Macedonia

Abstract

Canadian ambassador to (former) Yugoslavia from 1983-7. Since retiring from the foreign service in 1994, the author has given a course in Balkan affairs at the Institute of European and Russian Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa.A VISITOR TO THE (former Yugoslav) Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1962 would have found, as is certainly still the case, that Macedonia produces excellent wine. Until the 1991 insurgency by Albanian Macedonians disrupted supplies, a popular brand of Macedonian red wine was stocked by the LCBO (the Ontario liquor board).THE GREEK CONNECTIONA bottle of excellent white wine, ordered in the restaurant of a Skopje hotel, had a little booklet hanging from its neck. 'Ever since the times of Alexander the Great,' it proclaimed, Macedonia has been famous for the quality of its wines. Had there been Greeks in the restaurant, the noise of grinding teeth would probably have been deafening. The Greeks object fiercely to this kind of identification with the legendary figure (apparently known in Iran as 'Alexander the Barbarian') by a small Slav entity occupying a part of what once was Macedon. 'As all the world knows,' Greeks say, 'Alexander was Greek.'That is debatable. The Greek argument goes on to assert that Alexander (who, whatever his ethnic composition, was certainly not a Slav) had been assimilated into Greek civilization, which he propagated, after a fashion, to the limits of the known world.Greek objections extend to the very use of the name 'Macedonia' by their northern neighbour, which they see as an implicit territorial claim to the Greek province of the same name. This is an emotive political issue in Greece, and Greek governments have been successful in impeding international recognition of the new state. It has only been admitted into the United Nations under the provisional title of The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), presumably seated between Thailand and Togo.Greek concern about the status and identity of Macedonia was not new, nor was it entirely fanciful. There were Slav Macedonian nationalists who sought the recovery of all 'Macedonian lands,' including those in what they called 'Aegean Macedonia.' The Macedonian constitution had contained language that could be interpreted in that sense, and the first national flag featured a star associated with Alexander the Great. Both have since been removed.The creation of a Socialist Republic of Macedonia as part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ('former Yugoslavia') had never sat comfortably with Athens. Negotiations for an agreement on the mutual elimination of a visa requirement between the two states had broken down when the Greeks insisted that it should not apply to Macedonia. In the mid-1980s the Greek Ministry of Education announced that it would no longer accept degrees or diplomas issued by the University of Skopje, on the grounds that they were written in a non-existent language.Although some of the Greek contemptuous wariness may be rooted in preoccupations about their own historical identity, a more recent trigger was the Greek civil war that raged from 1944 to 1949. Tito openly supported the Greek communists, much to the dismay of Stalin, who did not want to provoke his former allies too soon and certainly did not want Tito to drag the Soviet Union into a premature confrontation. Furthermore, in the last phase of the civil war, up to 40 per cent of the communist forces were Slav Macedonians from both sides of the Greek-Yugoslav border.(1)There has always been a problem with Macedonian identity. Hugh Poulton, for many years a Balkans specialist with Amnesty International, even wrote a book entitled Who are the Macedonians? The British historian R.G.D. Laffan, in lectures given in 1917 to British troops on the Salonika front, observed that the Macedonian 'peasant is reluctant to say what is his nationality. Ask one of these Macedonians what he is. …