Macedonian State-National Concepts and ... - Makedonika

War. This was another testimony to the sympathies that the Macedonians, too,
nourished for the genuine South-Slav (Yugoslav) idea, as the foremost token of
the freedom, self-determination, self-rule and equality of the peoples in the Balkan
region. And the prospects of what was becoming a historical consciousness seemed
auspicious.
17.
The activity of the Macedonian émigré community in Bulgaria was of particular
significance at that time. “The forces of the left” were among the first to raise their
voice for the preservation of Macedonia’s entirety and for securing its freedom.
Perhaps this was most vividly expressed in Dimitar Blagoev’s words, who as early
as December 10, 1917 (speaking in the Bulgarian National Assembly in connection
with the adoption of the military budget for the coming year), condemned
Bulgarian policy as acquisitive and favouring division. He added that the First
World War was in fact a continuation of the previous wars for establishing “full
control over the Slavic element in Macedonia”. When the bourgeois representatives
demanded of him that he explain his descent and his position on
Macedonia more clearly and more openly in public, he bravely declared: “I was
born in ZagoriÌani; however, I am not a Bulgarian, but a Slav, and being that, if
you want to know, I am for Macedonia, as a Slavic land, which would have its own
administration.” A year later he presented the same views, once again in the
National Assembly, as the leader of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party. He
demanded the withdrawal of Bulgarian troops from Macedonia and its return to
the Macedonians “who, in full freedom, will decide on their future themselves”.
Supporting the signing of peace, Blagoev made it clear that the Macedonians were
not Bulgarians and repeated his conviction that Macedonia had been occupied and
annexed by force by Bulgarian thieves. In reply to the retorts of some representatives
that the Bulgarians were Macedonia’s liberators, he said: “Macedonia
is not liberated; that is what the Macedonians themselves think, and your goals in
the Balkan [Wars] and now are acquisitive.” Therefore, he demanded of the
Bulgarian government that it leave Macedonia and make it possible for the
Macedonians to decide freely on their future, because “a large part of the Macedonian
intelligentsia wishes Macedonia to be for the Macedonians” and “even in
Bulgaria the Macedonian activists propagate Macedonia for the Macedonians, an
independent Macedonia”, as a result of which it was necessary for the Macedonians
themselves to state “what they feel themselves to be”.
Another ‘leftist’, the old socialist revolutionary and comrade of DelÌev and
Sandanski, Dimo HadÔidimov, during “the Ilinden celebrations” in Sofia, when
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