The Birth of a Clone State Part III

in Articles / by Admin / on November 1, 2008 at 8:41 am /

The Birth of a Clone State

Part III

By Georgios Gialtouridis

The term clone is derived from κλών (klon), the Greek word for twig or branch, referring to the process whereby a new plant can be created from a twig.

On February 19, 1878, in the small Macedonian village of Litochoro on the lower slopes of Mt. Olympus overlooking the Aegean Sea, a group of brave Macedonian Greeks signed a Proclamation whereby “…the representatives of the various communities in Macedonia, overthrew the Sultan’s tyrannical authority, declared the union of Macedonia with mother Greece…Therefore, we were forced to seek our arms so that we may die as men as Greeks if we are not allowed to live like logical and free men.” The Declaration of the Greek-inspired Provisional Government of Macedonia by it’s President Evangelos Korovangos requested protection from the ‘Christian Super Powers’ through their respective consulates in Ottoman-occupied Thessaloniki ‘for the justification of their fight and the unification with mother Greece.’ Unfortunately, the British Consulate quickly disclosed these plans to the Ottomans, and within two weeks the rebellion was crushed. Those ‘Christian Super Powers,’ through the subsequent Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin later that year, further ignored these pleas for freedom from Ottoman tyranny and have either borne witness to or even incited the savagery which was to follow.

Following the Treaty of Berlin, Pan-Slavists began a coordinated effort for Bulgaria to regain the region of Macedonia. Unwilling to simply overtake the region as that would seem too San Stefano-like and may again provoke the Great Powers, in 1893 ethnic Bulgarians formed the VMRO, or the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. The role of the VMRO, through a combination of predatory impulses of the Komitadji death squads on one hand and a Pan-Slavist educational mechanism using Russian agents disguised as clerics under the auspices of the Bulgarian Exarchate on the other, was to conduct a systematic inhumane ethno-catharsis through intimidation, terror and murder thereby eradicating from the Macedonian region the Greek element who were unwilling to succumb to Slavism. Using their motto “Macedonia for the Macedonians” this was a deceptive attempt to initially create an autonomous Macedonia which would later unite with Bulgaria.

The Serbs, not to be out-done by the Bulgarians, knew that directly suppressing the Bulgarian idea was impossible to achieve. Politician Stojan Novakovic conceived an active ethnogenesis process as a transitional stage in assimilating the regional element formulated upon the principle of Macedonia as a separate nation with it’s own language and history. He thought this ‘blueprint’ could attract the people and their feelings and thus sever them from Bulgarianism. This same doctrine of an ideological homogeneity was later adopted and meticulously implemented by Tito.

Today’s ruling party in FYROM is the VMRO-DPMNE (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity), headed by Nikola Gruevski. Article 2 of the party’s Statute breaks down the acronym name. It states: “The first part of the name, VMRO, expresses the traditions of the Macedonian people from which the ideological and political struggle was subsequently integrated into the objectives and aims of the party.” This is inspired by the Pan-Slavist Bulgarian aspect of the Macedonism doctrine devised by the original founders of the VMRO.

Page one of the party’s current five-year program reads: “We particularly advocate the respect for the national and minority rights of Macedonians living in neighboring countries.” This relates to the Pan-Slavist Serb aspect of the irredentist ideology based on alleged homogeneity.

As the Russians, Bulgarians and Serbs were scheming their way to the Aegean Sea, Greece was fighting it’s own battles. The Greco-Turkish War of 1897 exposed Greece’s inability to liberate Macedonia at the time. With battle fronts in Crete, Macedonia, Epirus and the Aegean, Greece was understandably unable to militarily prevail in all simultaneously. The precipitous Ottoman demise was indeed additional incentive for Greeks in occupied territories to fight for their freedom. But the waters of the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean were hostile to mother Greece and her oppressed sons. Great Britain’s desperate support for Ottoman sovereignty in order to keep Russian influence away from the Straits and Suez Canal was not only on display in the Congress of Berlin but also in the Mediterranean waters at Greece’s expense. In Martin Gilbert’s Churchill, 22-year old Brigade Major Winston Churchill writes to his mother questioning Lord Salisbury’s foreign policy strategy: “We are doing a very wicked thing in firing on the Cretan insurgents & in blockading Greece so that she cannot succour them…I look on this question from the point of view of right & wrong: Lord Salisbury from that of profit and loss.” (p. 68)

Today, in the center of Litochoro in the Pieria prefecture of Greece’s Macedonia province, a Heroes’ Memorial adorns the sloped landscape. The busts of Evangelos Korovangos and two other brave men honor those who died in 1878. They were the Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray et al. of the true, Greek-inspired Macedonian Liberation Struggle. They were the first to fall for Macedonia. In recognition of these men who gave the ultimate sacrifice, I would like to cite Thucydides from The History of the Peloponnesian War as Pericles in his Funeral Oration so eloquently honors those who had first fallen in the war: “ανδρων γάρ επιφανων πασα γη τάφος” (2.43.3) meaning “for heroes have the whole earth for their tomb.” How fitting.

(*) Published in this weekend’s English edition of the New York-based publication The National Herald (Εθνικός Κήρυξ).

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Tags: bulgaria, churchill, clone, fyrom, gialtouridis, gruevski, macedonia, novakovic, slavism, state, vmro-dpmne

Comments

Dimitris says:

November 12, 2008 at 10:46 am

poli kalo

westclub4 says:

November 1, 2008 at 9:40 pm

Ethnic Macedonian brothers and sisters of the north, you are the historic ethnic Macedonian Greek people of Northern Macedonia. Your ethnic descent and historic origin is also Greek and likewise to ourselves –i.e. the ethnic Macedonian Greeks, who live concurrently south of the border. You have nothing in common with either the raiding Turanic Avars or the barbarous Baltic Slavs. You are Macedonian Greeks whose original Greek language got slavicized at some point in the past and as a result of partition, occupation, oppression and propaganda.

Indeed, you have been through a lot throughout the many centuries of the Avaric, Slavic, Tataric Bulgarian, Turkish and Yugoslavic rule via the partition and occupation of your land and also via the enslavement of your people. In nowadays, a significantly foreign Bulgarian and Slavic elite still rules over you and your ancient Macedonian Greek people. It is these same elite which have ruled you for centuries now, which has also oppressed and alienated you and your people.

Whereas, we have obtained freedom from early 20th Century onwards, you have yet remained enslaved either to Bulgars or Turks, and either to south-Slavs and Serbs ever since almost the late 8th Century. The end result of the many centuries of partition, oppression and occupation has been the development of a rather peculiar slavophonea, as well as, the alteration of much of your original ethnic Macedonian Greek culture and national consciousness. Nonetheless, you remain true Macedonians to the present; That is, you remain our ethnic Macedonian Greek brothers of the north, which are of an ancient ethnic Greek Macedonian descent and historic origin too, likewise to ourselves who live in the south.

Brothers and sisters of Northern Macedonia, you should always remember that you are neither Bulgars, nor Serbs. Neither of you is Baltic or Slavic, nor is it Tataric or Bulgarian either. You and your people are not the same with the Finno-Ugrians –i.e. either with the Avaric and Magyar Huns or with the Turkish and Tataric Mongols. You are nothing but a slavicized Hellenic Macedonian people, which has always been indigenous and autochthonous to the land of the Northern Macedonian region. You are ethnic Macedonian Greeks, ethnic Thracian Greeks and also ethnic Paeonian Greeks and all of which were enslaved once to the foreign Bulgars and whose language became slavicized thereafter.

You are a glorious and an also ancient ethnic Greek Macedonian people, like ourselves who live in the south. Your land is historic. It consisted once of many Macedonians, Paeonians, Thracians, Dardanians, Illyrians, Epirotans, Brygians, Ionians, Dorians, Aeolians and also of many other and more Greek and Pelasgic Greek peoples and tribes. They were the initial and original Pelasgian Greek tribes that were once widespread throughout the Hellenic Peninsula. These are your true and also historic Northern Macedonian ethnic anscestors. These are your true and also correct and historic Macedonian Greek ethnic origins and roots.