[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.
____________________