eurasian state was fashioned out of Macedonian leadership upon Persian concepts. (4) Alexander and his Macedonians could not have spread Hellenic culture in Asia because (a) Macedonians were not in possession of such culture and (b) Asiatics were no less cultured than the Greeks.



We came to understand that Asiatics' culture and Asiatics' art and philosophy were not only influential in Alexander's governing of the empire, but were significantly instrumental in shaping his global outlook on things in general. Fact is that he was greatly touched by the philosophy of the Magi, the wealth of Persia and the wisdom of Egypt. Even though, the intermingling of European and Asian cultures benefited both peoples, we may safely conclude that Europeans were influenced more by the Asiatics than the other way around; the traffic moved eastward by troves and much less in the opposite direction. "The tide of migration to the east started by Alexander was running too strong to be checked," writes Harold Lamb. "The discoveries in the east drew the more adventurous souls from the shores and islands of the Mediterranean toward the gold and the vast farmlands of Asia." (5)



And thus, we must come to grips with the realization that Hellenism, as promoted by Droysen, did not enlighten the east. Ancient Greeks may have been in possession of a lit candle but the fire, certainly came from the east. Surely, Asiatics were not what western writers conveniently described them as: effeminate, religious devotees with negroidal features and lowly cowards languishing in dark mysticism.



Fact is also that many of the modern western European historians blundered excessively when they describe the Macedonian conquest of Persia as a Greek conquest. It must be stressed that we have no records left to us from the ancient chronographers to support that kind of thinking. If not from the ancient chronographers, we must ask, where would the evidence come from? Why disseminate falsehoods? Where were the Greek troops? (6) Weren't they dismissed from service with Alexander only a few short years in the campaign? (7) Are we going to overlook this profound fact in favor of perpetuating falsehood and allow the Greeks to put a claim on Alexander? Ask yourselves this question: Could Alexander fit in this role as a Greek King? Does he have the credentials for it? Or let us reverse the roles and entertain these questions: Did the ancient Greeks think of him as their king? Were behaviors and attitudes of the ancient Greeks towards Alexander befitting a king?



Before we attempt to answer the questions, we need to compare and contrast both: (a) the Asiatics perception of him in the eastern provinces of the empire and (b) the attitude and the perception of the mainland Greeks toward Alexander.



(a) While in Egypt he was adapted as the son of Ammon Re, accepted as the Pharaoh of Egypt and the inheritor of Nectatanebus kingdom.8 In Persia he had become (in their legendry) the true son of the last of the royal line of Kurush the Achaemenian. In Ethiopian fables he was a miraculous healer. The Armenians and the Syrians followed suit. In India he was a friend of the rajahs of the Punjab and in Judea, a protector of the high priest. Even the Byzantines regarded him as a hero-king who opened the silk roads to China. Next, a very important and revealing point must be stressed and taken under consideration: for the duration of his reign, the eastern part of the empire was at peace.



(b) In Greece Alexander was met with discontent, rebellions and hate. Greeks did not regard him as their king and that his success in Asia was not a cause for joy and celebration but a reason for concern. While he was fighting Darius, Greeks sent envoys to the Persian King asking for gold to hire mercenary armies to fight the Macedonian conquerors. "Freedom for the Greeks" was their unifying cry and Demosthenes never stopped to rally the Greeks to overthrow the Macedonian yoke.



Remember Plutarch’s line, above, about the importance of things that: "exploits do not always reveal clearly the virtue or vice in men; sometimes a phrase or jest informs us better of their character?" How true and how revealing is this Demades' line upon hearing the news that Alexander had died in Asia. "If Alexander were really dead," he declared, "the stench of the corpse would have filled the world long before." (9)



Thus, just one line, one simple gesture, one sentence uttered by, not anyone in Greece, but Demades himself, who is credited for saving Athens from the enraged Alexander after Thebes, and then, called up again to save her for the second time from Antipater's wrath later.



While Asiatic nations accepted Alexander as their king and bestowed honors upon him, in Greece he was despised and hated as a conqueror. It was certainly, their fervent hope that he would perish in Asia. If Alexander was indeed a Greek king, would the Greeks celebrate dancing on the street adorned with garlands, upon the news that their king has died? (10)



Furthermore, if in retrospect, we dare to compare the general situation in the eastern provinces of Alexander's Empire with that in Greece proper, we will come away convinced that, throughout the eastern provinces during the reign of Alexander, relative peace prevailed everywhere except in Greece; there were no uprisings of any kind ever recorded, except in Greece. Common logic dictates that we ask ourselves the obvious question: If Alexander was a Greek king and he supposedly went to Asia to avenge the wrongs done to Greece by the Persians, then, how is it possible that these same Greeks rebel against their own king? Isn't it a fact that Greeks corroborated with the Persian King while Alexander was at war with him? (11) Didn't Agis III, the King of Sparta start an uprising against King Alexander and his Macedonians in 331? (12) Is there any sublime logic that I have failed to understand here? Do I need to remind you that some historians consider the battle at Megalopolis between the Greeks and the Macedonians to have been the biggest battle in Greek history? (Diodorus, World History, 17.62.1-63.4; tr. C.B. Welles).



How is it conceivable that none of the conquered nations rebelled against Alexander except "his own subjects", the Greeks? Do European parliamentarians see this Greek behavior as normal? Should we mention the Greek mercenaries in Bactria who rebelled against the Macedonians at the moment they learned about Alexander's death? (13)



Last, but not least, in the light of such preponderance of examples that explicitly testify to the inadmissibility of the Greek claims, isn't it quite ironic that most of the European parliamentarians have remained silent? If nothing else, and even if we elect to ignore the words of the Macedonian kings and side with today's Greeks that Alexander was a Greek king, do you not find the fact that he spent no more than a month out of his whole life on Greek soil, odd and slightly curious? Furthermore, do you not find the fact that while in Greece, even though for a very short time, he was always accompanied by his army, a bit suspicious?



These examples amply demonstrate the attitude and the feelings of the "liberty loving Greeks" towards Alexander. Even a 'blind person' can see that these two pictures, these two contrasting scenarios, are not compatible with the vehement portrayal of Alexander as a Greek King by today's Greeks. Literary evidence, if anybody cares to consult, would simply- not allow such a hijacking to occur. Prominent scholars have explicitly stated that ancient Macedonians linguistically, culturally and ethnically were not Greeks and 'this must be an accurate reflection of contemporary attitudes'. (14) Do European parliamentarians and bureaucrats comprehend the scope, the magnitude and the meaning of these few lines? Eugene Borza's summation is also compellingly convincing: "Over five-centuries span of writings in two languages representing a variety of historiographical and philosophical positions the ancient writers regarded the Greeks and Macedonians as two separate and distinct peoples." (15)



Equally preposterous and historically inadmissible is the term "Greek Empire" used instead of Macedonian Empire. There are no records available whether be it from Roman, Greek or Asiatic source where such terminology has ever been used and applied. This is another unpleasant residue from Droysen's Hellenismus.



Consequently, and with added discomfort, one is tempted to ask: where are your sources? Where is the evidence? I am quite curious, and frankly, much disturbed by the audacity and the silence displayed by the European intellectuals who, in my opinion, know the truth but because of political constrains are afraid to speak out. Why allow falsehood to be perpetuated? Why pretend that it does not affect you or it is not within your domain of interest? If you gentlemen represent democratic Europe and claim that you follow and adhere to the guidelines of the European constitution, then, it is certainly your responsibility as a human being, and as a member of a democratic union of Europe, to intervene and stop, or at least attempt to modify, the abusive behavior of one of your constitutive member nations. Thus, every scholar, every intellectual who knows the facts, knows that a member state of the union propagates deceitful evidence, distorts the truth and is allowed unimpeded to continue spreading falsehood, has a part in that falsehood himself or herself.



How many times do Macedonians need to pay for your benevolent attitude towards Greece? You know quite well what had transpired after the Balkan Wars. I do not intend to remind you but was secretly hoping that you would react to the Greek slogan of "Macedonia was always Greek". But not even a whisper came from you!



Was Macedonia always Greek, gentlemen? When was it Greek? Was it Greek during Philip's time? Was it Greek after Alexander's death? Perhaps, it was Greek during the Roman times? How about during the Ottoman Era? Was it Greek then? This is a falsehood and you allow falsehood to prevail. Silence is a sign of approval.



Greeks would not be acting with this much recklessness, impunity and bravado without your support. Now, emboldened by your explicit and implicit sup- port, they have moved forward and want to take, not just our Macedonian name, but also our identity, our language and our cultural heritage. And yet, you still remain silent as if we do not exist as people, as human beings with feelings and integrity. You gentlemen in the European parliament are disgusting hypocrites. On paper you roar like lions; in action you tuck tail and run like the cowards that you are.



I will leave you with the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "You can crush all the roses you want, but you will not stop the spring from coming!"



NOTES:



1 Charles Bryant Abraham, PhD Fellow remarks regarding Anna Panagiotou's study (pp. 187 -188), "He Glossa ton Archaion Epigraphon tes Makedonias," ("The language of the Ancient Inscriptions of Macedonia."



2 Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West. Tom Holland. ISBN 0-316-72664-8.



3 Harold Lamb, Alexander of Macedon, (p. 185)



4 Ibid (p. 185)



5 Ibid (p.275).



6 Peter Green in Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B.C., A Historical Biography p.157.



7 [Arr. 111.19.6-7; Plut. AI. 42.5; Diod. XYII.74.3-4; Curt. VI.2.17]



8 See my reference on p. 253.



9 Demades in Plut. Phoc. 22.



10 The life of Greece", by Will Durant, pp.552-53.)



11 See Hogarth Philip and Alexander of Macedon (1897: 185)



12 See Bosworth (1988a: 187-228); Heckel (1997); McQueen (1978); Cawkwell (1969); Borza (J 971); Curt. 6.1.1-21; Just. 12.1.4- 11; Arr. Anob.2.15.2-5).



13 For the rebellion of the mercenaries in the upper satrapies, please see Diod. XVI 11.7; Curt. 9.7.1-11. Also "A memorable encounter" on p. 84.



14 Historical Sources in Translation Alexander the Great, W. Heckel and J. C. Yardley (2004:7).



15 (Eugene Borza 'Who Were (and Are) the Macedonians?" (Abstract from a paper presented at the 1996 Annual meeting of the American Philological Association). http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/96program.html)





The Theft of a King – Who Stole Alexander

ISBN: 978-1-4327-6856-0

Publisher: Outskirts Press, Inc.



By Gandeto, J.S.G.



1. What is the book about?



The book centers on Alexander the Great and the Ancient Macedonians’ ethnicity. It elaborates topics related to the differences between the ancient Macedonians and the ancient Greeks and attempts to dispel the modern notion – one originating in the 19th century and thereafter propagated by some western authors – that ancient Macedonians “were” Greeks. Also, in the book the reader will find glimpses of today’s dispute between the Republic of Macedonia and Greece regarding the name of the Republic of Macedonia, in essence, what lies hidden behind this carefully orchestrated Greek problem with the name. Readers will have a chance to get acquainted with modern-day Balkan politics where deep-rooted historical intrigues, stereotyping and ingrained prejudices do justice for tolerance and rational thought.



The book offers glimpses into our continuous struggle to return Alexander to his rightful place - among his Macedonian kinsmen. Yes, it is a feeble voice in the dark, but a voice nevertheless, that isn't going to die any time soon. Through the topics discussed in the book, the reader will have a chance to see and understand the other side of the story. In the words of Marquez Garcia, "Our enemies have crushed many roses before but they haven't succeeded in stopping the spring from coming."



Compelling questions:

..If Alexander the Great was a Greek king, why would he dismiss his own "Greek" troops in the middle of his Asian campaign in 330 B.C.? (Arr. III.19.6-7; Plut. Al. 42.5; Diod. XVII.74.3-4; Curt. VI.2.17).



Why would Greeks in the mainland, supposedly his own people, rebel against him?



Why would the Greeks call the Lamian War a "Hellenic War" if they were fighting the Macedonians?



2. Why did you decide to write it?



My main objective was twofold: to bring to the forefront the differences between the ancient Macedonians and the ancient Greeks and to shed some light on much overlooked and, by some authors largely ignored, facts about the ethnicity of the ancient Macedonians.



I could no longer stay silent in lieu of such incontrovertible evidence left to us from the ancient chronographers that clearly distinguished and separated the ancient Macedonians from the ancient Greeks. I felt compelled to respond to the blatant and dishonest manipulation of historical evidence in order to circumvent and subvert the universally declared human rights covenants and obligations.



3. How did you get your book published?



A friend of mine suggested Outskirts Press as a reputable vehicle to reach my audience; I’m glad I did.



4. What types of readers will be interested in your book?



I would be happy if today’s younger generation gets a “whiff” of the twisted political winds in the Balkan and understand how distortions and manipulations of historical facts can be used for political gains.



5. What is special about your book? What differentiates it from other books in the same category?



What separates this book from other books in the same category is the blunt straight forward – no gloves – attitude. There is no glossing over, no need to look for clues hidden in between the lines or sugar-coating politically correct terms. If I have perceived historical distortions being sold as fact, I have described them as lies; if unsupported of evidence claims are propagated as truths, I called them fabrications; if historical injustice has been committed, I find no acceptable reason to remain silent regardless of socio-political consequences. Conscience compels me to act and stand against all social injustices.



If modern day Greeks succeed in their diplomatic offensive to convince the world that Alexander the Great and his Macedonians were actually Greeks, then such a verdict may accomplish two things: (a) prove that historical evidence can be ignored (and in this case it would be), that records can be manipulated and subverted, and (b) inflict irreparable damage to the confidence and the faith entrusted in the hands of scholars and academic institutions world wide. Such a verdict will amount to nothing less than the theft of a king. On the other hand, if justice prevails, as it should, then we may safely conclude that Alexander and his legacy would continue to rest among his Macedonians whom he considered his natural kinsmen and with whom he shared his troubles, setbacks, sufferings and pain as well as jubilation in his victories.



6. Have you published any other books? Do you plan to publish more?



Yes, I have. In 2002 I published The Ancient Macedonians – Differences between the Ancient Macedonians and the Ancient Greeks, One Golden Ray upon the Rock, a novel in 2005 and The Wolves of Trapper’s Bluff in 2007.



I most certainly will continue to write.



The book is available through most of the book stores;

http://www.outskirtspress.com/thetheftofaking

J.S.G. Gandeto was born in Lubojno, Macedonia. Educated at Ss Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, Republic of Macedonia. He immigrated to United States and continued his studies at Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan and Nova South-Eastern University in Fourth Lauderdale, Florida where he received his post graduate degrees. He recently completed his 29th year as an educator and has since retired and is continuing to pursue his passion in writing. In 2002 he published his first book Ancient Macedonians - Differences between Ancient Macedonians and the Ancient Greeks. In 2005 he published the romantic novels One Golden Ray upon the Rock and in 2007, The Wolves of Trappers Bluff.



In the Macedonian Language he has published the following novels: Spasa's Light in 2004, Saraf in 2009 and Rosamarina's Grave in 2010. Book of poems Muabeti in 2003, poemata Ko Jagne in 2005 and Majka -Egejka in 2009. Currently, he is preparing for publication his latest novel Folded Impressions.



Other articles by Risto Stefov:

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

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

Free electronic books by Risto Stefov available at:

http://makedonskakafana.com/macedonian_ebooks.html

Our Name is Macedonia


Taken from an email from risto stefov

[Struja]

I’m not too sure why Gandeto would use Charles Bryant Abraham comments with regards to Anna Panagiotou’s studies! As he himself supported the so called Dura europos inscription some time ago.

While Anna Panagiotou is just another moron scholar suggested that the Macedonians spoke a north west Doric Greek dialect because of the Pella curse tablet.

(l) Science and scientific principals ought not to be placed in the services of politicians nor should they become instruments of nationalistic propaganda.
1 Charles Bryant Abraham, PhD Fellow remarks regarding Anna Panagiotou's study (pp. 187 -188), "He Glossa ton Archaion Epigraphon tes Makedonias," ("The language of the Ancient Inscriptions of Macedonia."

Using two idiots doesn’t make a positive outcome in this case Gandeto!

Everyone in the scholar world knows that Anna Panayotou is a major propaganda player against the Macedonians. Maybe Borza was a better choice in this case. Borza also pass the same comment towards Anna in one of his books.

[George S.]

Mr electricity i will strive to get a response to your query.

[George S.]

From the Once Classified Files - Part 8

Here is Balkan States 8

Balkan States 8

August 22, 1946

Mr. Clutton to Mr. Bevin

No. 310

Belgrade, 13th August, 1946.

Sir,

I HAVE the honour to report that the first Congress of the National Front of Macedonia was held at Skopje from the 2nd to the 4th August. The most prominent personalities attending the congress were Lazar Kolishevski, President of the People’s Republic of Macedonia and secretary of the Territorial Committee of the National Front of Macedonia; M. Neshkovich, the President of the Serbian Government; and M.Frane Frol, the Minister of Justice of the Federal Government. The congress was also attended by a delegation from Bulgarian Macedonia (Pirin), the leader of which was Krsto Stojchev, a Deputy of the Bulgarian Sobranje. There were also delegates from Greek or, as it is called here, Aegean Macedonia, and a delegate from Trieste, M. Eugen Laurenti.

2. The congress opened on Ilinden the anniversary of the rising against the Turks in Macedonia in 1903. Extremely long speeches were made by M. Kolishevski and by M. Neshkovich. The main points of these were the necessity for suppressing reaction, the union of Pirin with the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and the strugg1e of the Macedonians in Greece. M. Stoichev, the Bulgarian delegate, spoke in favour of the Inclusion of Pirin in the Republic of Macedonia and added that, as he had declared elsewhere, there were in the Bulgaria of the present day still remnants of Bulgarian chauvinism which wished to destroy the fraternal relations existing between the Fatherland Front of Bulgaria and Marshal Tito’s Yugoslavia.

3. Of greater interest, however, was the manifesto issued by the congress at its conclusion. This document begins by saying that, on the anniversary of the glorious rising of Ilinden and on the anniversary of the meeting of A.S.N.O.M., when the foundations were laid for the realization of the Ideals of the Ilinden rising, the delegates, who had come from all parts of the country and who represented all classes and all nationalities in Macedonia, once again manifested the political union of the whole of the people and the unshakeable fraternity and union of the Macedonian people with all the national minorities in Macedonia. After praising the National Front, its leader, Marshal Tito and its policy, which had been created and executed by the best fighters for the rights of the working people, the Communist Party, the manifesto continues by saying, that the first congress of the front had the pleasure of welcoming guests in the persons of representatives of their brothers from Pirin and Aegean Macedonia. This had turned the congress into a manifestation of the wish of the Macedonian people of all parts of Macedonia to be free and united in the Republic of Yugoslavia. From its first days the programme of the National Front had been based on the principle that the people of Macedonia must be united in the Macedonian Republic. The realization of this ideal was to-day the ardent desire of the people. The strengthening cultural relations with Pirin and the national development of the people in that part of Macedonia would create all the conditions for the fulfillment of the wish for the union of these districts in the Macedonian Republic. This wish had also been manifested in the Vardar, i.e., Yugoslav district of Macedonia. By a fraternal understanding between the People's Republic of Yugoslavia and the Fatherland Front of Bulgaria, Bulgarian Macedonia should be united with the Republic of Macedonia.

4. Turning next to Aegean Macedonia, the manifesto says that the Macedonians in this region, who, with the democratic Greeks, waged a stubborn fight against their Monarcho-Fascist oppressors for the establishment of their national and democratic rights, had the undivided sympathy and moral support not only of the People’s Republic of Macedonia, but also of all the peoples of Yugoslavia. Taking its stand on the principle of the union of all the people of Macedonia within the framework of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia, the National Front of Macedonia insisted, moreover, that these national and democratic rights should be given to the Slovenes and the Croats of Trieste and the Julian March. The congress therefore firmly demanded the inclusion of this national territory in the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia.

5. The manifesto, after an exhortation to all sections of the community to liquidate the numerous types of local reaction in Macedonia and to unite within the National Front, ends by emphasizing the importance of the elections to the Constituent Sobranje of the People's Republic of Macedonia which are to take place on the 22nd September. The elections should be a new manifestation of the unity of the people and their determination to continue on their road, led by the National Front and its chief, Marshal Tito.

6. There are two points of secondary interest in this manifesto. The first is the statement that the policy of the National Front has been created and executed by the Communist Party. As a rule, the Communist Party in Yugoslavia keeps well in the background, but there have been during the last few months several indications that the party is beginning to come more out into the open. Examples of this are Mosha Pijade's statement that the People's Committees were the creation of the Communist Party (see my dispatch No.196 of the 21st May). and Marshal Tito's statement at Split that he did not expect the Catholic Clergy to love either him or his, i.e., the Communist, Party (see paragraph 4 of my dispatch No.293 of. the 22nd July). Of like interest is also the linking up, I think for the first time, of Yugoslav territorial aspirations in both the north and south, the justice of Yugoslavia's claim to Trieste being based on the justness of the principle of the union of Pirin and Vardar to Macedonia.

7. The most significant feature of the manifesto, however, is that it is the first open indication of future Yugoslav policy towards Macedonia, admittedly in a form which the Yugoslav Government could repudiate if need be. His Majesty's Consul-General at Salonica has reported the agitation within his district for the incorporation of Greek Macedonia within the framework of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. Little or no publicity has until the issue of this manifesto been given to such ideas inside Yugoslavia. It is true that, while the manifesto openly asks for the union of Pirin to Federative Macedonia, the references to Greek Macedonia are vaguer and amount to little more than platonic sympathy. Nevertheless, it is quite clear what is in the wind.

8. Whether this projected union of the three Macedonias within the framework of Yugoslavia is to coincide with the Federal Union of Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, as suggested in my dispatch No. 223 of the 6th June, cannot yet be said. Perhaps the question has hot even yet been decided. In this connexion I might add that I have twice asked officials of the Yugoslav Ministry for Foreign Affairs what significance should be attached to the manifesto. Their answers have been very evasive. One said that he had not yet read the press reports of the congress, and the other that he could not understand what the Macedonians were up to. They now had their own Macedonia, but he supposed that they now wanted something more. From this my conclusion is that Yugoslav plans are not yet fully crystallized.

I am sending copies of this dispatch to His Majesty’s Ambassador at Athens and Moscow, His Majesty’s Council-General at Salonica, His Majesty’s political representative in Sofia, and to His Majesty’s political advisor to Supreme Allied Command at Caserta.

I have, &c. GEORGE CLUTTON.

[Daskalot]

Here is Balkan States 9

Balkan States 9

September 4, 1946

Mr. Peake to Mr. Bevin

No. 324

Belgrade, 27th August, 1946.

Sir,

WITH reference to Mr. Clutton’s dispatch No. 310 of the 13th August, 1946, have the honour to report that the leading article in the issue of Borba for the 26th August was devoted to Greek, or, as the Yugoslav’s call it Aegean Macedonia. At the head of the article was a map, a copy of which I attach, showing the present national frontiers and also the ethnical frontier. As you will notice the latter embraces Salonica and almost all Greek Macedonia.

2. The article opens by saying that the frightful terror which is being carried on by Monarcho-Fascist bands in Greek Macedonia is already known to the Yugoslav public. Thousands of Macedonians and democratic Greek refugees are living witnesses of the murder and incendiarism which these bands are committing on “our brothers.” This terrorism has become much worse latterly, when the Monarcho-Fascist clique, which has not been able to find deep roots in the Greek people, began its attempt to purge Greek Macedonia of Macedonians and Greek democrats. Just now active purging of Greek Macedonia is going on- tens of villages are burning, women and children and powerless old men are being murdered, as in the most terrible period of the German occupation.

3. The district, in which a particularly violent terrorism is being carried on, and which is known under the name of Greek (Aegean) Macedonia, is, in f act, ethnically a part of Macedonia. In the whole of the Balkans there is no district which has passed through in the course of recent history such a bitter terrorism as has been suffered by the Macedonian population from the Greek imperialists. The ethnical history of Macedonia is then traced from 1896-1914, during the whole of which time it is shown that the Macedonians remained in an absolute majority in Greek Macedonia. After 1914, however, the picture began to change. The Greek soldiers killed tens of thousands of Macedonians, they destroyed villages, they burnt down houses. In the place of their former inhabitants there came Greeks or philhellene “Aromuni.” The greatest ethnical change was caused by the enforced exchange of populations between Greeks and Turks after the Greek defeat in Asia Minor in 1922 and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. At that time the Greeks were forced by the Turks to take in all the Christian inhabitants, among whom “Karamanlija,” Greeks, Kurds and other Caucasian people predominated. The great part of these people were settled in Greek Macedonia. The Greeks, for their part, sent into Turkey all the Mohammedans, such as Turks, Mohammedan Macedonians, “Arbanassi” and “Aromuni.” Large numbers were also forced into Bulgaria from Macedonia. After this war, in which our Macedonian brothers fought heroically shoulder to shoulder with the Greek patriots, the Monarcho-Fascists had chased into Yugoslavia and Bulgaria about 20,000 Macedonians from Macedonia. As the result of this persecution 150,000 Macedonians had been displaced or killed from 1914 up till now. In the course of the years 1941-42 our partisan representatives personally completed a list of Macedonian families in Greek Macedonia, and they reckoned that there were still about 250,000 Macedonians there. If one also takes into account the places in which the Macedonians do not represent the absolute but only the relative majority, then this figure of 250,000 should be considerably greater.

4. What, the article goes on, can our brothers expect from the present regime in Greece? The latest terrorism which is being carried on in Greece only confirms that the Monarcho-Fascist bands are continuing the prodigious terrorism which was carried on by the reactionary cliques in the past, and that it is intended that this terrorism shall completely annihilate our brothers in Greek Macedonia. The Macedonians in Greece do not enjoy any kind of rights. It is forbidden for them to speak their national language even in their own homes. Absolutely no Macedonian schools exist. Even their local political organizations have been rendered powerless. Chauvinistic cliques try to sow hatred among the Greek and other nationals against Macedonians, and to destroy that fraternity which was created in the course of the war of liberation. But to-day, opposed to that reactionary Greek policy, there is not the old Yugoslavia in which the Macedonians were oppressed equally with other peoples, but the new democratic Yugoslavia where all peoples have equal rights. The Macedonian people who fought with Greek partisans for their liberation expected, with reason, that this war would bring them, in the spirit of the proclamations of the Great Allies, the right to advance and unite themselves with their other brothers. With justice they expected, that finally all the Macedonian people would be united and break away from foreign slavery. But it is only the Macedonians in Yugoslavia who have succeeded in bringing about their own complete liberation; and while in the People’s Republic of Macedonia a new national life is awakening, on the other side of the frontier our brothers are suffering under the yoke of Monarcho-Fascist bands.

5. Greek imperialists have no right at all to hold Macedonians any longer under their intolerable yoke; ,they can no longer answer that Belgrade and Sofia are persecuting their Macedonian populations and that such people as free Macedonians in their own countries do not exist. They have even less right because they are stifling with all their force the democratic movement and the democracy of their people, accepting foreign support and giving over their country to the mercy, or otherwise of foreign exploitation. The people of Yugoslavia watched patiently what was happening to their brothers in Greek Macedonia. They believed, and today still believe, that the Greek people cannot oppose the fight of the Greek Macedonians for democracy and national independence. But the latest statements of responsible Greek circles, not only in Greece but also in the international arena, and also the frightful terrorism which is being carried on in Greek Macedonia, show that the Greek, reactionary circles have become the provokers of tumult in the Balkans and have decided to annihilate their Macedonian population. There is no hope at all that the reactionary Greek circles, who to-day with naked force and with the help of foreign troops keep themselves in power, will show the slightest wish for the solution of this problem in conformity with the demands and interests of the Macedonians in Greece. This problem has become part of the fight which is being carried on all over the world for peace, for democracy and for the self-determination of peoples. Therefore, the article concludes, our country cannot remain indifferent to the annihilation of our brothers in Greece, nor to their rights and their demands for self-determination and union with their brothers in Yugoslavia.

6. The theme of this article again predominated in the Belgrade press of the 27th August, when all three papers carried leading articles, which in Borba and Politika were headed by another map. The tone of these articles was extremely violent.

7. I am sending copies of this dispatch to His Majesty's Ambassador at Athens, His Majesty's Political Representative at Sofia, His' Majesty's Political Adviser at Caserta, and to His Majesty's Consul-General at Salonica.

I have, &c, C. B. PEAKE.

[Daskalot]

Here is Balkan States 10

Balkan States 10
Conditions in Western Macedonia
Report of Tour by Mr. Vice-Consul Dodson
Section 1

July 1st, 1949

R 6417/10127/19
Mr. Knight to Mr. Bevin

(No. 33)
His Majesty’s Consul General in Salonica presents his compliments to His Majesty’s Principle Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and has the honour to transmit to him, with reference to Salonica dispatch No. 61 of 9th December, a copy of a dispatch to His Majesty’s Ambassador at Athens, No. 17 of 23rd June, regarding Mr. Vice-Consul Dodson’s tour of Western Macedonia.

Salonica, 23rd June, 1949 – Enclosure

(No. 17) Salonica, 23rd June, 1949

Sir,

I have the honour to transmit to your Excellency the accompanying report by Mr. Vice-Consul Dodson on a recent tour of Western Macedonia. Mr. Dodson had previously visited this region at the end of November last, and his account of that journey was enclosed in my dispatch No. 41 of 9th December, 1948.

2. It was not expected from what is generally known of the adverse conditions still prevailing in Western Macedonia, that the military and economic situation in that area would show any marked improvement as compared with that of over six months earlier. Even so much of the report makes, I think, rather depressing reading in view of the undoubtedly imposed state of morale, both military and civilian, noticeable during the past few months throughout Northern Greece. Mr. Dodson considers that the improved morale in Western Macedonia is to be attributed to military successes elsewhere, particularly further south, rather than to any amelioration of the local situation; and in a region where so many villages remain empty of their inhabitants, and towns overcrowded with refugees living in such distressful conditions, the situation which still produces such conditions cannot be regarded as anything but serious.

I am sending a copy of this dispatch to His Majesty’s Principle Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and His Majesty’s Ambassador at Belgrade.

I have, &c. W. L. C. Knight.

Enclosure to Dispatch No. 17

I made a short tour in Western Macedonia between 10th and 14th June. I drove to Kozani on the afternoon of 10th June, and the following morning went by road to Kastoria together with Mr. A. M. Homes, British Police and Prisons Mission Liaison Office in Western Macedonia, who very kindly accompanied me throughout the rest of the tour. We spent Sunday visiting the neighbourhood of Kastoria and returned via Argos Orestikon to Kozani on the Monday. On Tuesday 14th June, we paid quick visit to Servia before leaving for Salonica.

2. In Kastoria we called on the mayor and on Major-General Vasilas, commanding 10th Division. All attempts to find the acting nomarch proved fruitless. On the Sunday morning we drove out to the village of Tikhion, north-east of Kastoria, and that afternoon crossed the lake by boat to visit the village of Mavrokhori. We had to abandon a visit to Nestorion, as the need for traveling with the convoy involved spending a night there, for which we had insufficient time. Similar reasons prevented our visiting Grevena from Kozani. We stayed in Kastoria with No. 2 U.N.S.C.O.B. observer group, the vice-chairman of which, Lieut.-Commander Barret, very kindly put us up. He had returned from the frontier only two hours before we arrived, and all the other members of the group were out on duty at various points.

3. On our way to Kastoria we had called on the police authorities in Neapolis, and on the return journey we called on the Mayor of Argos Orestikon, who took us around his refugee camps. We missed the daily convoy to Kozani as a result, and had some difficulty in persuading the military authorities to allow us to proceed despite the fact that the whole road appeared to be alive with troops.

4. In Kozani I called on Colonel Smijth Windham, commanding the British Military Mission liaison unit attached to Headquarters “B” Corps and was very kindly made a guest of the Mission’s hospitable mess. I also called on the Gendarmerie High Commander for Western Macedonia and at the Nomarchia. The latter was a waste of time as the acting nomarch was away and the official who received me as well as those who he summoned to his aid during our conversation, clearly had little idea of what was going on.

5. The situation in Western Macedonia is very different from the prevailing in Central and Eastern Macedonia and in Thrace. One senses the difference as one climbs up the Kastania pass, at the southern end of Vermion mountains, which divide the comparatively peaceful Central Macedonian region from the wilder area of Western Macedonia. Life seems to take on a new tempo and the mountains, rising range behind range westwards to the peaks of Smolokas and Grammos in Pindus and northwards to Vitsi, a new threat. There is in Kozani an atmosphere of urgency non-existent in Salonica. Whereas at Headquarters “C” Corps, one will discuss, over a cup of coffee, the prospects of a G.N.A. sweep against a rebel band in some far-away frontier are or be told about the latest mining incident, it requires only two minutes in the busy and business-like offices of the British liaison unit attached to “B” Corps to realize that there they are dealing with a war. Their maps are marked up for two or three operations at once and these are going on all around them. While talking to Colonel Smijth-Windham after dinner on the night of my arrival I pointed to a light in the hills south-west of Servia. “Yes,” he said “that’s a bandit light; that’s probably Ferraios.”

6. I could not find that the situation in Western Macedonia had changed much, if at all, since I last visited the area in December 1948, apart from a general improvement in morale. Military dispositions in the area seem little changed from six months ago. In places, perhaps, the rebels have been driven a little higher up the mountains, but the general picture remains the same. The Vitsi front runs more or less in a straight line from Florina to Kastoria and the triangle of Greek territory north-west of it is entirely in rebel hands. The line is held by two G.N.A. divisions, who depend on their supplies on the two main lines of road communications; Kozani-Ptolemais-Florina and Kozani-Neapolis-Kastoria. Between these roads the Siniatsikon mountains provide a line of communications for the rebels and a jumping-off ground for raids and mine laying expeditions. West of the Aliakmon lies the other main rebel position on Mount Grammos, south of which the Pindus range affords the rebels another line of communications. South of Kozani is a semi-circle of mountains, Vourinos and Flamouri in the bend of the Aliakmon and Kamvounia and Pieria south-east of it, which forms the rebel road to Olympus. This whole semi-circle, together with the Khassia mountains to the south of the Aliakmon bend, is almost entirely under rebel control. Indeed as we drove from Kozani to Servia on the 14th June Mr. Holmes told me that, apart from the tiny fringe of low-lying land around Velvendos and Servia, there were no garrisons beyond the Aliakmon at all. We were told in Servia that two nights before our visit parts of two rebel brigades had moved from Pieria into Kamvounia across the open ground between Servia and the Aliakmon rather than bother to take the mountain route.

7. The G.N.A. forces on Grammos and Vitsi are dug into positions, though Major General Vasilas, whose 10th Division is on the left of the Vitsi front, pointed out that they were nevertheless fighting a positional war offensively. He claimed to have killed 144 bandits, who had attempted to reach Vitsi from Kaimakchalan, in a battle fought the day before our visit. Behind these two front lines the remaining G.N.A. forces are engaged in keeping open the lines of communication, holding the main centers of population and carrying out sweeps against any rebel concentrations which may be reported. In other, words they are holding the position in Western Macedonia until the, mountain areas in central Greece have been cleared of rebels.

8. The rebels, according information given me by the British Military Mission, have between 4,000-5,000 troops on Grammos and approximately 4,000 on Vitsi. These latter are made up principally of four rebel brigades, all of which are reported to be under strength and one of which to be composed principally of women. In addition the rebels have a heavy concentration of guns on Vitsi. It is into these two mountain strongholds that the rebel supplies from Albania are brought. It appears that initially supplies are sent in bulk by road from Korce to the village of Vidove, just inside the Albanian frontier. Here they are broken up and the supplies for Grammos are sent on via the village of Slimnitsa. Supplies for the, Vitsi area are taken back by road to Bilisht and then driven over the border to Krystalopigi. The heights overlooking this road where it enters Greek territory are, unfortunately in rebel hands and it is impossible for the ,U.N.S.C.O.B. observers to see the lorries crossing the frontier, although I was told that, the sound of their engines was plainly audible at night.

9. The rebels seem to be expecting an attack on Vitsi, and their present strategy appears to be to prevent the G .N .A. from effecting any large-scale concentration of forces by sending small bands out in various directions, to pursue which the G.N.A. must disperse its troops. A number of these pursuit operations were certainly in progress while I was in the area. On our way from Argos Orestikon to Neapolis on 13th June we passed several columns of troops making their way up on to western Siniatsikon in pursuit, as we afterwards learned at “B” Corps Headquarters, of a reported band concentration. Only 6 miles from Kozani we saw a further force making its way onto Vourinos. I stopped to talk to the Brigade Commander, who told me that a rebel column with fifty mules was reported to have moved the night before from the area north of Siatista over into Vourinos. His brigade was moving up onto Vourinos from the north and east and further forces from Siatista were to move from the west. It was then 3 p.m. and the long lines of men and mu1es, moving across the corn-fields towards the foothills on the first stage of their march, must have been very visible to anyone watching from the peaks above. The following morning I was told at “B” Corps Headquarters that both these operations had drawn blank. Simultaneously with these operations other “B” Corps troops were assisting “A” Corps in an operation in the Khassia mountains against the Brigades of Ferraios and Bandekos.

10. The military authorities appear fairly satisfied with the present situation. The more sober certainly look for no final victory this year, but Colonel Smijth- Windham told me that he considered that if Central Greece could be cleared of rebels by the autumn and the G.N.A. be left with only the frontier and the areas immediately behind it to worry about, a big improvement would have been made. He did not think that the rebel morale was at present very high and believed that many were on very short rations. At the same time he thought that the present and, as he saw it, unsatisfactory situation for the rebels had been caused very largely by their own political mistakes, particularly the dismissal of Markos and the. N.O.F. declaration, and he admitted that if a political mistake of similar magnitude were to be made by the Greek Government the situation might easily change for the worse. He had a poor opinion of the rebel forces and considered that with any really determined army the war could be finished in six months. The reluctance, amounting almost to refusal, of all Greek commanders to move at night was a major factor in prolonging the fighting.

11. But although the local military situation is little different from what it was six months ago, public morale has certainly improved. There has clearly been some amelioration of the security situation in the immediate vicinity of the towns to account for the fact that all local authorities tell one that the situation is better, but in the main this improved morale must spring from reports of successes further south and from the new confidence felt by and in the army. It is perhaps easy to over-emphasize this development. When I asked the Mayor of Kastoria - an educated man and a Macedonian - what he thought of the present state of the public mind, he said it was difficult to talk in terms of morale about the reactions of the Macedonian peasant. They had been inured to…(the rest of the report is missing).

British Consulate-General, Salonica
March 16, 1945

Sir,

I have the honour to report that I toured Eastern Macedonia and Thrace by car from March 8th -11th last, visiting in particular the towns of Serres, Drama, Kavalla, Xanthi and Komotini, making Kavalla my headquarters. I was accompanied throughout by Mr. Wm. M. Gwynn, American Consul-General in Salonica.

2. Traveling by road presented no difficulties whatsoever, and the surface everywhere was better than could have been expected. Only on the stretch from Salonica to the Struma was any destruction evident, but a temporary wooden bridge has now been constructed across the Struma and other bridges and culverts repaired in a rough and ready fashion so that traveling time between Salonica and Serres is now almost normal. From Serres onwards there were practically no signs of blown bridges or damaged roads. The railway is also functioning on a reduced scale from Rodhopolis to Alexandroupolis, lignite from Serres being used as fue1. Throughout Eastern Macedonia and Thrace communications and public utilities have remained large1y intact, the chief material damage caused by the Bulgarian occupation being the burning of mountain villages and the carrying off of cattle, draught animals and agricultura1 produce. Conditions ere thus much more favourable for a rapid economic recovery than in Western Macedonia. We were everywhere received with the utmost friendliness, sometimes to the point of embarrassment and not a single untoward incident marred our journey.

3. Only a brief stay was made at Serres, but it was sufficient to impart an impression of considerable poverty, malnutrition and insufficient clothing in what should normally be a prosperous town. Most shops wore shut, and the few that were open were but poorly stocked with articles or very inferior quality. British troops had not yet occupied the town, but security was reported to be good.

4. More time was spent in Drama on both the outward and return journeys. It gave signs of much greater animation and economic conditions seemed definitely better. A company of the Gurka Rifles had arrived there the previous day (March 7th), and I was able to obtain the impressions of the Officer commanding, Captain Aurick, who had already formed severa1 local contacts. He had not found the ELAS officer in charge of the guard company by any means as co-operative as he could have wished. He held, it appeared, the mistaken view that he was responsible for disarming the Nationalist Bands, and likewise that he could continue to carry out his functions in his own way until the National Guard arrived to relive him. He was also maintaining a force of some 200 armed guards instead of the one hundred laid down in the Agreement of Varkiza. Captain Aurick considered that ELAS should confine itself to policing the town, and that for this purposes one hundred was entirely adequate. I therefore interviewed the ELAS officer to give him a more realistic view of his own position, stressing the point that Captain Aurick was the local representative of the Commander-in-Chief, and that he must take orders from him. I also told him that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the disarmament of the Nationalist Bands; that was a matter for the Greek Government and their local representatives, in this case the British troops. No difficulty was being made, however, as to the handing over of the arms surrendered by ELAS, which was due to take place the next day and has since been done.

5. With regard to the disarming of the Nationalist Bands of Anton Tsaous, I found a certain amount of confusion. Two days previously the Officer Commanding H.M.S. "Kimberley" at Kavalla had visited the headquarters of these bands, accompanied by the ELAS officer who had previously commanded the 6th ELAS division at Kavalla, and had told the bands that they must be prepared to surrender their arms the following Sunday, although he had wished in the first place to collect them forthwith. This had caused some perturbation to the Nationalist Bands, who saw themselves disarmed while ELAS still had 200 armed men at their disposal, plus demobilized men who had retained their arms and could be mustered against the Nationalists. Apparently, Captain Aurick dealt with this situation by agreeing that the Nationalists should retain 25% of their arms until ELAS disarmament was completed. Subsequently another British officer, acting independently and on his own initiative, also took a hand in the disarmament of the same Nationalist Bands, but when I left the position was that some measure of co-ordination bad been achieved and the handing over of 75% of the Nationalists’ arms was to take place on the 13th instant. It has in addition since been agreed that, pending the arrival of the National Guards, Nationalists my carry arms north of a given line as a protection against Bulgarian bands.

6. Prior to my leaving Salonica I had sent Anton Tsaous himself and he had raised the question of his return to Drama. I suggested to him that he should remain where he was until such time as Government officials and the National Guard had taken over Drama. This line is clearly advisable, as Anton Tsaous could only return at present under British military protection, which would in itself create a definite impression that we are lending him support. It is in any case, I think, too much to hope for that there will not be further clashes between Nationa1ists and Communists in the Drama area, were the Nationalists are particularly strong in the country districts and have many reasons for taking revenge on their pollitica1 opponents. For this reason I consider Drama the most sensitive spot of all the places visited, and particular attention should be given to it by the Greek authorities. There can be no doubt that complaints of the conduct of both sides are current here to a greater extent than elsewhere. The Nationalists complain that the EP guard are beating up their sympathizers, cutting off their electric light and carrying on propaganda against the Government. EAM/KKE elements, on the other hand, are complaining of attacks made on their members by Nationalists. It was impossible in the short time at my disposal to investigate in any detail the va1idity or these charges, although in the Municipal hospital I found a follower of Anton Tsaous who had been taken prisoner in a recent clash and almost lynched by the mob when he was brought into Drama. Seated by his bed was an ELAS soldier who had been wounded in the same engagement, together with a number of the EP who had been put as guard over the Nationalist. They had buried their quarrels and were perfectly happy together. When I asked the EP guard why he was in charge of a prisoner who had automatically been released under the recent agreement, he pointed to his cap where, in addition to the EP badge, he was disporting the flags of all the Allies and expressed a readiness to serve whatever authority was now the proper one.

7. Stopping again at Drama on the return journey on March 11th, I attempted to see the Nomark and Demark, but it was Sunday and they could not be found; nevertheless, I had a long conversation with the Demark’s assistant, principally about the economic requirements of the town. Each inhabitant was receiving a daily bread ration of 400 grams, the price per ration being 7.5 levas, which is equivalent, at the rate of 6 levas to 1 drachma, to1.25 drachma or 0.5d. Grain, he said, was in very short supply and would only last a short time. When the Bulgarians evacuated, the authorities had managed to retain a quantity or 2,200,000 okes, but some five or six hundred tons of this quantity had had to be distributed for seed to peasants in the mountains and to others whose farms had been burned down. The Assistant Mayor also complained of a shortage of fats, olive oil and sugar, adding that the population as a whole was suffering severely from malnutrition as a result of the Bulgarian occupation when the bread ration had been only half of what it is now and of lower quality. Scabies was said to be rampant among the children due to lack of sugar. My informant considered that the Agreement of Varkiza had been generally welcomed, that the security position in the town was good, but that Anton Tsaous' followers were responsible for disorders outside. I asked him whether he had heard of any complaints about the conduct of the Indian troops in Drama (having heard from Captain Aurick that the communists were beginning a propaganda campaign against them) but he declared that nothing of the sort had came to his hearing. I should add that the report of communist propaganda against the Indian troops is correct, Drama is the only place whore this has occurred. In Western Macedonia the communist policy is to welcome the British and Indian troops, whist turning a comparatively cold shoulder to the National Guard. Subsequent reports received from the military authorities indicate the situation at Drama is developing f'avourably. British troops are increasingly warmly welcomed and the unco-operative ELAS officer in charge of the EP Company has vanished from the scene.

8. Kavalla presented a scene of unwonted activity. The advance party of the 7th Indian Brigade had arrived the previous day to arrange accommodation for the Brigade Headquarters and Battalion that are to follow. On the day of our advent officials M.L. and UNDRA had arrived. The following day, March 9th, H.M.S. “Sirius” and the Greek destroyer “Ierax” entered the port, where H.M.S. "Kimberley" was already moored. The next afternoon an M.L. convoy of 50 trucks arrived, followed on the 11th instant by a food ship, an oil fuel ship and the Governor Genera1 of Eastern Macedonia. It had been intended that the National Guard should arrive on March 13th, but their movement has been subjected to some delay, and the Governor General, rather unwisely, has decided he cannot take over until he has their support. The population of Kavalla showed every sign of friendliness and satisfaction at the turn of events. As elsewhere, they are obviously anxious to resume their ordinary life, and the small minority who still retain a taste for turbulent politics are at present quiet. EAM/KKE have undoubtedly suffered a more than partial eclipse in this communist stronghold, helped by general dissatisfaction at their administration and the accompanying corruption and unfair discrimination. The communist organization, however, is here as elsewhere by no means broken, and will certainly make its presence felt as soon as events present a favourable opportunity.

9. On the morning of March 9th the American Consul-General and I attended a conference between representatives of M.L., UNRRA and the local authorities, represented by the Nomark and Demark. The purpose of the conference was to arrange for the resumption of the distribution of M.L. supplies. The Nomark and the Demark fell in with all suggestions made to them, promised their full support in every direction and self-sacrificingly stressed the point that the country districts were in worse need of help than Kavalla itself. In the course of the conference they mentioned that a delegation had been sent the previous day to Salonica to request the early arrival of Government officials and National Guards to take over the administration of the town. They contended that grain was in very short supply and would suffice the population for a few days only. Up to the present the peasants had been induced to make contributions for feeding the town, but now with the arrival of' M.L. and new authorities they would no longer feel under the same obligation. They stressed, too, the need for clothing, a need which was obvious to the most casual observer.

10. To introduce a little reality into the a1most unnatural friendliness of the proceedings, I enquired as to the whereabouts of three previous employees of M.L. who were known to have been arrested by the ELAS police in December last. The Nomark confessed that two of them had been shot while trying to escape, adding that if we had not intervened in Greek affairs such things would never have been necessary. He was obviously very worried about asking about the third man, Constantine Vardakis, an interpreter who had been arrested in the M.L. office itself, and showed great agitation. After considerable hedging the Demark gave the game away by whispering to him audibly that Vardakas had been shot. I understood that these three persons were members of a group of eleven persons known to have been killed by the EP in December last. I explained to the Monark that there was no comparison between conditions in Kavalla and Athens, and that the shooting of these persons would doubtless be investigated by the Creek judicial authorities, as it might well disclose a common law offence.

11. A visit was then paid to the offices of the Administrative Committee for Eastern Macedonia and Thrace to explain, if need be, the altered circumstances of their existence, but the head of the Committee, Grimbas, had already realized the position for himself. He was prepared to hand over his office immediately to M.L., which had previously occupied them as its headquarters, and produced a declaration which he had already prepared, informing the population that the Committee were handing over their functions to the Governor General and thanking the people for their support. Grimbas also made no difficulty about leaving the house of the manager of the Commercial Tobacco Company, which he and his colleagues had occupied as residential quarter. He gave the impression of a man who was both disappointed and disillusioned, and confessed that previous lack of administrative experience likewise made him little desirous of remaining in office. He took the opportunity, nevertheless, of complaining that the National Guard had searched the house in Salonica occupied by his wife and child, and subjected them to certain rough usage.

12. At Xanthi we were received by the Nomark and Demark and other officials with bouquets of laurels, gifts of their best cigarettes and an invitation to a civic banquet, which time, however, obliged us to decline. They were all quite reconciled to handing over to the Government authorities, and as in other places complained of the delay that was occurring. Politically, they said, the bulk of the population was republican, and there was a movement on foot to form a United Republican Front in conjunction with EAM, to include both Liberals and Progressives. The officer in charge of the EP/ELAS Guard informed us that security in the town was good, but that there had been some cattle stealing in the country districts owing to the absence of any police, and small bands of demobilized Nationalists (others called them demobilized Elastites) had been terrorizing certain villages. He said he was having difficulty in keeping his guard together; they were all anxious to go home without further delay. The food situation in Xanthi appeared from all accounts to be bad, particularly in the mountain districts which were appealing to the town for help. The bread ration was 400 grammes per day, 60% barley. I enquired as to the number of prisoners held, and was told that there were at present 42 in the local gaol, 20 of them on charges of collaboration, amongst whom were some Bulgars and two Bulgarians of Greek nationa1ity. It was said that all hostages had been released after a few days' detention. The police officer asked for my advice regarding two demobilized Bulgarian soldiers whom he had arrested a few days before. They had been found wandering about the countryside, and were in danger of being lynched by the local population. I advised him to hand them over for disposal to the first troops that arrived, considering them prisoners of war.

13. Of all the places, Komotini made the happiest impression. The local officials seemed on excellent terms with the Liberals, a delegation of whom called on us in the Nomark's office. The Nomark confessed to being a member of KKE, but c1aimed that out of eighteen members of the Prefect’s council only two belonged to this party, the remainder being Republican. He also talked about the formation of what he called a "Liberal Republican Party", to include EAM and all Progressive elements. It was proposed, we heard, to hold a protest meeting the next day, to complain of the delay in sending Government officials and the National Guard, but the Liberals we saw said that they had dissociated themselves from this demonstration. Security in the town, we were told, was excellent, though there was some thieving going an outside. The Nomark stated that there were at present 60 prisoners in the local gaol, including six charged with collaboration with the Bulgars and two or three Bulgarians; the rest were common criminals. He also mentioned that one Bulgarian war criminal had been shot. According to him, ten or twelve persons had been arrested preventatively during the recent troubles, all of whom had now been released. The food situation seemed better than elsewhere, although there was the same acute shortage of imported goods and particularly clothing and footwear. From reports received at Komotini it appeared that the situation in the Alexandroupolis and Demotika areas is very similar. Complaints were also made to us of the hardships caused by the inability to trade with Turkey and Bulgaria. Local efforts to renew commercial relations had failed as the present officials were not recognized by those Governments, nor could the question of payment be solved.

14. Throughout the journey one everywhere felt that EAM/KKE is in varying degrees very much on the defensive. It is anxious to prove itself respectable, moderate and patriotic, loyal to the agreement of Varkiza and anxious to co-operate to with republican and liberal elements in forming a common front against monarchists and other so-called reactionaries. But the KKE organization remains in the background unimpaired. The turbulent spirit that animates it is but temporarily repressed, and is ready to assert itself again when conditions are favourable. The demobilization of ELAS has been carried out with the greatest willingness. Most arms have been handed in, though there are many stories of hidden dumps and ultimate designs. Between Serres and Drama we saw a group of seven or eight demobilized ELAS soldiers on the road, and stopped to talk to them. It appeared that they had been disbanded some weeks previously and were then merely returning from a carnival celebration at a neighbouring village. They were extremely friendly and full of pacific intentions. It was noticeable though that EAM – appointed officials were very sensitive to any suggestions of collaboration or even relationship with Bulgarians. They were anxious to appear first and foremost as good Greek patriots, even when their previous association with Bulgarian communists had been matter of common knowledge.

15. There are two aspects of the economic situation that deserve special mention. In the first place, an early decision should be made or the question of currency, for east of the Strimon the leva is still the only circulating medium. To refuse to exchange at least limited quantities of leva into drachma at a reasonable rate will involve a great part of the population in considerable hardship, although even a reasonable rate from the point of view of the Greek Government will cause complaints, as all prices in terms of leva are unreal, the leva enjoying a purely fictitious value owing to its scarcity. Whereas in the rest of Greece currency has undergone a considerable devaluation, here the value of the leva has to a great extent been maintained in a closed economy. It would also seem essential that the Bank of Greece should as soon as possible establish branches throughout the area and make arrangements to give advance on a generous scale against merchandise during the transitional period.

16. The second questions relates to a stock of some 8.5 million kilograms of processed tobacco now ready for sale at Kavalla and elsewhere. This tobacco was bought by the Bulgarian Government from producers at unremunerative prices, and will now presumably be considered the property of the Greek State. Nevertheless, if the proceeds of its sale (and the United States is at the present moment a very interested purchaser) are paid into the Greek treasury there will be considerable local discontent, the producers complaining that they are now being robbed by the Greek Government instead of the Bulgarian Government. A reasonable suggestion for solving this problem has been made by the newly appointed Governor General for Thrace, M. Papathanassis. He suggests that part of the proceeds should be paid as compensation to the producers, and that part should be retained to form a fund for the repatriation and resettlement of refugees from Thrace now temporarily living in other parts of Greece. This proposition merits serious consideration, and it is to be hoped that something on these lines can be arranged.

17. Finally it may be said that, in general, all conditions favourable for the resumption of complete authority in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace by the Greek Government. The only question is whether the Greek Government can rise to the occasion. The principle dangers lie, firstly, in delay, secondly, in the quality of officials who are to assume office, and, thirdly, in the attitude and behaviour of the National Guard. Any ill-considered action on the part of the latter body would strengthen the hands of the extremists and seriously perturb the majority of the population who are now only too anxious to see normal life re-established on a peaceful, orderly basis. Here, as elsewhere, law must once more be made supreme and legal firms observed.

Sir Reginald Leeper, K.C.M.G., C.B.E., His Majesty’s Ambassador, Athens.

British Embassy - ATHENS

March 3rd, 1947

Dear James,

The following is an extract from a letter dated 10th February which we have received from our Consul at Corfu:

“Recently I visited the prison of Corfu where six hundred prisoners are incarcerated, having most been sentenced by the special Collaboration Courts before the coming into force of the Emergency Measures Act of June 1945.

The capacity of the prison is one hundred and thirty prisoners and of the present inmates three hundred and thirty-three are communists and eight-five were convicted of normal crime.

By interrogation it was ascertained that while in Salonika Prison, prisoners awaiting transportation to Corfu sent a list of their names to “ORIM” an organization founded in 1903 for the independence of Macedonia, address:- Secretary Nicholaos Papa, Anastasio Rallis (a school teacher) 9 Dean Street, Toronto, Canada, One hundred cheques of twenty dollars each have since been received by various prisoners from this source which were dispatched from Toronto in the name if individuals and not of the organization, although the accompanying letters are all written in the same handwriting.

This organization is alleged to have assisted one hundred and thirty-two families from the village of Vasiliyadis near Kastoria, to immigrate to Canada and pre-war distributed funds via Bulgaria. It is said that the procedure in 1932-1933 was for Macedonians in Greece to immigrate to Canada via Istanbul and Sofia whence they continued their journey provided with Bulgarian passports.”

We have no evidence here to support or deny this story of the activities of “ORIM”, but we think you may like to know about it and look into it.

We should very much like to know the outcome of any enquiries you may make, meanwhile we also will attempt to find more.

Yours ever, (signed) John Tahourdin.

J. George, Esq.,
Canadian Embassy, Athens

British Embassy Belgrade

April 15, 1947

I was greatly interested to read what Frank Roberts had to say in his letter of the 3rd of February to you about his conversation with Quaroni, and I have now had an opportunity to think about your letter N. 2364/389/38 of the 26th February on the same subject.

2. I must own to a certain diffidence in expressing my views on a question of the kind that after being in this country for comparatively so short a time, and, to adapt a saying of Pascal, I don’t as yet know enough to write you a short letter, and I must ask you to bear with a long one.

3. In the first place, Yugoslavia to my mind represents an entirely different picture from that displayed by any other European country except Russia. Here Communism hiding under the cloak of the National Liberation Movement, has won an outright victory and reigns unchallenged. Before, therefore, attempting to answer Quaroni’s question, it is perhaps worth while taking a brief glance at the past, to see how the present situation in Yugoslavia came about.

4. When, in 1941, Tito began to organize the armed rising, which took place in June of that year, although in all probability he was acting in complete independence of Moscow, yet he must have been confident of eventual Russian support since he had been trained in Moscow where he seems to have been regarded as an excellent organizer and an able and far sighted man. Little was known of him in his own country, except by his fellow communists, nor had he made - for himself a reputation as a military leader, for, contrary to popular belief, he was never in Spain at the time of the Civil war, during which he sat at Besancon organizing a depot for recruits and supplies. But when his hour struck he quickly proved himself to be a commander of genius, with a remarkable power of injecting enthusiasm and a sense of unity into all manner of diverse elements, and welding them into a Movement of National Liberation. Not the least of his achievements was the programme which resulted from the Jajce Congress of November 1943. It was not a communist programme, the emphasis being entirely upon the new and national Yugoslavia. One of its avowed aims was to put an end to the persecution and internecine strife that had always been an element of disruption in the country between the two great wars. It had, that is to say, a strong element of reputable nationalism. This was the alternative he offered to his countrymen who, if they wished to play their part in ridding their country of the invader, had either to throw in their lot with him or to join Mihailovic, whose aim was to restore the monarchy, and with it the old dominance of Serbia in the tripartite kingdom.

5. The result was that there rallied to Tito's side many who were fired by the ideal of a united Yugoslavia in which internal strife would cease and all efforts would be bent to increasing the country's prosperity and position in the world. The majority of these did not, and I believe do not care a fig for theoretical communism. Many, indeed, must dislike it, and this, I think, applies in large measure to the, Army where, however, the officers owe their social position to Tito, without whom they would revert to being errand boys and boot blacks. But they also put up with it because they are imbued with the Slav ideal; their thoughts are bent on their country, its expansion end its hegemony in the Balkans, and they believe that this regime has a better chance of achieving these aims than any other. In short, it was not least by his ability to project the one idea which could attract and hold these differing elements that Tito was able to make himself Prime Minister or the first united Yugoslavia in 1945. The rest is soon told. The young communists who had been in and out of prison with him before the war and who had shared with him the perils and difficulties of his campaigns were quickly moved into key positions, and the regime was started on its way. Here it is, and here it looks like staying. Tito's own power has waned while that or his associates has waxed, but his position in the country, end still more with the Army, remains undiminished and continues to be built up.

6. The reason is easy to see. This is a minority government, and it is well aware of the fact. It enjoys complete power, and is determined, come what may, to hold on to it. But to remain in power it is necessary first and foremost to be sure of the Army, in which communists are by no means in the majority. This is where Tito is a godsend to the Government, and it is one of the chief reasons why his prestige must at all costs be maintained. To the Army he is presented not as a communist but as a great military leader by whom his country achieved its freedom. Indeed, in this one respect only Stalin and Russia are pushed into the background. To the army it is nothing but Tito all the time. The marching songs sung by the Yugoslav soldiers as they go about their business have for their sole theme the exploits of the Marshal, his tribulations, his battles and his victories. The nationalist ideas in the Jajce programme are kept constantly before them, and their gaze is directed as much externally to the territorial expansion of Yugoslavia as it is internally to the liquidation of Yugoslav political opponents of the present regime. No effort is, or course, being spared to indoctrinate the rising generation with the communist creed, but some years must pass before there is on Army which can be counted on for certain to be politically reliable. Until this happens Tito as a leader is indispensable and the nationalist sentiments of the army are given full rein and even encouraged in every way. It is worth recording that the Russians have themselves encouraged such sentiments. Marshal Tolbukin stayed a minimum of time in this country and, as far as we can judge, with an eye to the morale of the Yugoslav Army made every effort to withdraw his troops as quickly as possible. The Russians at that time went so far as to put it about that some victories which they themselves gained had been the work of the Partisans. They would obviously go to particular lengths in this direction in the early days when they were anxious to build up the regime. Their policy does not however seem radically to have changed in the intervening period. The Russian military instructors here are kept fairly discreetly in the background and the Yugoslav army certainly could not complain that it does not receive sufficient encouragement and praise from Russian sources.

7. This then is the historical background against which we have to judge the political thought and tendencies of the present government. The relevant points are, I think

(i) The regime built itself without Russian assistance. It would be too much to say that the Russians allowed Tito and his colleagues wide latitude; in their curious ignorance of Balkan affairs during the war they scarcely seemed to have noticed Tito until a fairly, late date. On the, other hand he was himself sufficiently confident of eventual support to take very far reaching decisions on his own authority.

(ii) The regime's strongest appeal in its early days rested upon nationalist sentiment in various forms. Among the population as a whole nationalism is a confused and often parochial feeling. The Slovenes irrespective of party feel very deeply about Trieste. The Macedonians don't, but feel intensely about Salonika. Both of them loathe the Montenegrins. But Yugoslav nationalism, as opposed to regional nationalism, remains a, very potent force in the Communist Party and in the Army upon which the Party depends for its hold on the county.

8. So much for history and now for the present. No one here would think of denying that the present rulers of Yugoslavia are all convinced and many of them fanatical communists. It may seem a platitude to add that they must therefore believe in communism, but I think we sometimes forget the implications of this obvious conclusion. To Tito and his colleagues communism is not simply an intellectual theory and it has not been watered down as it must have been, for example, among many French and Italian communists by other intellectual influences. I suspect in fact that Yugoslav communism keeps at the moment far more closely to the classical principles of Leninism than does the brand of communism now favoured in the Kremlin. Yugoslav communists have a much more recent experience of persecution for their faith than have the Russians. They seem to me to believe in communism as the answer not only to internal economic- problems but also, according to the old Marxist theory, as the answer to all problems of foreign affairs. They believe that whenever another neighbouring country becomes communist it will cease, to harbour imperialist designs against Yugoslav territory; it will run its own internal affairs more efficiently; it will produce more exports for other countries including Yugoslavia; it will raise its own standard of living and will be a better potential market for the goods; which Yugoslavia can now export and for the larger quantity, which she hopes to be able to export after completion of the 5-year plan; finally, being communist it will be more sympathetic and accommodating to Yugoslavia's needs, and relations with it, being conducted by two communist governments, will be immeasurably easier. In short, we must assume that the Yugoslav communists believe that whenever another country becomes communist this process represents a direct and immediate benefit to Yugoslavia.

9. At the same time we are all agreed that the Yugoslav Government is intensely nationalist. It is not merely that they depend for their support upon that strongly nationalist organization, the army. Their own nationalism is perfectly genuine. The first symptom is intense pride in what their country has done during the war and confidence in their plans for the future. The relevant aspect of their nationalism is, however, that they desire:

(a) maximum prosperity at home in the form of a secure agricultural basis to the country's economy and the fulfillment of far-reaching plans far industrialization.

(b) international prestige;

(c) territorial expansion;

10. As I have indicated above the Yugoslav communists must believe that maximum prosperity at home is attainable only when communism has embraced as many countries as possible, when all countries are making the best use of their productive facilities and when having shed the gross prejudices which some Governments still seem to harbour, all countries are ready to trade with Yugoslavia upon the sort of terms which suit the Yugoslav Government's taste.

11. The Yugoslav communists must have just as much reason to believe that their international prestige is also to be attained in the same way. Here indeed I think they are perfectly right. This prestige exists at the moment only among communist parties and fellow travelers and in countries which are governed by communists. The press they get in Italy and Greece is as bad as the press they get in Albania and Bulgaria is good. We all know how long this state of affairs would last if Italy and Greece fell under a communist government. In short, the more communism there is in the world the more prestige for communist Yugoslavia. This must be qualified to the extent that if a major European country became communist Yugoslavia would obviously lose the position which she now seems to hold as the second most influential communist country. But you will find my answer to this qualification in paragraph l5 below.

12. When we turn to Yugoslavia's territorial ambitions it is harder to determine whether there is a conflict between the claims of communism and nationalism. I do not, however, believe that there is such a conflict. Of the 4 major Yugoslav territorial claims, three are now being prosecuted against non-communist governments and one against a communist government. There has been much speculation whether the prosecution of territorial claims against Italy, Austria and Greece is in the interests of world communism. It is obvious that such claims strengthen the anti-communist feeling in these three countries. It may be that the body which has, replaced the Comintern took account of this, but whether or not it did, one thing seems to me comparatively clear. Yugoslavia's three territorial claims against non-communist Governments ore not going to be disappointed because the Comintern's successor has decided that it' is better tactics to help the Italian, Greek and Austrian Communist Parties. They are going to be disappointed because the, non-communist forces in the world look like being strong enough, at any rate at the moment, to prevent their realization. We here have sometimes thought that the Russians might take pains to avoid embarrassing the Italian Communist Party over the Trieste question. They do not appear to have done so. On the contrary they pressed Yugoslav claims to Trieste, firmly and stubbornly and appear to have relinquished their pressure only when they were certain that it had failed. They and communist parties in other countries are supporting Yugoslavia's Austrian claims with a similar, disregard for the repercussions which such claims may have upon the success of communism in Austria. Finally, although Russian intentions in Macedonia are obscure they have, to say the least, not discouraged Yugoslav and Bulgarian claims on Greece which must be a great embarrassment to the Greek communist party. In fact, they seem so far definitely to have decided to back the really safe horse of a communist Yugoslav Government and not to trust themselves to the uncertainties, of public opinion in Greece, Austria and Italy where, in the absence of communist Governments, public opinion is still an important factor.

13. We do not, of course, know how Yugoslavia’s territoria1 claims would fare if Greece, Austria and Italy became communist. It might be that once they secured power the Communalist Governments of those countries would become just as nationalist as the Yugoslav Government and would be unwilling to make any territorial cession. But one thing is quite clear. So long as the Governments in these three countries are not communist and provided that they receive sufficient support from non-communist forces in the West there is no chance whatever of their ceding territory. If we exclude the possibility of a complete economic collapse of the non-communist forces of Europe it is therefore clear that only through the spread of communism and the emergence of further communist Governments will there arise any prospect at all of the satisfaction of Yugoslav territorial claims. Their chance of securing territory from communist Greek, Austrian or Italian governments may be less than they suppose, but at least cannot be as small as their chance of securing such territory under the present dispensation.

14. I think this argument is supported by the manner in which Yugoslav claims have been prosecuted against Bulgaria. These claims have, I think, provoked some press reaction in Sofia but not, as far as I know, the governmental reaction to which all other Yugoslav claims have given rise. I world not base an argument too strongly upon any aspect of the Macedonian question because as I have said, I find Russian intentions in this regard very obscure. But it seems at least possible that the communist Bulgarian Government are ready or have been compelled to promise territory to the communist Yugoslav Government.

15. To sum up it seems to me that the Yugoslav Government believe and have good reason for believing that their national interests as defined in paragraph 9 above are inseparable from the spread of communism over the world. I should be surprised if they made any great distinction between the expansion of communism and the expansion of Russian influence and domination. They believe I think, that if the whole of Europe embraced communism they would find themselves as a senior partner of the Balkan Federation (whether or not the technical procedure of Federation was carried out). This, I think, the answer to the qualification which I made at the end of paragraph 11 above. Yugoslavia would obviously have to cede the second place in the communist hierarchy to, e. g. a communist France, but I think the Yugoslav Government much too hard-headed to nurse unlimited ambitions. As the head of a Balkan Federation in a communist Europe they could enjoy, or at any rate would expect to enjoy, considerably more prestige and influence than their country has possessed for centuries, and they would not, I am sure, hope for more than this. They may from time to time have to put the brake on nationalist exuberance among their supporters. For example, the shooting down of the American aircraft last September, appeared to me to be an outburst of such exuberance on the part of the army which caused considerable embarrassment to the Government. But I believe that the Government are ready to wait a long time for the realization of their hopes. So long, therefore, as communism is an expanding force, and so long as they are not disillusioned in the belief that it is a valid economic theory I do not believe that serious conflict is likely to arise between the claims of international communism and of Yugoslav communist nationalism. I have certainly no person to believe that such a conflict has yet arisen.

16. I believe that a fundamental change of circumstances is required to create conditions in which such a conflict might arise. The best example I can think of is the possibility of a serious failure of the present Soviet 5-year plan, which would, I presume first put the strongest brake upon the present Russian policy of dynamic expansion, and secondly give Russia serious reason to consider plundering all the satellites for her own benefit. Such conditions might well cause both some measure of disillusion among Yugoslav communists, and a direct and serious conflict of interest between Yugoslav nationalism and international communism, of which the latter's first object being presumably to render assistance to Russia. This is, of course, a matter of speculation and I cannot say whether even in such circumstances Belgrade would attempt to refuse any demand which Moscow seriously pressed. I can, in fact, only give you a few general ideas which I think govern every-day relations. The first is that the Yugoslav Government seem to enjoy as much confidence as the Soviet Government are ever likely to give to any organization outside Russia. As I have said above, Tito assumed authority during the war for far- reaching decisions in the confidence that they would later be approved. The Yugoslav Government are still, I believe, trusted by Moscow to take the right course in most fields of administration without too much instruction or advice. At the same time, if and when instructions are received they have some, and probably fairly wide powers of “arguing back”. Their relation to Moscow is indeed probably very similar to that of a senior colonial governor. They are trusted and known to be working in the same direction. They can represent, very strongly at times, that local conditions made certain courses of action desirable and they know that such representations will be considered. In the last resort they will carry out instructions. Secondly, we should remember that Yugoslavia is now very useful to Russia as a source of imports, as a spearhead of the attack in international organizations and as a show piece of communism outside Russia. So far as the Russians consider unselfishly the needs of any Government it must be the Yugoslav Government.

17. These two rules may govern every day relations but would probably break down in the event of a serious clash of interests. But there as a third rule which would, however, obtain even during such a conflict. This is that the Yugoslav Government must depend to a very large extent upon Russian support for its internal position. At the moment there is no need for aggressive Russian support to keep the country held down, but one of the most potent factors which has prevented active opposition is the wide-spread belief that even if the Army could be penetrated or neutralized the Russians would still return and re-impose Tito by force of arms. If the regime were ever to lose Russian support the possibilities of a revolution would be very greatly increased, a fact which the regime could certainly not afford to ignore.

18. After Saying all this I need hardly add that at present I see no chance whatsoever of useful encouragement to national as opposed to international communists. I shall of course bear the matter in mind and let you know If I see any reason to change the conclusions I have now reached.

19. I am sending copies of this letter to Frank Roberts, Ashley Clark, Ward and Nichols.

C.F.A. Warner, Esq., CMG, Foreign Office, London, S.W.l.

[Daskalot]

I have joined all these topics into one and rearranged them so that they are in the right order.
It is easier to read all documents this way.
I hope you guys do not mind.

[George S.]

NOT another Greek lie??

The Myth of Greek Ethnic 'Purity'

Macedonia and Greece,

John Shea, 1997 pp.77-96



THE GREAT ETHNIC MIX OF GREECE



Just as Macedonia and other Balkan states were invaded by Slavs and other peoples from the north and from within the Balkans themselves, so were the lands that eventually were to become modern Greece. We need to examine this issue, since the modern Greeks repeatedly argue that they are direct ethnic descendants of the ancient Greeks and Macedonians. The fact is that the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural developments that these invasions created simply built upon similar movements of peoples into and out of the Balkans in the ancient past.



THE MYTH OF GREEK ETHNIC PURITY



Greek writers give a great deal of emphasis to the idea of Greek racial purity. For instance, in speaking of the movements of Germanic tribes in the Balkans before the Slavs, the writer of Macedonia History and Politics says that the Goths were beaten off and the invasions in the fourth century did not lead to "ethnological adulteration." In speaking about more modern times the writer says (p. 43), "Greece became involved in the 'Macedonian disputes,' because of political pressure from the Bulgarians and Yugoslavs, and because of the sensitivity of the Greeks towards the historical continuity of their race." Clearly this view about racial purity amongst the Greeks, presented here in a magazine distributed by the Greek government in English-speaking countries, is important to the Greeks.



Macedonia has been represented as a buffer protecting Hellenism from the waves of the barbarians throughout the centuries. Thus it is argued by modern Greeks that the area of the present-day Republic of Macedonia was affected by these barbarian invasions, but the lands that are now Greece were largely unaffected.'



The Greek insistence on ethnological purity for its people is not unusual among expressions of nationalism. The American political scientist Buck explained that the notion of physical kinship implied in the word "nation" is the most conspicuous element in the popular conception of nationality. However, it is also the least realistic. Buck points out that we have only to think of the extent of invasion and colonization that has occurred in nearly every corner of Europe to realize that this notion could at best be only approximate. More importantly, from the viewpoint of historical analysis, it is not possible to demonstrate national family connections. Recorded descent is at best restricted to a few families that are notable for some reason or another. All that can be shown convincingly is linguistic descent, but this is often taken as evidence of national descent.'



Anthony D. Smith points out, specifically in reference to the modern Greek nation, "Greek demographic continuity was brutally interrupted in the late sixth to eighth centuries A.D. by massive influxes of Avar, Slav and later, Albanian immigrants." He adds that modern Greeks "could hardly count as being of ancient Greek descent, even if this could never be ruled out.”

It seems clear that Greek nationalists do not wish to examine evidence concerning the present state within Greece that may reflect on this question about the reality of ethnic purity. The editor of The Times, long the most prestigious of British newspapers, wrote in August 1993: "Since 1961, no Greek census has carried details of minorities. This is because successive Greek governments, ‘a la mode japonaise,' subscribe to a myth of homogeneity. Today, the historical refusal to acknowledge ethnic or cultural plurality has transmogrified into a refusal to accept political dissent in relation to these ethnic or cultural questions."



Simon Mcllwaine writes, "Modern Greek identity is based on an unshakable conviction that the Greek State is ethnically homogenous. This belief ... has entailed repeated and official denial of the existence of minorities which are not of 'pure' Hellenic origin. The obsession with Greek racial identity involves the distortion of the history of the thousands of years when there was no such thing as a Greek nation state.



Many of the views that follow explain that, whether the Greeks feel comfortable with the idea or not, their peoples are of diverse ethnic background, a great mix of the peoples of the Balkans, and have been for the past several thousand years. If all of the peoples of the Balkans were subjected to mixture of varying degrees with the invaders, as was certainly the case, then the argument might readily be made that modern-day Greeks are no more ethnically related to early Greeks than present-day Macedonians are to ancient Macedonians.



Ancient Greeks. A common assumption is that ancient peoples were ethnically homogenous. As has already been noted with regard to the peoples of Macedonia, the kingdom was undoubtedly a great mix of people, and the diversity increased with the expansion of the Macedonian Empire. There was probably a comparable mix of peoples in various Greek city-states. While the Greeks who came into the Balkan peninsula became the dominant people in that area, strong influences from the earlier inhabitants remained. "For certain areas of the Greek mainland and many of the islands, the names of some fifteen pre-Greek peoples are preserved in ancient traditions, together with a number of other references.



A widely accepted view is that the Indo-European language moved into Greece from Anatolia with the spread of agriculture around 7000 B.C.6 Thus a dialect of Indo-European would have been the language of the Neolithic cultures of Greece and the Balkans in the fifth and fourth millennia. There were also infiltrations or invasions from the north by Indo-European speakers sometime during the fourth or third millennium B.C.



Bernal suggests an explanation of ancient Greek development in terms of what he calls "the ancient model." Classical, Hellenistic, and later, pagan Greeks from the fifth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. believed their ancestors had been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonization and the later influence of Greek study in Egypt. Up to the eighteenth century A.D., Egypt was seen as the fount of all "Gentile" philosophy and learning, including that of the Greeks, and it was believed that the Greeks had managed to preserve only a part of this wisdom. Bernal suggests that the sense of loss that this created, and the quest to recover the lost wisdom, were major motives in the development of science in the seventeenth century.



Bernal argues that the ancient model was accepted by historians from antiquity till the nineteenth century, and was rejected then only for anti-Semitic and racist reasons. He sees the Egyptian and Phoenician influence on ancient Greeks as beginning in the first half of the second millennium B.C. He concludes that Greek civilization is the result of the cultural mixtures created by these colonizations and later borrowings from across the eastern Mediterranean. These borrowings from Egypt and the Levant occurred in the second millennium B.C. or in the thousand years from 2100 to 1100 B.C., which Bernal suggests is the period during which Greek culture was formed! "The Ancient Greeks, though proud of themselves and their recent accomplishments, did not see their political institutions, science, philosophy or religion as original. Instead they derived them - through the early colonization and later study by Greeks abroad - from the east in general and Egypt in particular."



"Pelasgians" is the name generally given by ancient writers to the peoples before the Hellenes. According to both Herodotus and Thucyclides, Pelasgians formed the largest element of the early population of Greece and the Aegean, and most of them were gradually assimilated by the Hellenes. Herodotus saw this transformation as following the invasion by Danaos (the Egyptian), which he took to be around the middle of the second millennium B.C. Herodotus stated that the Egyptian Danaids taught the Pelasgians (not the Hellenes) the worship of the gods." The idea that the Pelasgians were the native population, converted to something more "Greek" by the invading Egyptians, also occurs in the plays of Aischylos and Euripides, written around the same time as Herodotus' Histories.



The Ionians were one of the two great tribes of Greece, the other being the Dorians. In classical times the Ionians lived in a band across the Aegean from Attica to "Ionia on the Anatolian shore ... Herodotus linked the Pelasgians to the lonians."



Tiberius Claudius wrote about the movements of some Greek tribes into the Balkan peninsula:

“Among these Celts, if the word is to have any significance, (are included) even the Achaean Greeks, who had established themselves for some time in the Upper Danube Valley before pushing southward into Greece. Yes, the Greeks are comparative newcomers to Greece. They displaced the native Pelasgians ... This happened not long before the Trojan War; the Dorian Greeks came still later -eighty years after the Trojan War. Other Celts of the same race invaded France and Italy at about the same time."



With regard to what is now called the Dorian Invasion, Bernal notes that in ancient times this was much more frequently called "the return of the Heraklids." The Dorians came from the northwestern fringes of Greece, which had been less affected by the Middle Eastern culture of the Mycenaean palaces which they destroyed. Their use of the name Heraklids was a claim not only to divine descent from Herakles, but also to Egyptian and Phoenician royal ancestors. This is not simply a modern theory. Ancient sources show that the descendants of these conquerors, the Dorian kings of classical and Hellenistic times, believed themselves to be descended from Egyptians and Phoenicians."



Bernal argues that the explanation of Greek development in terms of Egyptian and Phoenician influences was overthrown for external reasons, not because of major internal deficiencies or weaknesses in the original explanation, but because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantics and racists could not tolerate the idea that the crown jewel of European civilization owed its beginnings to a racial mix of cultures. For such reasons the ancient model had to be discarded and replaced by something more acceptable to the political and academic views of the time.



The Aryan model



The Aryan model, an alternative theory about the development of the ancient Greeks, first appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century. It denied any influence of Egyptian settlements and expressed doubt about a role for the Phoenicians. An extreme version of this model was propounded during the height of anti-Semitism in Europe in the 1890s, and then in the 1920s and 1930s; this particular explanation denied even the Phoenician cultural influence." According to the Aryan model, there had been an invasion from the north, an invasion not described by ancient writers, which had overcome the existing pre-Hellenic culture. Greek civilization was seen as the result of the mixture of the Indo-European speaking Hellenes and the older peoples over whom they ruled.



Bernal argues that four forces explain the overthrow of the ancient model as a description of the beginnings of Greek culture: Christian reaction to the threat of Egyptian ideas, the rise of the concept of "progress," the growth of racism, and Romantic Hellenism .16 In particular, a tidal wave of ethnicity and racialism swept over northern Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. The view was established that humankind was made up of races that were intrinsically unequal in physical and mental endowment. Racial mixing could lead to degradation of the better human qualities. To be creative, a civilization needed to be "racially pure." It became accepted that only people who lived in temperate climates - that is, Europeans - could really think. Thus the idea that "Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, [could be] the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites" could not be tolerated. 17 By the turn of the eighteenth century, the so-called "European" Greeks were considered to have been more sensitive and artistic than the Egyptians and were seen as the better philosophers, even the founders of philosophy. By the end of the nineteenth century, some popular German writers had come to see the Dorians as pure-blooded Aryans from the north, possibly even from Germany. The Dorians were certainly seen as very close to the Germans in their Aryan blood and character. Significant British historians of the time also were enthusiastic about the supposedly pure northern, and possibly Germanic, blood of the Dorians.



These ideas were developing in Europe in the same period as the Greek War of Independence, which united all Europeans against the traditional Islamic enemies from Asia and Africa. This war and the philhellenic movement throughout Europe and North America, which supported the struggle for independence, helped refine the existing image of Greece as the epitome of Europe. Paradoxically, the more the nineteenth century admired the ancient Greeks, the less it respected their writing of their own history.



Linguistic evidence and the ancient model



Bernal provides evidence in support of his view that Egyptian and Phoenician elements were powerful in the development of ancient Greek culture. He notes that it is generally agreed that the Greek language was formed during the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries B.C. Its Indo-European structure and basic lexicon are combined with a non-Indo-European vocabulary of sophistication. He argues that since the earlier population spoke a related Indo-European language, it left little trace in Greek; thus the presence of that population does not explain the many non-Indo-European elements in the later language. Bernal suggests that it has not been possible for scholars working in the Aryan model over the last 160 years to explain 50 percent of the Greek vocabulary and 80 per cent of proper names in terms of either Indo-European or the Anatolian languages supposedly related to "pre-Hellenic." Since they cannot explain them, they simply call them pre-Hellenic.



Bernal suggests to the contrary: that much of the non-Indo-European element can be plausibly derived from Egyptian and West Semitic and that this would fit very well with a long period of domination by Egypto-Semitic conquerors. He claims that up to a quarter of the Greek vocabulary can be traced to Semitic origins (which for the most part means the Phoenicians), 40 to 50 percent seems to have been Indo-European, and a further 20 to 25 percent comes from Egyptian, as well as the names for most Greek gods and many place names. Thus 80 to 90 percent of the vocabulary is accounted for, as high a proportion as one can hope for in any language.



Bernal argues that the Indo-European component of the Greek lexicon is relatively small. There is a low proportion of word roots with cognates in any other Indo-European language. Further, the semantic range in which the Indo European roots appear in Greek is very much the same as that of Anglo-Saxon roots in English, another culture strongly influenced by invaders (in this case, the French-speaking Normans). These roots provide most pronouns and prepositions, most of the basic nouns and verbs of family, and many terms of subsistence agriculture. By contrast, the vocabulary of urban life, luxury, religion, administration, political life, commercial agriculture and abstraction is non-Indo-European. Bernal points out that such a pattern usually reflects a long-term situation in which speakers of the language which provides the words of higher culture control the users of the basic lexicon. For example, he claims that in Greek the words for chariot, sword, bow, march, armor, and battle are non-Indo-European. Bernal explains that river and mountain names are the toponyms that tend to be the most persistent in any country. In England, for instance, most of these are Celtic, and some even seem to be pre-Indo-European. The presence of Egyptian or Semitic mountain names in ancient Greek would therefore indicate a very profound cultural penetration. Bernal presents many examples of these and notes that the insignificant number of Indo-European city names in Greece, and the fact that plausible Egyptian and Semitic derivations can be found for most city names, suggest an intensity of contact that cannot be explained in terms of trade.



Bernal maintains that when all sources, such as legends, place names, religious cults, language and the distribution of linguistic and script dialects, are taken into account alongside archaeology, the ancient model, with some slight variations, is plausible today. He discusses equations between specific Greek and Egyptian divinities and rituals, and the general ancient belief that the Egyptian forms preceded the others, that the Egyptian religion was the original one. He says that this explains the revival of the purer Egyptian forms in the fifth century B.C." The classical and Hellenistic Greeks themselves maintained that their religion came from Egypt, and Herodotus even specified that the names of the gods were almost all Egyptian.



Using linguistic, cultural, and written references, Bernal presents interesting evidence connecting the first foundation of Thebes directly or indirectly to eleventh-dynasty Egypt. He argues that both the city name Athenai and the divine name Athene or Atena derive from Egyptian, and offers evidence to substantiate this claim. He traces the name of Sparta to Egyptian sources, as well as detailing relationships between Spartan and Egyptian mythology. He says that much of the uniquely Spartan political vocabulary can be plausibly derived from late Egyptian and that early Spartan art has a strikingly Egyptian appearance. For Bernal, all these ideas link up with the Spartan kings' belief in their Heraklid - hence Egyptian or Hyksos - ancestry, and would therefore account for observations such as the building of a pyramid at Menelaion, the Spartan shrine, and the letter one of the last Spartan kings wrote to the high priest in Jerusalem, claiming kingship with him.



Bernal claims that there has been a movement, led mainly by Jewish scholars, to eliminate anti-Semitism in the writing of ancient history, and to give the Phoenicians due credit for their central role in the formation of Greek culture. A return to the ancient model is less clear with regard to Egyptian influence. However, Bernal proposes that the weight of the Aryan model's own tradition and the effect of academic inertia have been weakened by startling evidence showing that the Bronze Age civilizations were much more advanced and cosmopolitan than was once thought, and that in general the ancient records are more reliable than more recent reconstructions. He believes the ancient model will be restored at some point in the early twenty-first century. For our purposes it is sufficient to note that even the current acknowledgment of the significance of Phoenician influence in the formation of ancient Greek culture indicates some of the ethnic mix that made up ancient Greece.



INFLUENCES IN THE GREEK ETHNIC MIX



Slavery in the ancient world



While it is difficult to gauge the intermixture that took place between the older established inhabitants and the infiltrating Greeks wherever they may have come from, the tradition of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean may have had an even greater impact on the physical nature of the people. It has been estimated that in classical times the number of slaves in Attica was roughly equal to the number of free inhabitants, or around 100,000." In Sparta there was an even greater proportion of slaves, and most of them, the helots, were Messenians. While the slaves of Athens were a wide racial mix and therefore less likely to unite on the basis of a common language, these Messenian helots of Sparta all spoke Greek, and had a kind of group self-consciousness. Thus they presented "special problems of security for their Spartan masters, whose numbers were constantly on the decline."



Changes in the ethnic composition of Greek city-states are illustrated by the comments about the case of Piso. Piso, who had been the recipient of an unhelpful decision by a vote of the Athenian city assembly,



"made a violent speech in which he said that the latter-day Athenians had no right to identify themselves with the great Athenians of the days of Pericles, Demosthenes, Aeschylus, and Plato. The ancient Athenians had been extirpated by repeated wars and massacres and these were mere mongrels, degenerates, and the descendants of slaves. He said that any Roman who flattered them as if they were the legitimate heirs of those ancient heroes was lowering the dignity of the Roman name."



Such historical ideas make it clear that even two thousand years ago the notion of ethnic purity amongst the Greeks was difficult to sustain. The ethnic mix continued over the next two thousand years. As Nicol has observed, "The ancient Greeks were, after all, of very mixed ancestry; and there can be no doubt that the Byzantine Greeks, both before and after the Slav occupation, were even more heterogeneous.”



Celtic Influence



In 282-280 B.C., a Celtic army of about 170,000 led by Brennos and Achicorius entered Macedonia and, with Bolgios, overwhelmed the country. The Celtic army swept into Greece, defeating the Greeks at Thermopylae, and went on to sack the temple of Delphi, the most sacred site of the Hellenic world, before withdrawing. The Celtic army eventually withdrew in an orderly manner, taking their loot with them. No Greek army was strong enough to attack them. The Celtic invasions had a lasting effect on Greek consciousness, being commemorated in Greek literature.



Though some remained as mercenaries, the bulk of the Celtic armies moved north again, having found little room to settle in populated Greece and Macedonia. The Celts remained in Thrace, though they were Hellenized. The Scordisci had established a prosperous and strong kingdom around modern Belgrade, and one Celtic tribe settled on the slopes of Haemos. However, most went further north and east, some even settling in Asia Minor, in Galatia.



Greeks as Slavs



In recent historical time other Europeans have held the view that the people of modern Greece have little ethnic connection with the ancient Greeks. Robert Browning, 32 a writer who is sympathetic to the Greeks, discusses the writings of the Bavarian Johann Philipp Fallmerayer, who in 1830 proposed that the Slav invasions and settlements of the late sixth and seventh centuries resulted in the "expulsion or extirpation of the original population of peninsula Greece. Consequently the medieval and modern Greeks ... are not the descendants of the Greeks of antiquity, and their Hellenism is artificial." Fallmerayer's view that not a drop of pure Greek blood is to be found in the modern Greek is often held to be extreme. A more moderate version of essentially the same idea was presented more recently by R.H. Jenkins.



Browning concedes that the Slavic impact was considerable in the Balkan Peninsula, and that there was great intermixture of races in Balkan Greek lands. He says Fallnierayer wits right in drawing attention to the extensive Slav invasion and settlement in continental Greece. Despite the great attention given by the Greek government to renaming towns, villages, rivers and other geographic locations, there remain large numbers of place names of Slavonic origin. Even so, Browning suggests, the majority of the Greek-speaking people lived in Constantinople and Asia Minor, and in these more distant locations were not so strongly affected by the Slavs. He says also that the original population was not extirpated or expelled, since many remained in coastal regions, cities, and inaccessible areas.



Nicholas Cheetham is uncompromising in the language he uses to describe the Slav influence. He says that between the fifth and seventh centuries "a sharp and brutal revolution altered the whole character of Hellas... It also involved a steep decline of civilized life and an almost total rejection of former values... The most striking change affected the ethnic composition of the people and resulted from the mass migration of Slavs into the Balkans which began in the sixth Century.”



Cheetham explains that the eastern emperor held back the Slavs for decades. For instance, the emperor Constans II (642-68) successfully forced back the "Macedonian Slavs" (as Cheetham calls them) who were threatening Thessalonika. Later Constans' grandson, Justinian II, undertook a major campaign against the Slavs and settled many in Asia. But in the end there was a continuous infiltration followed by settlement. It seems that earthquakes and the bubonic plague had thinned the population on the eve of the Slav invasion. After the great plague of 744-747, Constantinople was repopulated with Greeks from the Balkan peninsula and the islands, and this may have made even more room for the newcomers. The land was re-peopled, Cheetham says. The Slavs occupied the fertile plains and river valleys, while the original peoples were forced into the numerous mountain ranges. The Slavs remained rural dwellers, so the cities may have suffered less from their arrival. The Slav settlements extended the length and breadth of the Balkan peninsula. They overran the "whole of Greece," and more, Cheetham says. Their influence extended across the Balkans from the Danube to Cape Tainaron. In the process, Roman authority was submerged, and the remnants of classical culture and the Christian religion were extinguished. There were few areas remaining where the Greeks predominated, though at least in those early times Thessalonika was one of them. In the eighth century Strabonos Epithomatus wrote, "And now, in that way almost all of Epirus, Hellada, the Peloponnese and Macedonia have also been settled by the Skiti-Slavs." In general, the lands that had been Greek in ancient times were commonly regarded by foreigners as a Slav preserve.



In 805 the Slavs came under imperial control. They learned the ways of Roman citizens and were probably being attracted to Christianity. Eventually, peasant farmers from Asia minor were brought in to re-colonize coastal plains and river valleys of "Hellas." Those Slavs who did not assimilate were gradually pushed back into the more rugged and inhospitable regions of the interior.



The distinction between Romans and assimilated Slavs became blurred. As early as 766 Niketas, a (Macedonian) Slav, became patriarch of the Constantinople patriarchate.



Nicholas Cheetham claims that the Orthodox church made intense efforts to convert the Slavs in Greece, and that this took effect more or less in the period from A.D. 800 to 1000, only when the Greek language had ousted Slavonic. Again, this effect was stronger in the southern part of the peninsula than further to the north, since the Christianization of the Slavs as a whole was made possible only when some Slav monks from Thessalonika created a suitable script in their own language as the vehicle for this task. Yet the central point, that the ethnic mix was profound, is quite clear.



Another historian, Tom Winnifrith, says that the Slav conquest of the Balkans was rapid, eliminating the Latin heritage. He says the Slavs "spread throughout Greece." However, it was not just the Slavs who created ethnic change at this time. Winnifrith says there were many Latin-speaking refugees from cities in the thickly populated areas of the Danube frontier and Illyricum who are likely to have gravitated to Salonika and Constantinople and exchanged their Latin for Greek. These refugees added another element to the constantly changing ethnic equation in the Balkans.



The extent of the Slavic inroad is evident on maps showing mediaeval population distribution. The map titled "Slavs in the Balkans" shows that by about the eighth century A.D., Slavs were settled along the whole length of the Balkan peninsula right to the tip of the Peloponnese and were especially strong along the western coast. Pockets of Greek inhabitants remained along the east coast.



The Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrgenitus openly says that the whole of Hellas had been Slavicized. The Slavonic tribes of the Ezerites and the Milingi were independent in the Peloponnese in the seventh and eighth centuries and did not pay tribute to Byzantium. Even today in the Peloponnese, one cannot go three miles in any direction without encountering a Slavonic place-name."



Arnold Toynbee compares the Slavic invasion with the early Greek invasions, noting that "on the mainland itself, the Slav occupation was more nearly complete than the North-West-Greek occupation had been." He explains that Attica was not occupied in either historical invasion, but in the Peloponnese, "Arcadia, which had escaped occupation in the twelfth century B.C., was now overrun." For more than two hundred years, till the re-conquest of the Peloponnese by the East Roman government around A.D. 850, the Slavs controlled almost all of it. "As late as the year A.D. 1204, the French invaders of the Peloponnese found that, after more than three centuries of East Roman rule, there were still two independent Slav peoples, the Ezeritai and the Melingoi, in the fastness of Mount Taygetos."



There is much agreement among historians about the dramatic and overpowering influx of Slavic peoples to Greece. These people often intermarried and were assimilated in the "Roman" culture. Some writers tend to downplay the importance of the racial intermixture for Hellenization, suggesting that being a Hellene does not require particular racial antecedents. This is a point that modern Greeks appear unwilling to believe. Their preference seems to be simply to deny that "ethnological adulteration" ever took place. For example, in Macedonia, History and Politics (a publication sponsored by the Greek government and distributed throughout the English-speaking world) it is acknowledged (p. 10) that after Basil 11 there was a "solid Slav element" in Yugoslav and Bulgarian Macedonia, but it claims there was no impact at all in Greek Macedonia, or in Greece itself. The analyses from other sources lead us inevitably to a rejection of these claims. The Slavic influence in what is now Greece is clear. However, there were other important influences also.



Greeks as Albanians



Slavs were not the only groups to move into the southern part of the Balkan peninsula. Many Albanians came in also. Albanians settled in Athens, Corinth, Mani, Thessaly and even in the Aegean islands. In the early nineteenth century, the population of Athens was 24 percent Albanian, 32 percent Turkish, and only 44 percent Greek. The village of Marathon, scene of the great victory in 490 B.C., was, early in the nineteenth century, almost entirely Albanian."

Nicholas Hammond a historian who is sympathetic to the Greek view that the ancient Macedonians were a Greek tribe and who has had several works published in Athens, is unable to support the Greek view on this matter. He says that by the middle of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century the majority of people in the Peloponnese were Albanian speakers. The fascinating point is that the people with whom they were competing for land were overwhelmingly not the original Greek-speaking Roman citizens, but the new breed of Greek-speaking Slavs. As Hammond says, many Greek-speaking people at that point in time were probably ethnic Slavs.



The continuing impact of this new ethnic and cultural force is indicated in Hammond's comments that the Albanian incursions into Greece continued under the Turkish system and went on right into the eighteenth century, and that the descendants of these Albanian people were still speaking Albanian when he was in Greece in the 1930s. This is not a reflection on the national consciousness of these Greek citizens, for as Hammond explains, they thought of themselves as Greek. Indeed Hammond points out that the Albanian role in the resistance to the Turks, and in the formation of the Greek nation, was significant. Like the Slavs, the Albanians became attached to their new lands, learned the new language, and began to think of themselves as one with the other peoples living there.



Greeks as Vlachs



Also quite numerous during the eighteenth century in Greek lands and in territories that were to become Greek were the Vlachs. Hammond says that the Vlachs came in with the Albanians and provided leadership. He suggests that the Vlach peoples probably originated in Dacia, an area that is now part of Romania. Hammond says that the Vlachs managed to acquire possession of the great Pindus area. In general, they stayed in northern Greece and were never assimilated in terms of language the way that other ethnic groups were, though some groups ended the nomadic life and settled in Macedonia and in Thessaly.



According to Tom Winnifrith, some Greek writers have claimed the Vlachs as ethnic Greeks. He is skeptical about this idea, claiming that these Greek historians have "been at unfair pains to eliminate almost completely the Latin element in Vlach language and history." Winnifrith comments that one of these Greek writers, M. Chrysochoos, the first to suggest that the Vlachs living in the passes crossing the Pindus mountains were the linear descendants of Roman soldiers, is inspired by misplaced patriotism to insist that these Romans were really some kind of Greeks.



The Vlachs seem to have left Dacia as part of a wave of migration that spread throughout the Balkans from Greece, where they are known as Kutzo Vlachs, Tzintzars, or Aromani, through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia to the Trieste region . Many of them are still in these areas today. They all speak varieties of Romanian, but represent the remnants of originally Dacian-, Illyrian-, Thracian- and even Scythian- speaking tribes. Vlachs settled in Thessaly, Rourneli, the Ionian Islands and the Aegean islands.



The Romanian Balkan history professor Motiu has said that the Vlachs comprised 7 to 8 percent of the population of Greece, numbering seven to eight hundred thousand. There have been no population statistics regarding the Vlach minority since the Greek census of 1951. The census of 1935 and 1951 recorded 19,703 and 39,855 Vlachs respectively. Greece does not recognize the presence of a Vlach minority.



Greeks as Turks



A recent issue that has engaged the vigorous attention of Greek politicians is the position and status of Cyprus. It is an area of conflict with Turkey, and one in which Greece has attempted to influence world opinion in its direction by fostering the theory of Greek ethnic purity. In 1964 German archaeologist Franz Maier argued that the Turkish Cypriots were a "people" and not a minority, and that Greek Cypriots and Greeks were not really racially Greek but a mixture. Similarly the Cypriot sociologist Andreas Panayiotou has been quoted as saying that Cypriots were not Greek, but were a synthesis of Greek, Turkish and other elements. He advocated that the Cypriot dialect should become the island's official language.



Some external observers (perhaps with their own case to make) have come to similar conclusions: "Greece, while denying the presence of ethnic and religious minorities within its borders, tries to convince the world that the Orthodox people living in its neighboring countries are ethnic Greeks. But this is not true. In Cyprus, the Southern Cypriot Orthodox whom Greece presents to the world as Greek Cypriots, are not ethnic Greeks.”



This material demonstrates that the Greek attitude towards ethnic purity in Greece, and all that follows from it, can be seen in various spheres of political interest, not only in the case of the ethnic Macedonians of Aegean Macedonia and in behaviors towards the new Republic of Macedonia. It is a mainstay of the Greek nationalist position.



The Cyprus position is something of a special case; nevertheless, it reminds us of the 400-year occupation of Greek lands by the Turks and the inevitable ethnic impact. It has already been noted that in the early part of the nineteenth century the population of Athens was about one-third Turk. "Auberon Waugh ... wrote in The Daily Telegraph that the Greeks of today, with hairy popos, flat noses and bushy eyebrows, are clearly a race of Turkish descent and have nothing to do with the Greeks of antiquity sculpted on the Elgin marbles."



The Greek independence movement



Just as interesting as the ethnic diversity of Greece is the idea that the new peoples in the southern Balkan Peninsula learned Greek, became good Roman citizens, and identified a community of interest with other peoples living in their land. Writing nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, just a few years after the success of the Greek revolution, George Finlay49 noted that the local energies and local patriotism of all the Christian municipalities in the Ottoman empire were able to readily unite in opposition to "Othoman oppressions" whenever some kind of communication or administrative structure to centralize their efforts could be created. In these local institutions, Finlay suggested, a foundation was laid for a union of all the Christian Orthodox races in European Turkey. This comment was made, of course, a generation before Bulgaria achieved its autonomy from the Turks, and long before a Macedonian state became possible. Greece was then still a very small state at the bottom of the Balkan peninsula. Finlay recognized " the vigorous Albanians of Hydra, the warlike Albanians of Suli, the persevering Bulgarians of Macedonia, and the laborious Vallachians on the banks of the Aspropotamos" who embarked together on a struggle for Greek independence, "as heartily as the posterity of the ancient inhabitants of the soil of Hellas. Nicholas Hammond tells us that in the Greek War of Independence the Albanians, above all, drove the Turks out.



The heroism and determination of the Greek revolutionaries alone probably would not have been enough to overcome the Turks and their allies. The armed intervention of the European powers made a difference at crucial times. With the beginning of the Greek War of Independence in 1821, the Turkish sultan gave Mohammed Ali (an Albanian general of the Turkish forces in Egypt who had seized power in 1808) the provincial governorships of Crete and the Peloponnese with a commission to exterminate the Greek rebels. The Greek fleet kept them out till 1825, when the fleet mutinied over a lack of pay. A battle at Missolonghi, where Greek patriots were being besieged by the Turks, was swayed in Turkish favor by the arrival of the Egyptians. The heroic defense and the appearance of an Egyptian threat moved the governments of Europe to support the Greek cause. In 1827 squadrons of British, French and Russian navies destroyed the Turkish and Egyptian fleets at Navarin, and Greek independence was made certain.



According to anthropologist Roger Just, most of the nineteenth-century "Greeks," who had so recently won their independence from the Turks, not only did not call themselves Hellenes (they learned this label later from the intellectual nationalists); they did not even speak Greek by preference, but rather Albanian, Slavonic, or Vlach dialects." He held that their culture was similarly remote from the culture of the ancient Greeks. Their "customs and habits might seem to bear as much if not more relation to those of the other peoples of the Balkans and indeed of Anatolian as they did to what were fondly imagined to be those of Pericline Athens."



Maintaining the myth



Other Europeans have become irritated with the Greek myth of ethnic purity. For instance, in an editorial in The Sunday Telegraph, London, March 27,1994, the Greek attitude is taken to task:

What is the word for this obsessive Greek pseudo-relationship with their country's past (they even have a magazine, Ellenismos, devoted to the subject)? It is not quite pretentiousness. There is too much passion for that. No, the Greeks, the ancient ones, had a word for the modern Greek condition: paranoia. We must accept that Mr. Andreas Papandreou (Greek prime minister) and the current EC presidency are the sole legitimate heirs of Pericles, Demosthenes and Aristide the Just. The world must nod dumbly at the proposition that in the veins of the modern Greek ... there courses the blood of Achilles. And their paranoid nationalism is heightened by the tenuousness of that claim.



The Editor of The Sunday Telegraph argues that Greece has been ruthless in erasing traces of ethnic diversity, and suggests that the desperation of its actions, including the Greek claim to a monopoly of the classical past (in which all peoples of European origins have a share) can be explained by the fact that the Greeks today are a mixture of Slavs, Turks, Greeks, Bulgars, Albanians, Vlachs, Jews and Gypsies.



One modern Greek intellectual who now lives outside of that country has reflected on the forces within Greece that foster and sustain the theory of Greek ethnic purity:



In retrospect it is clear to me that my 12 years of Greek schooling, mainly in the 1970s, conspired to instill in me precisely one attitude: an almost unshakable belief in the purity and unity of the Greek people, language and culture ... Belief in the continuity of Greece against all odds was enabled also by the method of withholding information and sealing off interpretive paths. We had, as children, neither the capacity nor the inclination to explore disunities and "impurities.”



Modern Greek citizens who try to assert their ethnic identity are not treated tolerantly in Greece even today. One of these recently said, "There are a million Macedonian speakers [in Greece]. We are entitled to rights, to associations, schools, churches, traditions ... I have a Macedonian ethnic consciousness ... I belong to an ethnic minority which isn't recognized by my State." As a consequence of this statement and others like it, Christos Sideropoulos and another Greek Macedonian, Anastasios (or Tasos) Boulis, repeatedly faced the Greek courts. They were charged with spreading false rumors about the non-Greekness of Macedonia and the existence of a Macedonian minority on Greek territory which is not officially recognized, and with instigating conflict among Greek citizens by differentiating between the speakers of a Slavic language and Greeks. If convicted they faced possible terms of several years' imprisonment and heavy fines.



More will be said about charges of human rights abuses against Greece in a later chapter. At this point it is enough to recognize the continuing vigor with which Greece asserts an ethnic purity that cannot be substantiated by historical analysis.



Of particular interest are the population changes that have occurred in Aegean Macedonia during the twentieth century. The Greek position is that the Greek citizens of Aegean Macedonia have a genuine claim to historic connection with Macedonia and that the Slavs do not. It is implied that they have this connection since they are Greek and the ancient Macedonians are claimed to have been Greek. However, it is not commonly known, even among Greeks, that a majority of the "Greek" population of Aegean Macedonia can trace its immediate ancestors not to Macedonia, but to Anatolia, western Turkey, since they came from Turkey as refugees in the 1920s during one of the Greek-Turkish wars. The population of western Turkey at the time had been subject to many of the same forces that affected the populations of the southern Balkans, though for various reasons, including the tendency of the Byzantine Empire to move troublesome peoples to this area and the strong presence of peoples of Turkic origin, the mix was even more complex. If the connection of Balkan Greek speakers to the ancient Greeks and thence to the ancient Macedonians is tenuous, the links with the Turkish Greek speakers who came into Aegean Macedonia are even more dubious. This issue will be explained further in another chapter.



Nineteenth-century European attitudes toward Greece



In 1821, after the Greek War of Independence broke out, western Europe was swept by Philhellenism." The Germans were the nationality most quickly and deeply involved. Over 300 Germans went to fight in Greece, but throughout Europe tens of thousands of students and academics were involved in support movements. Many Britons, French, and Italians went to Greece to fight, and there was a strong support movement in the U.S. Though only sixteen North Americans reached Greece, the widespread philhellenic feelings arising from the war provided a big boost for the "Hellenic"- Greek letter -fraternities in the US. Shelley wrote:



We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts all have their roots in Greece. But for Greece ... we might still have been savages and idolaters ... The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its images on those faultless productions whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which can never cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to enable and delight mankind until the extinction of the race.



Throughout western Europe, the Greek War of Independence was seen as a struggle between European youthful vigor and Asiatic and African decadence, corruption and cruelty.



The Greek fight for independence had attracted European sympathy because of European distrust of the Moslem Turks, sympathy with the Christian Greeks, a great respect for classical Greek scholarship, and views developing in Europe that the ancient Greeks were "northern Europeans" and the originators of philosophy and science. Despite this favorable view of the ancients, closer inspection of modern Greeks had left many western Europeans disappointed with their heroic, but superstitious, Christian and dirty, "descendants," whom some regarded as "Byzantinized Slavs.” These views were not isolated. Mark Twain, for instance, "had thought modern Greeks a libel on the ancients."" The English poet Byron was shocked when he came to Greece expecting to find the tall, blond, blue-eyed heroes of antiquity.



Cheetham says that the new Greeks were regarded with vague suspicion in academic circles, since their association with ancient Greece was not considered to be genuine. They were, in Robert Byron’s words, "discounted as the unmoral refuse of medieval Slav migrations, sullying the land of their birth with the fury of their politics and the malformation of their small brown bodies." Cheetham says that the classical master at his school commiserated with him on the prospect of his having to consort on his holidays with what he called "those nasty little Slavs."



It may be that European racist contempt for the Greek revolutionaries of the nineteenth century goes some way toward explaining the persisting determination of the Greeks to create an alternative racial model for themselves. If we juxtapose the nineteenth-century view of the ancient Greeks as Aryans with attitudes towards the ethnic characteristics of the Greek revolutionaries, we can see the enormous burden that the Greeks carried in their dealings with Europe. While it has been a characteristic of new nation-states during the last century and a half to manufacture a suitable cultural, linguistic and ethnic pedigree for themselves, the Greeks have carried this process through to an extent that is unparalleled in Europe. Even today, Greece clings to a European connection via its rather tumultuous relationship with the European community. It is ironic that a part of the continuing European mistrust of the Greeks, as is evident from influential editorial comments such as those cited above, has developed because of the very myths that the Greeks propagate in order to purify their image. Greek myth-making today can be seen as inspired by the wider European racism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and even a continuation of that racism. The United States State Department and international human rights organizations have claimed that Greek suppression of ethnic minorities has come out of such policies. These claims will be elaborated in a later chapter.



THE CONTINUATION OF GREEK CULTURE?



Arnold Toynbee discusses the evolution of the meaning of the word "Hellene" in Greek literary usage, noting that it was originally given to a very specific group of northwest Greek-speaking people who lived in the interior of Epirus, but later came to be used to describe the association of twelve peoples in central and northeastern continental Greece that formed the Delphi-Anthela amphictyony. This was primarily a religious communality. Other Greek citystates joined this association and the name Hellene was applied to all who participated in this civilization. Toynbee points out that the principal distinctive feature of this new Hellenic civilization, a characteristic that distinguished it from the earlier Mycenaean civilization, was the city-state. This feature was more important even than language, as is evidenced by the admission of the Luvian-speaking city-states of Lycia and Caria.



Toynbee notes that Herodotus, writing in 479 B.C., put common race and language first in his definition of Hellenism, but acknowledged a role for a common culture. However, Isocrates, nearly 100 years later (380 B.C.), made the point that the Athenians "have given the name 'Hellenes' a spiritual connotation instead of its former racial one. People who share in our Athenian culture are now felt to have a stronger title to the name 'Hellenes' than people who share with us merely a common physical make-up.



Robert Browning dismisses the significance of the Slavic influence in Greece by taking up this idea, arguing that being Hellene was not a matter of genetics or tribal membership, but of education. Thus Browning suggests that if you speak Greek and live like a Greek, you are Greek. Cheetham takes a similar tack, claiming that the "original" citizens of the Balkan peninsula were intensely proud of their Hellenic culture but adding that questions about racial origins would have appeared pointless to educated persons of the high Byzantine age, since they tended to indifference towards such matters. They had become quite accustomed to the enormous ethnic mixture that had characterized the empire since late Roman times. Both of these explanations, though intended to be sympathetic to the Greeks, are diametrically opposed to the present Greek government position.



Like Robert Browning, Cheetham makes the point that there was at least some continuity of culture in early medieval times, since the mixture of peoples was held together by the combined power of "Greek civilization, Roman law and the Christian religion." Cheetham argues that the Slav immigrants were progressively intermingled with the Greeks so that an eventual fusion took place.

Browning also notes that over time the Slavs were acculturated and were often converted to Christianity. A process of "re-Hellenization" took place, led by the Greek Orthodox Church, using the vehicle of the Greek language. To use the words of Nicholas Cheetham, (in the south) "religion and Hellenization marched hand in hand." The Slavs and Albanians, in particular, converted to Christianity and learned to speak Greek.



The nature of this re-Hellenization must be questioned, since even its advocates recognize that Roman law and the Christian religion were in no sense contiguous with classical culture yet made up a large part of the character of this "new Hellenic culture." If we strip away the religion of classical Greece and the unifying force of common shrines and rituals of the Delphi-Anthela amphictyony; eliminate the political structure of the city-state; and replace Greek law and administrative procedures with those of Rome, it seems unreasonable to assert that the remaining elements constitute a culture essentially the same as classical Greece. It is simply not plausible to suggest that the bulk of Greek speaking Roman citizens in the Middle Ages, let alone the former Turkish subjects of nineteenth-century Greece, "lived like" ancient Greeks.



Making a case about the difficulty classical writers faced in distinguishing between dialects of Greek, Arnold Toynbee 61 offers an analogy. He suggests that a speaker of High German from Frankfurt am Main, or a speaker of Low German from Flanders or Holland, might find it difficult to believe that the language spoken by people in some rural district in Luxembourg, Alsace, or one of the forest cantons of Switzerland is a dialect of his own language. Perhaps the most interesting point about this example is how it demonstrates that although people may speak dialects of the same language, they can enjoy very different lifestyles and cultures. If we compare the Dutch seaman of the sixteenth century and a Swiss-German farmer of the same period, we might wonder whether the two would see any affinities between themselves except for a remote language similarity. We might also contemplate the absurdity of the idea of a Swiss-German of the present day saying to himself, "My (Dutch) ancestors were among the greatest of sea navigators." It would be an anachronism.



Eric Hobsbawn reminds us:



The most usual ideological abuse of history is based on anachronism rather than lies. Greek nationalism refused Macedonia even the right to its name on the grounds that all Macedonia is essentially Greek and part of a Greek nation-State, presumably ever since the father of Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia, became ruler of the Greek lands on the Balkan peninsula ... it takes a lot of courage for a Greek intellectual to say that, historically speaking, it is nonsense. There was no Greek nation-State or any other single political entity for the Greeks in the fourth century B.C.; the Macedonian empire was nothing like the Greek or any other modern nation-state, and in any case it is highly probable that the ancient Greeks regarded the Macedonian rulers, as they did their later Roman rulers, as barbarians and not as Greeks, though they were doubtless too polite or cautious to say so.



In the same way that it would be questionable for a modern Swiss-German to claim descendence from sixteenth century Dutch seafarers, it is questionable for modern Greeks to claim family affinity with the ancient Macedonians, even if the ethnological purity which such a claim requires could be established.



An appeal to continuity of Hellenism through the Greek language is similarly dubious. We have already seen Roger Just's comment that by the nineteenth-century most of the newly independent "Greeks" did not call themselves Hellenes, and did not even speak Greek by preference. Furthermore, the use of a form of the Slavic language was still widespread, perhaps dominant, in the territories that were not taken into the Greek nation until later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.



It has been claimed that the Greek language of the nineteenth century was a corrupted ecclesiastical version of classical Greek that the ancients might have had some trouble comprehending. George Finlay was extremely critical of this language and the role of the church hierarchy based in Constantinople in reducing it to the level apparent in the mid-nineteenth century.



If we consider the standard applied by Herodotus that ancestry, language and culture were the basis for Greek community, or even if we prefer the evolved definition of Isocrates that gives primary emphasis to culture, it is not an unreasonable conclusion that nineteenth-century Greeks failed to meet these criteria. After the establishment of independence, Greek intellectuals made a great effort to return their country to its Hellenic past. Classical place names were revived, and Turkish, Venetian and even Byzantine buildings were removed to reveal ancient ruins. The language was standardized in the nineteenth century as part of a concerted effort to create a new Greece. This brought some stability to the culture of the diverse "new Hellenic" peoples who could be recognized at that time. Since 1988 and the renaming of northern Greece as Macedonia, a whole new focus has been given to the Greek effort to identify with the classical and Hellenic past.





OFFICIAL GREEK STATISTICS PUBLISHED IN 1935



The following are official Greek statistics published in 1935 by the Greek government. They summarize characteristics of the refugees who entered Greece between the period of 1923-1928, their numbers and the country where they came from. The total number of registered refugees were 1,159,311 people, of whom 565,143 (about half) were settled in Greek occupied Macedonia.

A) EUROPE:
Eastern Thrace: 140,915
Bulgaria: 29,439
Istanbul (Turkey): 14,138
Yugoslavia: 13,038
Albania: 5,168
Russia: 5,083
Romania: 1,077
Italy: 438
Germany: 298
France: 293
Austria: 133
England: 109
Czechoslovakia: 63
Switzerland: 44
Hungary: 44
Belgium: 40
Poland: 34
Estonia: 3
Lithuania: 3
Latvia: 2
Norway: 2
Netherlands: 2
Finland: 2
Ireland: 1

B) ASIA:
Asia Minor (Turkey): 201,173
Pontus (Turkey): 122,180
Caucasus (USSR): 29,313
Dodecanese (Turkey): 394
Cyprus: 324
Syria: 100
Iraq: 89
Iran: 31
Palestine: 29
Yemen: 10
India: 4
Philippines: 3
China: 2

C) AMERICAS

USA: 537
Argentina: 12
Canada: 11
Brazil: 2
Uruguay: 2
Cuba: 1
Mexico: 1
Chile: 1

D) AFRICA

Egypt: 446
Ethiopia: 10
South Africa: 10
Algiers: 5
Tunisia: 5
Libya: 4
Sudan: 3
Tanzania: 2
Morocco: 1



taken from a private email from R Stefov

[George S.]

From the Once Classified Files - Part 8

British Embassy - Belgrade

British Embassy - Belgrade

December 21st, 1946



No. 425



Sir,



The Slav Congress, which opened its proceedings in Belgrade on 8th December, brought them to a close some five days later. Thorough preparations have been made for this meeting, and an Organizing Committee had been set up so far back as July last in order to facilitate its work, which was stated to be the development of the brotherhood between the Slav nations, with the aim of strengthening democracy in Europe and the world in the fight against fascism, and to help in the building of international peace and security. The Yugoslav press played its full part before and during the proceedings, and no effort was spared to make the occasion, which was loudly and proudly proclaimed to be the first post-war congress, a memorable one, and to point out the significance of choosing Yugoslavia as its host.



2. At first sight, it might have been thought that the choice of Belgrade was an add one. The city has suffered heavily from the ravages of war and is notably lacking in those facilities and amenities normally in demand at international gatherings. It is best with an acute housing problem, and it can have been no easy task to accommodate the 250 delegates, a list whose names is annexed hereto, who together with their advisers and experts, cannot have amounted to much less than 500 persons. But the choice of Belgrade was clearly not dictated by convenience. Yugoslavia proclaims herself with increasing assurance the leader of the Balkan countries and the head and front for the coming Balkanic Confederation. Her long seaboard on the Adriatic encourages her to believe that she is the advance guard of the Slav nations facing the West, and the choice, therefore, of Belgrade a the place most suitable for those purposes of Slav propaganda, which the Congress was convened to carry out, was no doubt made with great deliberation.



3. A study of the proceedings of the Congress, which have been published in great detail, reveals the following three main themes:- the unity and brotherhood of the Slavs, not only in Europe but the world over, under their great mother, Soviet Russia, upon whom they are entirely depended and to whom they owe everything; the necessity of maintaining this unity against the menace of “fascism” and “imperialism”; and the superiority of the democratic system as evolved by the Slav nations since the war over what is described as the “classic idea of democracy” in the West. The list of delegates, as you will see, is a long one, and contains representatives from the United States and Canada (who sent 11 and 10 representatives), South America (represented by an Argentine Slav, who proclaimed that he also represented the Uruguayan and Bolivian Slavs) and delegates from Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. The largest delegation, 21 strong, was that from Russia, headed by Marshal Tolbukin, but Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Poland were each represented by approximately the same number. A delegation from Albania was also present, first as brotherly observers and later to understand, to all intents as purposes, as full members of the Congress and honorary Slavs. The decorations in the streets, which were not too well contrived, invariable gave their chief honour to the Russian flag with smaller satellite emblems grouped around it.



4. The Congress opened on 8th December with the setting up of the Presidential Committee, to which were elected, among other, M. Stalin, Marshal Tito, M. Dimitrov, President Beirut, President Benes and M. Molotov, these names being received with tremendous applause, though the loudest cheer of all was received for the name of M. Stalin. Marshal Tito then gave the inaugural address, which was softer in tone than some he has delivered lately. The Slav people, he said, must walk the way of reciprocal affection, collaboration and spiritual unity, wherever they live. They had great mission, but it was not, he emphasized, to create a pan Slav bloc. It was only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union that the Slavs had realized, for the first time, what disunity meant. What would have happened had there been no great Soviet Union? What would have happened without the Glorious Red Army? What would have happened without that genius Stalin? No gratitude would be so great to pay to the mighty Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the Slavs were creating a new and true people’s democracy. They were not meeting at the congress to make blocs against other nations, but to demonstrate their resolution that a just peace must be made for all countries which had played their part in the struggle.



5. All this was well received, but it breathed an unexpected air of mildness, which Marshal Tolbukin, who spoke for the Soviet delegation, was at pains to correct. He warned his listeners that there were reactionary forces in the world which were trying to prepare the way for a new aggression; to conquer other countries and to enslave other peoples. They must never forget comrade Stalin’s words that it was necessary to hinder and curb these war-mongers.



6. Little comment is called for upon the other introductory speeches, though it is of some interest that one of the American Slavs in spite of so recent an arrival in Yugoslavia, announced that he had discovered that it was a land of smiling people, singing their way through life, and said how great would be his privilege to tell the United States that in Yugoslavia freedom reigned, and hoped one day Americans too might enjoy the same liberty. Upon this note of mutual gratulation the day’s proceedings closed, and the guests proceeded to the business of refreshments upon the customary heroic scale.



7. The following day, the Congress was offered stronger meat. The tone was set by Milovan Djialas who, while he did not deny that such great states as Britain and America had made certain sacrifices in the war, pointed out that these could not be compared with those made by such little countries as Poland and Yugoslavia. After the customary references to foreign imperialists, he went to coin a phrase by describing Russia as the Empire on which the sun never sets. When bombs had fallen on Yugoslavia, the Yugoslavs had said “so many less bombs on Russia”. One thing had become clear to the Yugoslav people – that there was not and could not be any salvation without Russia. There could be no Slav collaboration without unselfish love for the Soviet Union, and no success in the fight for freedom and democracy without reliance on the Soviet Union.



8. Djilas was followed by the Argentine delegate who said he spoke for 800,000 Slavs in his own country as well as the Slav communities of Uruguay and Bolivia. He described all that the Slavs are doing in South America to strengthen their ties with the Soviet Union, - “that fortress of democracy”, - and in general to forge the links of Slav unity.



9. On the third day, a complete change came over the proceedings, and the deliberations of the Congress took on a mood of tranquil piety. The opening speech was by the Russian academician Grakov, who paid a moving tribute to St. Cyril and St. Methodius, to whom, he said, the Slav nations owe an inextinguishable debt, since they had made the worship of God possible in the language understood by all Slavs.



10. He was followed by Monsignor Ritig, so lately in evidence as a Yugoslav delegate at the Paris and the one Roman Catholic cleric of any note in sympathy with the regime, who was received with great applause, and who was carried away by the spiritual fervour of the occasion that he described the souls of the audience as being “washed with the growth of majestic thoughts”. Reconciliation, he said, was the aim of the Congress. Reconciliation between the white and the black races – and here he was addressing himself particularly to the Anglo-Saxons. But the greatest reconciliation of all he continued must be between the East and the West. With the West, the Slavs had been until yesterday allies, and they never wished to be their adversaries, not only for their own sake, but for the sake of all humanity.



11. It was only natural that so lofty an address should produce something of an anti-climax, but the Russian Archbishop Nikolai, who received an immense ovation, did his best to maintain this high level. He described the work of the Russian Orthodox Church in the course of a thousand years of history, and went on to speak of what had been accomplished by its sister churches, including that in Bulgaria, whose people he averred had been so unfortunately deceived by their rulers at the beginning of the war. After this the proceedings rather faded away in a general discussion of cultural aims.



12. A necessary tonic was provided by the publication the same evening of the Congress Manifesto, whose terms, in their wearisome familiarity, indicated where the original draft had almost certainly been prepared. “Who” it demanded querulously, “would want a new war? A new war is only needed by imperialist conquerors. Freedom-loving people of the world”, it continued, “fight against the attempts of imperialist conquerors to enslave us. Strengthen the links of eternal friendship with the liberator and protector of all Slavs, the great Soviet Union”.



13. The following day, a mild sensation was provided by a speech from the Patriarch Gavrilo, who had returned to Yugoslavia less than three weeks earlier. He had been received by Marshal Tito a few days before the Congress started, and it was understood that their meeting had been cordial, but when he failed to put in an appearance at the previous day’s session during which so many Christian sentiments had been uttered, it was though that he must still be in the shadows. The Patriarch’s aim was clearly to prove his entire respectability to the Government. Reciprocal love and fraternal collaboration would he said build the future happiness of the Slavs. Moreover, Slav solidarity was guided by their centuries of protector, mother Russia (loud applause), and by the noble Russian people, headed by the great Stalin. (The whole Congress stood and, for some minutes, gave frenzied applause). Some what surprisingly, the Patriarch then went on to mention the founder of the Christian religion, whose Name he had not figured much in speeches made in this country recently and to whom he ascribed qualities and ideals not dissimilar to those which had so freely, but far more fervently, been attributed to Comrade Stalin by other speakers. This tribute received but faint applause. He ended with a little doxology to the Church, the Priesthood and Marshal Tito, and this was excellently received.



14. On the same day, the citizens of Belgrade (about 200,000 according to the newspapers) flocked to the Square of the Republic to demonstrate their affection for their Slav brothers, having thoughtfully provided themselves beforehand with appropriate banners and such slogans as “Long live the best friend of the Slavs, Generalissimo Stalin” and “Greetings to our brother nation, Bulgaria”.



15. So far as Belgrade was concerned, this was the culminating point in the proceedings. The following day the delegates went off to Zagreb, where they were met by 100,000 rapturous hosts. The night before their departure, Marshal Tito gave to the Congress a lavish reception, to which none but Slavs were invited, and marked consideration was paid to the delegates from the United States, the Argentine, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The visit to Zagreb was mostly devoted to sight seeing, there being more opportunities of this kind there than in Belgrade, and it was crowned by a particularly elaborate reception given by the Croatian Government in the evening, at which there were peasant dances, the performers in national costume, being invited to the reception which followed. The celebrations in Zagreb were followed by similar festivities at Ljubljana, where once again was assembled a vast crowd which had stood for hours along the line to greet the special train. The doings at Ljubljana were not protracted, the delegates leaving almost immediately for Bled, where the lake was especially illuminated in their honour. Finally, after an unostentatious return to Belgrade, the Congress dispersed on the 16th December.



16. Such then is the record of the proceedings, so far as it has been published in the press. The Czechoslovak and Polish Ambassadors here, in speaking to me about the Congress before it met said that, so far as their respective delegations were concerned, no one was coming who was competent to discuss political questions, nor did either of them think that politics would figure much in the proceedings. Neither M. Korbel nor M. Wende were themselves delegates, and the latter, who called on me on the day the Congress broke up confessed that he had not as yet read any of the speeches, though he was hoping, when he has a little more leisure, to do so. On the whole, I am inclined to think that political discussions were not a feature of the Congress, nor indeed would the atmosphere had been propitious for them.



17. The Congress, in my view, had a simpler and a three fold aim; in the first place to achieve the maximum publicity in the Slav press for the superiority of the Slav democracy over the ancient and outmoded forms as used in the West; secondly to penetrate the Western hemisphere with these same and finally make plain the absolute predominance of Russia and the Slav Confederation. The greatest consideration was shown to the delegates from the Americas, New Zealand and Australia, and it is particularly significant that the Marshal specially received the U.S. and Canadian delegates, an honour not accorded to the Soviet Delegation. No pains were spared to remind them of their kinship with their brothers Slavs and to assure that, on their return to their countries of adoption, they would spread the leaven with which they had been studiously provided. The Slav Congress will be an annual affair, and no effort or expense will be too much to improve it as an organ of publicity for enlightenment both at home and abroad. Each of the smaller Slav countries will be made to serve as a spearhead of Russian propaganda when occasion offers, but this will I believe apply in particular to Yugoslavia who, I have little doubt, both in her own eyes and in those of Russia, has a special role to play among the satellites.



18. The question remains whether we can afford to stand by and watch this formidable organ of propaganda perfect itself, without making an effective reply. Moreover, it will not merely be an organ of propaganda, but a potential means of penetrating and disrupting the political life of countries where there are any considerable number of Slav immigrants. The question is one which affects not only the United States and Latin America, but also the British Commonwealth of Nations, for there is a Slav minority in Canada and Australia. At the same time it raises issued on which I am in no position anything but an incomplete opinion, for any counter measure would involve a deliberate offensive propaganda campaign against every Slav country and the Soviet Union in particular. There are no Anglo-Saxon minorities behind the Iron Curtain where racial or religious feelings can be exploited for political ends, and in the circumstances therefore and defense other than reliance on the fundamental health and resistance to disease of the democratic political organism must be offense.



I am sending a copy of this dispatch to Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Sofia and Washington.



I have the honour to be, with the highest respect, Sir, Your most obedient, humble Servant, (Sgd.) Charles Peake.



The right Honourable C.R. Attles, P.C., M.P., etc., etc.







British Embassy - Belgrade



January 2nd, 1946



??/1/47



Dear Department,



Will you please refer to your printed dispatch No. 1102 of the 3rd December (R.17049/298/67) enclosing a copy from a letter from the Office of the High Commissioner for Canada concerning the departure from Canada of three Bulgarian and Macedonian delegates to the Pan-Slav Congress.



2. As we reported on our dispatch No. 425 R.592/24/92 of the 20th December, in all ten delegates to the Pan-Slav Congress arrived from Canada. They did not play any very noticeable part in the proceedings of the Congress. Four of them, three of whom are off to visit relations in Bulgaria, namely Andrej Hristov, Lambo Sotirov, Andrej Palmirov and Nikola Kiris, were entertained to a cocktail party at the Embassy on December 30th.



3. They did not appear to have been particularly impressed by the series of speeches, banquets, conducted tours and demonstrations put on in their honour, and although they said that they admired what was being done in Yugoslavia in the way of reconstruction, they were only keen to return to Canada which, they said, was so much more advanced in all material matters. As for the new “new democracy” of which there was so much talk in Yugoslavia, Hristov said that he had had no hesitation in telling his fellow delegates that in Canada also there was a type of democracy which he regarded as being nothing inferior to that in the Slav countries.



4. Although they had a few opportunities of obtaining independent information on the current state of affairs in this country they said that they realized there was some dissatisfaction with the regime, though they believed this to be merely on the part of those formerly of the richer classes. Kiris, who said that he intended to write on the new Yugoslavia for the Greek paper in Toronto, said that he believed that 60 per cent of the peasantry supported the present government.



5. Palmirov, the head of the Macedonian League in Toronto, who had visited Skopje, had been impressed by the enthusiasm of the Macedonians who were at last being allowed to run their own affairs and to have their own language in schools. He compared this state of affairs favourably with that existing in Greece where he alleged that the Macedonians were not allowed to have their own schools, but he went on to say that it did not matter at all whether the Macedonians were under Yugoslav, Greek or Bulgarian rule. So long as they were allowed to use their own language they would be contented.



6. All four of the delegates appear to have been very grateful for having been asked to a British Embassy which, they said, amidst the alien atmosphere here, reminded them of their home in Canada. While it is possible that in such surroundings they tended to stress more than usually their preferences for Canada to the Balkans and their loyalty to the British Empire, we have no doubt that if the organizers of the Pan-Slav Congress hoped to find a potential 5th column in these particular Canadian delegates they were grievously disappointed. Indeed Hristov remarked that while his generation of Macedonians in Canada might be interested in preserving their Macedonian culture, their sons have no interest in their countries of origin and were just plain good Canadians.



We are sending a copy of this letter to Sofia.



Yours ever, Chancery, T.M.F
taken from an email fromRStefov