Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

182 UNWANTED INDEPENDENCE
time. In the official Macedonian historical literature, memories of those times of
doubt are by preference swept under the carpet.
A solution was finally offered at Jajce in November 1943 with the program for
a new, federative Yugoslavia, articulated by Tito’s communist leadership. Broad
circles in Macedonia were won over to this concept. It even had something to
offer the advocates of independence, for, thanks to Vukmanović-Tempo’s
preparatory work, they had come to believe that a“Greater Macedonia” could be
realized one day within the framework of Yugoslavia. 17
On 2 August 1944, this reorientation was formalized. Some 120 delegates
assembled in the Monastery of the Blessed Prohor Pčinski, which today lies on
the Serbian side of the border, to establish the Anti-Fascist Council for the
People’s Liberation of Macedonia, or ASNOM (acronym derived from the
Macedonian) and to proclaim the People’s Republic of Macedonia as an equal
member of “Democratic Federative Yugoslavia”. At the same time, it was
decided to create an official Macedonian literary language on the basis of one of
the central Macedonian dialects. This did not yet signify the formal act of
establishing a Macedonian nation, let alone the culmination of “nation-building”,
but it was an important milestone in this process.
In a summons directed to the Macedonian people, the CP Macedonia included
in its declaration the portentous sentence asserting that the Macedonians would
achieve “also the unification of all parts of Macedonia” which had been divided
by “Balkan imperialists” in 1913 and 1919. 18 This was directed against both
Bulgaria and Greece and showed that Tito clearly planned to create a communistled
Balkan Federation in the future, which would include Albania as well as a
communist Greece, and in which all the “national questions” of the region,
including those of Kosovo and Macedonia, would be “solved” in the communist
style. Tito found a willing partner in Georgi Dimitrov, the former Comintern
secretary who had returned to Bulgaria in 1944. The cooperation between the
two men provided grist both then and later for charges that they were effecting a
revival of the old Comintern thesis about Macedonia.
The Greek side even today takes that abovementioned sentence in the party
resolution for the establishment of ASNOM as a basis for the thesis that
Macedonian statehood entailed, from the beginning, an “aggressive intention”
vis-à-vis its neighbors, an intention against which these states must protect
themselves. It is uncontested that grave acts followed on these words on the part
of Macedonian communist leaders, but that was all more than 50 years ago.
The Greek communists had understood as much as the Yugoslav communists
did the importance of gaining control of the “liberation struggle” and excluding
democratic or nationalistic rivals. In December 1944, the Greek communists had
practically the whole country in their hands, with the exception of Athens; but
they were contained by energetic British intervention and by the effective
reestablishment of the nationalist camp.
Already, during the Second World War Bulgarian elements of both the right
and the left had tried, with only limited success, to obtain a foothold in Greek