Yugoslavia: A History of its Demise - Indymedia

184 UNWANTED INDEPENDENCE
who had been strewn across several communist countries, in its own territory. A
secret report of the Greek government in 1951 established that there were still 51,
000 “Slavophones” in Greek western Macedonia, 23 whose numbers subsequently
declined through emigration, above all to Australia and Canada.
Greece viewed the concentration of “Slavophone” refugees in Macedonia as a
hostile act. For decades, the Greek government denied these people even the right
to visit Greece, not to mention to return. In the 1970s and 1980s, when, as a
result of the numerus clausus and other inadequacies at the Greek universities,
many young Greeks were studying in Skopje, Macedonian authorities constantly
tried to separate the “Slavophones” from Greece from the other Greeks and to
form them into special groups. Greece countered that a diploma earned in a
“language not used internationally” could not be recognized. 24 Even aside from
this, there was still a subliminal irredentism in Macedonia, not least in academic
circles. Greece had reasons to mistrust Skopje and to make Belgrade its
exclusive point of entry for relations with Yugoslavia. Even President Gligorov
admitted openly, in a talk in 1991, that Macedonia had to pay today for certain
acts in the past.
Of course, Greece’s behavior toward the Slavic minority on its territory is
quite another matter. The problem of the linguistic minorities in Greece is a
complex one. There are groups in this country who speak languages other than
Greek, the most important of these being the Albanian-speakers, of whom there
are still many in Attica as well as on individual islands such as Hydra, and then
the Vlachs on Pindos Mountain. They both consider themselves Greeks. The
only officially recognized minority in Greece is the Turks (together with some
Pomaks) in Eastern Thrace. They were defined as “Muslims” in the Treaty of
Lausanne in 1923. The problem of the Slavs is, again, different.
I visited the districts in question here on several occasions and was thereby
able to establish that the majority of those perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 Slavicspeakers
in the Florina-Edesse-Kastoria triangle today declare themselves
“Macedonians”, especially if one addresses them in their own language. They
have their folklore and would like to see their particularity recognized, but they
do not speak of being annexed to Macedonia. The times when gendarmes wanted
to ban the use of their language and when they were not allowed to sing their
own songs at weddings or other festivities are long gone. But their situation is
still unsatisfactory.
The question is therefore of interest, because Greece grounded its boycott
against the Republic of Macedonia inter alia on the argument that the
Macedonian constitution of 1991 constitutes in Article 49, which obliges the
Macedonian state to “care” for the Macedonians living in neighboring states and
for emigrants, interference in the affairs of other states. However, quite apart
from the fact that other states, including Greece, have such articles in their
constitutions, Macedonia explicitly declared, in a constitutional amendment
adopted at the insistence of West European states, that it did not intend to engage
in any “interference” in the sovereign rights of the states affected or in their