Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

176 UNWANTED INDEPENDENCE
In any case, it was largely fear of Milošević’s aggressiveness which pushed
Macedonia in the direction of democracy and independence in autumn 1989.
Even before the end of the year, alternative political associations were given the
green light to organize in Macedonia; as early as spring 1990, these
“associations” constituted themselves as parties. On 24 September 1990, the
parliament in Skopje, the Sobranje, decided to hold free elections, which took
place on 11 November 1990. The leading forces united behind a reform-oriented
leadership, in which the oft-recalled Kiro Gligorov was now summoned to serve
as head of state. He was elected president by a large majority in the parliament
on 17 January 1991. This was followed by the installation of the first freely
elected government, under Professor of Economics Nikola Kljušev. Shortly
thereafter, it was decided to strike the word “socialist” from the official name of
the republic. The former communist party, which had already begun to refer to
itself as the “Party of Democratic Transformation”, changed its name to the “Social
Democratic Union of Macedonia” on 20 April 1991, still under Gošev’s
leadership. This was followed, on 8 September, by a referendum on the
establishment of “a sovereign and independent state of Macedonia, with the right
to adhere to a league of sovereign states of Yugoslavia”. On 20 November 1991,
the new constitution was proclaimed; in practical terms, the proclamation was
equivalent to a declaration of independence.
Macedonia has about two million inhabitants, of whom Albanians comprise
22.9 per cent, according to official statistics from 1994. Macedonia has
experienced dramatic changes in the course of its history and the “Macedonian
question” has often been the focus of European politics. Even today the
Macedonian conflict continues to simmer. All the sides involved exploit
historical myths, beginning with Philip of Macedonia and Alexander the Great.
That the Macedonians of antiquity were related to the Greeks, even if with an
intermixture of Illyrian elements, is hardly disputed. But that this Hellenic
relationship was not entirely unproblematic is shown in the Third Philippic of
Demosthenes, where he writes that Philip of Macedonia “…is not only not a
Greek but has nothing to do with Greeks, not even a barbarian from a country
one can name with respect, but a scoundrel from Macedonia, where one earlier
could not even buy a usable slave”. 2 This citation shows, at a minimum, that in
their exclusive claim to the Macedonian name, the Greeks could not base their
assertions terribly strictly on documents from antiquity.
Shortly before 600 CE, the Slavs began to stream into the southern Balkans
and, in most of Macedonia, displaced the culture of antiquity. The Slavic
Macedonians of today claim that the Slavic apostles Cyril and Methodius used
their language, the “Macedonian” language, to bring Christianity to the Slavs.
What is correct is that both of the apostles, who were Greeks from Salonika, used
the Slavic dialect found in the vicinity of their city and created from that basis a
new written language, later known as Old Church Slavonic. The script which
they used was Glagolitic, which was largely the invention of the two brothers.
Only later, in the first Bulgarian Empire, was it transformed into the more