NGO (Greek Helsinki Monitor) Report on Greece - Part 1 - Introduction
THE MACEDONIANS

Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights Group - Greece have been the first Greek Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) to publicly use the term ‘Macedonian minority’ in Greece, to be followed, in 1995, by some other groups or individuals, too few though.

O n 4 December 1991, the Greek Council of Ministers defined the terms for the International recognition as independent state of the (until then federal Yugoslav) Socialist Republic of Macedonia (SGPI, 1992:6):
“It should not use the name ‘Macedonia’ which has a purely geographic and not an ethnic meaning. It should recognize that it has no territorial claims on our country. It should recognize that, in Greece, there is no ‘Macedonian’ minority.”
On 16 December 1991, the Greek foreign minister, Antonis Samaras, persuaded his EPC (European Political Cooperation) colleagues to include these conditions, albeit in a modified version, in their ‘Declaration on Yugoslavia’, which inter alia defined the conditions for ‘the recognition of Yugoslav Republics’. The latter’s last paragraph stated (ELIAMEP, 1992:305- 6):
“The Community and its member States also require a Yugoslav Republic to commit itself, prior to recognition, to adopt constitutional and political guarantees ensuring that it has no territorial claims toward a neighboring Community State, including the use of a denomination which implies territorial claims.”
As a result, it took almost two years before the Republic of Macedonia (as it would like to be called) was fully recognized by most countries in the world -and in most cases by the provisional name agreed upon to facilitate its entrance in the UN (Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - FYROM). Even the EC countries delayed the recognition despite the fact that the EEC’s Arbitration Commission (the ‘Badinter Commission’), in its advice no. 6 of 11 January 1992, had stipulated that (ELIAMEP, 1993a: 327):
“The Republic of Macedonia fulfilled the conditions laid out by the Guidelines on the Recognition of New States in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union as well as by the Declaration on Yugoslavia adopted by the Council of Ministers of the European Community on 16 December 1991.”
Although the stumbling block for the recognition is the name of the new country, with Greece refusing any ‘Macedonian’ name and the Republic of Macedonia refusing any ‘non-Macedonian’ name, Greece continues to be adamant in its refusal of the existence of a ‘Slav’, or a ‘Slavomacedonian’ or, even worse, a ‘Macedonian’ minority in its territory. In the words of then Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis, in an interview to Economicos Tachydromos (19/8/1993):
“I have revolutionized Greece’s policy on the matter. PASOK (the Greek socialist party) had tolerated such a debate, that is to present us with a minority problem, whereas C. Karamanlis (former Greek president and prime minister before PASOK) had not tolerated it. When I went (to Yugoslavia), as the Official Opposition Leader in 1989, I almost engaged in a fist fight: I called it ‘phantom minority’. When the US Department of State, three years ago, mentioned a minority, I told them this is a casus belli for us. Show me where this minority is. There are bilingual Greeks; maybe some very few (among them) do not have a Greek national consciousness. (But) no one speaks any more officially about a Macedonian minority.”
Later on, Mr. Mitsotakis admitted even more explicitly that the real problem with the recognition of the Republic of Macedonia was the implicit admission that a respective minority existed in Greece (Mitsotakis, 1995:3):
“I understood the Skopje issue from the very beginning in its real dimension. What had concerned me from the very beginning was not the country’s name, which is related with the historical dimension of the problem and has mostly psychological and sentimental value. The problem for me was to avoid the emergence of a second minority problem in Western Macedonia. (...) For me, the aim had always been that that Republic should clearly state that there is no Slavomacedonian minority in Greece and to commit itself through international treaties to stop all irredentist propaganda against Greece. That was the key in the Greek-Skopjan dispute.”
It is therefore obvious that, for the Greek authorities, the issue of the existence of a Macedonian minority, let alone claims about its repression, is so extremely sensitive that they attempt to officially eliminate it by imposing on the Republic of Macedonia their view as a sine qua no for its recognition. Had that new country ever signed an international official document explicitly including the third term of the Greek Council of Ministers, it would have been used by Greece in perpetuity to claim that there is no Macedonian minority in its territory, just as it uses the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 to argue that the minority in Thrace can call itself only Muslim (the term used in the Treaty) and not Turkish, the CSCE- and Council-of Europe-adopted principle of self-determination not withstanding. On the basis of that official attitude, Greek courts can issue prison sentences for whoever calls him(her)self a Turk and they have already done so; likewise for those who say they are Macedonians or argue that there is a Macedonian minority in Greece.
Such an attitude, which has been giving the impression abroad that ‘democracy takes a back seat in Greece’ (The Times leader, 20/8/1993), reflects the existence of a nationalistic near consensus among Greek political parties, media and, notably, intellectuals and academics; hence, dissenters have little influence and can be easily and quietly persecuted. The adoption, in 1991-2, by the European Union (EU) of Greece’s terms for the recognition of the Republic of Macedonia has only helped the intransigence of Greek nationalism and made life more difficult for the minorities and the rare dissenting voices.
On the other hand, the authorities’ argument that there are only very few in the Macedonian minority who claim to have a non-Greek national consciousness is to a large extent the result of half a century of systematic persecution of that minority which has led to the expulsion of one part, the assimilation of another, and the sheer fear of a third part to ‘come out of the closet’ and publicly state their different identity. This situation may shock Western publics, but it has been common among the various Balkan nations in the 20th century.
In this document, we will explain the historical reasons for the current situation, describe current repression, present and explain the attitude of the Greek state and society on the matter, alert to the lack of appropriate documentation and international concern on the issue, and offer some suggestions for ways to remedy this and the, unfortunately, many similar state-minority conflicts in the Balkans.
A significant part of the factual information presented therein was collected during a fact finding mission which Minority Rights Group- Greece coordinated in Greek Western Macedonia and the Bitola area in the Republic of Macedonia between 19-26 July 1993, with the participation of two other NGO’s, Helsinki Watch (USA) and the Danish Helsinki Committee. The mission received no assistance nor any briefing from the Greek foreign ministry, contrary to its obligations under the Moscow CSCE declarations to which Greece is a party; in fact, it was even sometimes harassed by Greek state officials, in ways similar to the ones experienced by two of its members in the past (see Appendix I).
A note on the terms Slav, Slavomacedonian, Macedonian
As it has already become evident, the very name of Macedonia is a very sensitive issue for Greece. When trying to define the respective minority, we are faced with an equally sensitive issue. International linguists and human rights researchers tend to use the term Macedonian for both the language and the minority. Within the minority, though, there are three groups. Those who have a Macedonian national identity, meaning that they feel they belong to the same nation with that constituting the majority in the Republic of Macedonia: they call themselves Macedonians and they perceive their identity as incompatible with the Greek national identity, although hardly anyone has a problem with being a Greek citizen. Then, another group has an ethnic identity, which is incompatible with both the Greek and the
Macedonian national identities and seeks the recognition of their cultural specificities: most of the latter seem to prefer to call themselves Slavomacedonians. Finally, a third group, the largest one, is made up of people who have a full Greek ethnic and national identity, whether because they descend from ‘Graecoman’ Slavs who opted to fight for the Greek national cause or because their families were the subject of successful, though oppressive, assimilation: they are a simple linguistic minority which would be hostile to the use of the Macedonian term for them (in fact some may object even to the use of the Slavomacedonian term). To further complicate the matter, the ethnic Greeks who live in Greek Macedonia have a Macedonian regional identity and strongly object to the - monopolizing for them - use of the term Macedonia and Macedonian by the (Slav)Macedonians of Greece and, especially, of the Republic of Macedonia (Karakasidou, 1993:11-4 & 1994:63).
To overcome this confusion, towards the end of the interwar period and during World War II and the ensuing Civil War, it seems that the term Slavomacedonian was introduced and was accepted by the community itself, which at the time had a much more widespread non-Greek Macedonian ethnic consciousness. Unfortunately, according to members of the community, this term was later used by the Greek authorities in a pejorative, discriminatory way; hence the reluctance if not hostility of modern-day Macedonians of Greece (i.e. people with a Macedonian national identity) to accept it, especially at a time when the name issue has been elevated to a source of major conflict between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia.
In this document -and unlike in its first version (MRG-G, 1994)-, we have resolved to use the term Macedonian to refer to the whole Macedonian-speaking community in Greece. The first reason is that naming the minority after its language is the practice often used in this field, just as we have done for the Arvanites, the Aromanians and Meglenoromanians, and the Pomaks.
Secondly, the hostility of today’s Macedonian activists towards a name (Slavomacedonian) which has acquired such a loaded value, just like the name Kutzovlachs for the Aromanians, is another strong reason to avoid its use: after all, most of the human rights-related problems we will discuss here have had as victims those who have never had a Greek consciousness and have identified themselves as Macedonians (or, in the early interwar years and for some, Bulgarians). Thirdly, as we said above, the majority of Macedonian speakers in Greece are unhappy with the Slavomacedonian term as well. Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights Group - Greece have been the first Greek Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) to publicly use the term ‘Macedonian minority’ in Greece, to be followed, in 1995, by some other groups or individuals, too few though.
In conclusion, we should stress that we will not make any changes to excerpts of texts of other authors who have used the terms ‘Slavomacedonians’ or ‘Slavophones’.
To be continued…

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