[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 36 (Wednesday, February 27, 2019)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E220-E221]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     MACEDONIAN MINORITY IN GREECE

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. PAUL MITCHELL

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, February 27, 2019

  Mr. MITCHELL. Madam Speaker, as a co-chair of the Congressional 
Macedonian Caucus and representative of one of the largest populations 
of Macedonian-Americans in the country, I would like to include in the 
Record the following article from the BBC entitled ``Greece's invisible 
minority--the Macedonian Slavs''. I'm dedicated to maintaining and 
strengthening a positive and mutually beneficial relationship between 
the United States and Macedonia, and urge my colleagues to join me in 
building and enhancing the cultural, economic, strategic, and 
governmental ties between our two nations.

               [From the BBC News Stories, Feb. 24, 2019]

         ``Greece's Invisible Minority--the Macedonian Slavs''

       By ratifying an agreement with the newly renamed Republic 
     of North Macedonia, Greece has implicitly recognised the 
     existence of a Macedonian language and ethnicity. And yet it 
     has denied the existence of its own Macedonian minority for 
     decades, says Maria Margaronis. Will something now change?
       Mr. Fokas, 92, stands straight as a spear in his tan 
     leather brogues and cream blazer, barely leaning on the ebony 
     and ivory cane brought from Romania by his grandfather a 
     century ago. His mind and his memory are as sharp as his 
     outfit.
       A retired lawyer, Mr. Fokas speaks impeccable formal Greek 
     with a distinctive lilt: his mother tongue is Macedonian, a 
     Slavic language related to Bulgarian and spoken in this part 
     of the Balkans for centuries. At his son's modern house in a 
     village in northern Greece, he takes me through the painful 
     history of Greece's unrecognised Slavic-speaking minority.
       Mr. Fokas takes care to emphasise from the start that he is 
     both an ethnic Macedonian and a Greek patriot. He has good 
     reason

[[Page E221]]

     to underline his loyalty: for almost a century, ethnic 
     Macedonians in Greece have been objects of suspicion and, at 
     times, persecution, even as their presence has been denied by 
     almost everyone. Most are reluctant to speak to outsiders 
     about their identity. To themselves and others, they're known 
     simply as ``locals'' (dopyi), who speak a language called 
     ``local'' (dopya). They are entirely absent from school 
     history textbooks, have not featured in censuses since 1951 
     (when they were only patchily recorded, and referred to 
     simply as ``Slavic-speakers''), and are barely mentioned in 
     public. Most Greeks don't even know that they exist.
       That erasure was one reason for Greece's long-running 
     dispute with the former Yugoslav republic now officially 
     called the Republic of North Macedonia. The dispute was 
     finally resolved last month by a vote in the Greek parliament 
     ratifying (by a majority of just seven) an agreement made 
     last June by the countries' two prime ministers. When the 
     Greek Prime Minster, Alexis Tsipras, referred during the 
     parliamentary debate to the existence of ``Slavomacedonians'' 
     in Greece--at the time of World War Two--he was breaking a 
     long-standing taboo.
       The use of the name ``Macedonia'' by the neighbouring 
     nation state implicitly acknowledges that Macedonians are a 
     people in their own right, and opens the door to hard 
     questions about the history of Greece's own Macedonian 
     minority.
       When Mr. Fokas was born, the northern Greek region of 
     Macedonia had only recently been annexed by the Greek state. 
     Until 1913 it was part of the Ottoman Empire, with Greece, 
     Bulgaria and Serbia all wooing its Slavic-speaking 
     inhabitants as a means to claiming the territory. It was 
     partly in reaction to those competing forces that a 
     distinctive Slav Macedonian identity emerged in the late 19th 
     and early 20th Century. As Mr. Fokas's uncle used to say, the 
     family was ``neither Serb, nor Greek, nor Bulgarian, but 
     Macedonian Orthodox''.
       In the end, the Slav Macedonians found themselves divided 
     between those three new states. In Greece, some were 
     expelled; those who remained were pushed to assimilate. All 
     villages and towns with non-Greek names were given new ones, 
     chosen by a committee of scholars in the late 1920s, though 
     almost a century later some ``locals'' still use the old 
     ones.
       In 1936, when Mr. Fokas was nine years old, the Greek 
     dictator Ioannis Metaxas (an admirer of Mussolini) banned the 
     Macedonian language, and forced Macedonian-speakers to change 
     their names to Greek ones. Mr. Fokas remembers policemen 
     eavesdropping on mourners at funerals and listening at 
     windows to catch anyone speaking or singing in the forbidden 
     tongue. There were lawsuits, threats and beatings.
       Women--who often spoke no Greek--would cover their mouths 
     with their headscarves to muffle their speech, but Mr. 
     Fokas's mother was arrested and fined 250 drachmas, a big sum 
     back then.
       ``Slavic-speakers suffered a lot from the Greeks under 
     Metaxas,'' he says. ``Twenty people from this village, the 
     heads of the big families, were exiled to the island of 
     Chios. My father-in-law was one of them.'' They were tortured 
     by being forced to drink castor oil, a powerful laxative.
       When Germany, Italy and Bulgaria invaded Greece in 1941, 
     some Slavic-speakers welcomed the Bulgarians as potential 
     liberators from Metaxas's repressive regime. But many soon 
     joined the resistance, led by the Communist Party (which at 
     that time supported the Macedonian minority) and continued 
     fighting with the Communists in the civil war that followed 
     the Axis occupation. (Bulgaria annexed the eastern part of 
     Greek Macedonia from 1941 to 1944, committing many 
     atrocities; many Greeks wrongly attribute these to 
     Macedonians, whom they identify as Bulgarians.)
       When the Communists were finally defeated, severe reprisals 
     followed for anyone associated with the resistance or the 
     left.
       ``Macedonians paid more than anyone for the civil war,'' 
     Mr. Fokas says. ``Eight people were court-martialled and 
     executed from this village, eight from the next village, 23 
     from the one opposite. They killed a grandfather and his 
     grandson, just 18 years old.''
       Mr. Fokas was a student in Thessaloniki then--but he too 
     was arrested and spent three years on the prison island of 
     Makronisos, not because of anything he'd done but because his 
     mother had helped her brother-in-law escape through the 
     skylight of a cafe where he was being held.
       Most of the prisoners on Makronisos were Greek leftists, 
     and were pressed to sign declarations of repentance for their 
     alleged Communist past. Those who refused were made to crawl 
     under barbed wire, or beaten with thick bamboo canes. 
     ``Terrible things were done,'' Mr. Fokas says. ``But we 
     mustn't talk about them. It's an insult to Greek 
     civilisation. It harms Greece's good name.''
       Tens of thousands of fighters with the Democratic Army, 
     about half of them Slavic-speakers, went into exile in 
     Eastern bloc countries during and after the civil war. About 
     20,000 children were taken across the border by the 
     Communists, whether for their protection or as reserve troops 
     for a future counter-attack.
       Many Slavic-speaking civilians also went north for safety. 
     Entire villages were left empty, like the old settlement of 
     Krystallopigi (Smrdes in Macedonian) near the Albanian 
     border, where only the imposing church of St. George stands 
     witness to a population that once numbered more than 1,500 
     souls.
       In 1982, more than 30 years after the conflict's end, 
     Greece's socialist government issued a decree allowing civil 
     war refugees to return--but only those who were ``of Greek 
     ethnicity''. Ethnic Macedonians from Greece remained shut out 
     of their country, their villages and their land; families 
     separated by the war were never reunited.
       Mr. Fokas's father-in-law and brother-in-law both died in 
     Skopje. But, he points out, that decree tacitly recognised 
     that there were ethnic Macedonians in Greece, even though the 
     state never officially recognised their existence: ``Those 
     war refugees left children, grandchildren, fathers, mothers 
     behind. What were they, if not Macedonians?''
       It's impossible accurately to calculate the number of 
     Slavic-speakers or descendants of ethnic Macedonians in 
     Greece. Historian Leonidas Embiricos estimates that more than 
     100,000 still live in the Greek region of Macedonia, though 
     only 10,000 to 20,000 would identify openly as members of a 
     minority--and many others are proud Greek nationalists.
       The Macedonian language hasn't officially been banned in 
     Greece for decades, but the fear still lingers. A middle-aged 
     man I met in a village near the reed beds of Lake Prespa, 
     where the agreement between Greece and the North Macedonian 
     republic was first signed last June, explained that this fear 
     is passed down through the generations. ``My parents didn't 
     speak the language at home in case I picked it up and spoke 
     it in public. To protect me. We don't even remember why we're 
     afraid any more,'' he said. Slowly the language is dying. 
     Years of repression pushed it indoors; assimilation is 
     finishing the job.
       And yet speaking or singing in Macedonian can still be 
     cause for harassment. Mr. Fokas' son is a musician; he plays 
     the haunting Macedonian flute for us as his own small son 
     looks on. He and a group of friends used to host an 
     international music festival in the village square, with 
     bands from as far away as Brazil, Mexico and Russia.
       ``After those bands had played we'd have a party and play 
     Macedonian songs,'' he says. ``None of them were nationalist 
     or separatist songs--we would never allow that. But in 2008, 
     just as we were expecting the foreign musicians to arrive, 
     the local authority suddenly banned us from holding the 
     festival in the square, even though other people--the very 
     ones who wanted us banned--still hold their own events 
     there.''
       At the last minute, the festival was moved to a field 
     outside the village, among the reeds and marshes, without 
     proper facilities--which, Mr. Fokas's son points out, only 
     made Greece look bad.
       ``And do you know why the songs are banned in the square 
     but not the fields outside?'' his father adds. ``Because 
     around the square there are cafes, and local people could sit 
     there and watch and listen secretly. But outside the village 
     they were afraid to join in--they would have drawn attention 
     to themselves by doing that.''
       The ratification of Greece's agreement with the Republic of 
     North Macedonia--and its implicit recognition of a Macedonian 
     language and ethnicity--is a major political breakthrough 
     which should help to alleviate such fears. But the process 
     has also sparked new waves of anger and anxiety, with large, 
     sometimes violent protests opposing the agreement, supported 
     by parts of the Orthodox church.
       An election is due before the end of the year. Greece's 
     right-wing opposition has been quick to capitalise on 
     nationalist sentiments, accusing the Syriza government of 
     treason and betrayal. For Greece's Slavic-speakers, who have 
     long sought nothing more than the right to cultural 
     expression, the time to emerge from the shadows may not quite 
     yet have arrived.
       Mr. Fokas has been referred to by his first name to protect 
     his identity.

                          ____________________