Akritas Macedonian blog: November 2010

Saturday, November 27, 2010

PM Gruevski´s hardline policy leaves FYROM out of NATO summit yet again

Australian Macedonian Advisory Council
November 26, 2010

FYROM Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski´s hardline policy to his country´s naming dispute with Greece has once again caused FYROM to not be invited to take part in the latest NATO summit (where new members are then invited to join the Alliance) which took place on 20 November 2010 in Lisbon.

Immediately after the summit, instead of taking responsibility for his failure once again for FYROM to be invited to join the NATO alliance (after its failure to join NATO in 2008 and a stagnant EU candidature in 2010 (http://www.ana.gr/anaweb/user/showplain?maindoc=9321518&maindocimg=9318247&service=96&showLink=true), Gruevski stated that his country "had not joined NATO, because of ´interference´ from Greece, due the name issue".

Meanwhile, the citizens of the FYROM (of whom 35% are of Albanian origin) are becoming....

Friday, November 12, 2010

Letter to Kofos by World Pan-Macedonian Associations

A Critique of Consequence

Concerns over the feasibility of special advisor to ELIAMEP Dr. E. Kofos's suggestions for a solution to the Macedonian naming dispute between Athens and Skopje

November 2010

Dear Dr. Kofos,

In regards to the Rose-Routh seminar you gave in Skopje on October 20, 2010 at NATO's Parliamentary Assembly vis-à-vis the imbroglio Greece has with its northern neighbor, and in regards to recent news reports coming out of Skopje attributed to you, we the Worldwide Pan-Macedonian Associations would like to offer you our comments. We feel that the Pan-Macedonian Associations, as the bastions of Hellenism in Macedonia, should be an important voice and an inseparable figure in the academic, political, and historical discussions on the name issue with our neighbor. We are the representatives of millions of Macedonians in Greece and the Diaspora; we are diachronic, and independent of all political parties.

We respect your efforts over the last five decades in dealing with Skopje's Macedonism however we must strongly object to the ideas that you and your colleagues in ELIAMEP have promoted to the citizens in Greece and the Diaspora, to various foreign ministers of the Hellenic Republic, and most recently to politicians and journalists in Skopje.

Throughout your thesis you un-necessarily refer to that state as.....

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Understanding the Macedonian Name Dispute and its importance to the United States

by Ioannis Fidanakis
President of Pan Thracian Union of America “Orpheus”.

It’s been 19 years since a small former republic of Yugoslavia declared independence and attempted to hijack the history, identity and name of the ancient Greek Kingdom of Macedonia. Originally known as Vardar Banovina, the region was renamed by Josip Broz Tito in the aftermath of the Second World War. The name chosen by Tito was the Socialist Republic of Macedonia, an ideal chose as it allowed him to promote the concept of an oppressed ‘Macedonian ethnicity’, in which he could develop the idea of reunification of the greater geographic region in hopes of gaining access to the Aegean Sea, through the Greek port city of Thessaloniki. With the fall of the former Yugoslavia the republic was admitted into the United Nations under the provisional name, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Much has changed since this disagreement between Greece and FYROM began in 1991. The world is a much different place now, and despite a world economic crisis Athens and Skopje continue to fight over the word ‘Macedonia’.

Most Americans are ignorant of the name dispute and those that have some type of understanding find it ridiculous to fight over a name. Their inability to understand the Greek position is the failure of Greek America to properly explain their concerns to the average American. It is with this said, that a new campaign has been launched hoping to educate and bring attention to the Greek position concerning the name dispute. Focused on....

Regarding the Greek debt Crisis....

Greece, a peripheral european state was encouraged to join a badly designed single currency by the rich elite of countries that dominated it. Those countries, having set up borrowing rules for the currency union, were the first to break them and did so with impunity.

Through complacency and inept financial regulation, and lacking good investment opportunities in their own stuttering economies, they then encouraged their banks to lend recklessly to the country on the periphery.

When those investments went sour, the elite governments -influence from Germany- with theirs globalizing neoliberal leadeships, rushed to bail out their banks first by loading up the debtor government with yet more loans to pay them back and then by imposing a foreign overlord to extract repayments through legal force.

We need History Lectures based on FACTS not political motives!

In November 5-8 2009 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City took place the so-called "7th Macedonian-North American Conference on Macedonian Studies".
Although a number of presenters strictly deal with subjects of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, there are politically motivated lectures that attack and disparage the people of Greece, the Greek Cultural identity and as they twist historical facts through their disturbing presentation.
These motivated lectures are influence under the umbrella of the Slavmacedonism [5], a post-modern ultra nationalist ideology.

Read more here.

Modern Macedonian question - What is it all about?

Ancient Macedonia was a Greek kingdom situated in the north end of Greece. It became the most powerful Greek state during the 4th century bc after the decline of Athina (Athens) and Sparta. Under the leadership of King Philippos II and his son Alexandros III (Alexander the Great) the Macedonian army conquered most of the world and created the world's largest empire ever, including South-East Europe, most of Asia and North Africa.
After the death of Alexandros, Macedonia followed the fate of the rest of Greece. It became a Roman province, later a Byzantine province, it was occupied by the Ottoman empire and finally it became part of the indepented Greek state in 1912.
Today a Slavic nation attempts to adopt the history and culture of Macedonia as their own and present themselves to the world as "ethnic Macedonians" and "descedants of ancient Macedonians"
This is a blatant attack against Greece and its world wide respected history.
The FYROM Slavs who claim to be "Macedonians" have no historical, cultural or linguistic relation with ancient Macedonia. They descended into the region not before the 6th cent. A.D. long after ancient Macedonia was homogenized with the rest of Greece. Their 'Republic of Macedonia' occupies less than 10% of ancient Macedonia.
Therefore their claim on ancient Macedonia's name, history, culture and symbols can not be justified.

Aegean Macedonia.........

is a FYROMacedonian Slav nationalist term used to refer to the region of Macedonia in Greece, in the context of a United Macedonia.
The origins of the term seem to be rooted in the 1940s but its modern usage is widely considered ambiguous and irredentist.
The term has occasionally appeared on maps circulated in the FYROM, which envisioned Greek Macedonia (referred to as "Aegean Macedonia") as part of a "Greater Macedonia", and is regarded as a challenge of of the legitimacy of Greek sovereignity over the area.

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