|
Nicholaos
K. Martis
Former
Gov. Minister
Kaisareias
8
115 27
Athens
GREECE
Athens, March 29, 2004
The President of the United States
Mr. George
Bush
Washington
USA
As President of the United States of America, the world’s mightiest
political, economic, and military power, with a prestigious record of playing a
decisive part, together with its struggling allies, during two World Wars and
the Cold War which followed, in safeguarding the democratic way of life of the
people o Europe, you are in a position to ensure that the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia ceases to constitute the antidemocratic communist
residuum in Europe.
The fraudulent creation of Stalin
and Tito, FYROM, with the stolen Greek name of ‘Macedonia’, has been strongly
criticized and invariably treated by the American side as a hostile act, not
only against Greece.
The Slavs of FYROM, whom Tito
christened ‘Macedonians’ in 1944, have usurped the history and the cultural
patrimony of the people who have lived in Macedonia, and are deceiving
international public opinion.
A recent example is a speech made by
Kiro Gligorov at the University of Columbia in New York on the subject of ‘The
Contribution of Ilinden to the Awakening of Macedonian Consciousness’. Ilinden
was the name given to the uprising
against the Turks in 1903 in the area of Monastiri (now Bitola).
The uprising was fomented by
Bulgarians, but FYROM presents it as an uprising of ‘Macedonians’. This was
contradicted at the time by the consuls of the United States, England, France,
and Austria, who were in Monastiri. In a book titled The Events of 1903 in
Macedonia as Presented in European Diplomatic Correspondence (Doc. 34), the
four consuls report in dozens of documents to their respective foreign
ministers that the uprising was fomented by Bulgarians (Doc. 34). A report by
the Turkish Ambassador to France (Doc. 39) also contradicts what FYROM says.
Gligorov also deceived the
international community from the rostrum of the United Nations (p. 91 of my
book FYROM: The anti-democratic residuum in Europe and its problematic
Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU and Doc. 43).
Skopje also deceived the Vatican and
the Italian people in 1986 when it exhibited Greek icons as ‘Macedonian’ icons
in a room in the Vatican.
Following protests by the Archbishop
of Athens, the Vatican stated: ‘We were tricked by Skopje’.
All their assertions are false (p.
87-93 of my book). Under the name of Macedonia, FYROM is a cancer threatening
peace in the region. The only solution for its survival –which would be an
important factor for peace in the Balkans - is a new name, agreed on by all the
ethnic groups of which it is made up. It is a solution, which was supported by
an American Undersecretary of State in 1992.
As a Macedonian myself, as Minister
for Macedonia and Thrace for seven of my twelve years as a government minister,
and as a reserve officer who saw 83 months of service during the Second World
War and fought in the battle for the fortified positions of Macedonia and
Thrace during the German invasion of Greece in 1941 and then at El Alamein,
Rimini, and the Battle of Athens in December 1944, I consider it my duty, as I
did towards your predecessors Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to
inform you too about the Macedonian question.
I am also
spurred to write to you by the recent judicial assistance agreement between the
USA and FYROM, not, however, under its present legal name of the ‘Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, but under the stolen Greek name of
‘Macedonia’.
As you will realize, this agreement
using the name of ‘Macedonia’ was a political mistake and the blame is shared
by those who bowed to coercion from Skopje and recommended that it be signed.
The agreement between the USA and ‘Macedonia’
was also surprising because it confutes the USA’s and the UN’s firm positions
against FYROM as ‘Macedonia’.
In 1944, no sooner had Tito created
the ‘Republic of Macedonia’ that the Roosevelt administration condemned all
their assertions as demagoguery with veiled threats, and ever since then
American presidents and important figures have condemned or taken steps against
FYROM as ‘Macedonia’.
Tito’s declared aim of wresting the
geographical area of Macedonia away from Greece to gain access to the Aegean,
which would neutralize the line of defense of the democracies (Greece and
Turkey), the President Truman’s statement in his memoirs, based on reports by
the information services, that Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania were waging a
campaign to create a communist Greece, led to the enunciation of the Truman
Doctrine.
The Truman Doctrine, which also
covered Turkey, and the statement in the President’s speech that the loss of
Greece’s independence would also have repercussions for the countries of Europe
show that the United States regarded the creation of a Macedonian problem as
the first incident in a cold war, which was also obvious from the circular
airgram issued by Stettinious.
Arthur Vanderberg, the President of
the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs, was more explicit in a letter of
1947, in which he stated that the problem of Greece was symbolic of the global
ideological conflict between the Eastern bloc and Western democracy.
As a cold-war incident, however, the
Macedonian problem evolved in Greece and especially in Macedonia as a warm-war
incident.
This was pointed out by President
George H. W. Bush on an official visit to Greece in 1991, when he stated that
Greece alone had halted Soviet expansionism in Europe during the difficult
period.
The Roosevelt government’s blunt
(and still appropriate) description of Skopje’s assertions as ‘democracy’ would
be charitable if applied to FYROM’s latest deliberate hoodwinking of
international public opinion.
In 2001, FYROM signed an association
agreement with the European Union.
However, on the Skopje government’s
official website it is stated that ‘The Republic of Macedonia –not FYROM-
signed an association agreement not with the European Union, but with the
(named) fifteen member countries of the European Union, including Greece (Doc.
12).
When they learn that the member
states of the European Union, including Greece, and also the United States have
accepted ‘Macedonia’ as FYROM’s name in the recent agreement, Internet users
all over the world will have no reason to wait for the UN decision regarding a
new name, mutually acceptable to both FYROM and Greece.
The whole ‘Macedonian problem’ is
not a local squabble, nor is it simply a matter of FYROM’s name.
The history of Macedonia constitutes
an important part of the infrastructure of Western civilization. Consequently,
respect for the historical truth about Macedonia is not a matter that concerns
the Greeks alone.
By disseminating Greek culture and
establishing Greek as the only language of the people, Alexander the Great and
his successors (the Ptolemies and the Seleucids) profoundly influenced the
history of the human race.
Christianity used the Greek language
as the medium by which it was transmitted. Of the 48 books of the Old
Testament, eight were written in Greek and the other 40 were translated into
Greek. The New Testament was written entirely in Greek and these two sacred
texts were translated from Greek into hundreds of other languages (p. 99 of my
book).
In his book Hellenistic Period,
the Soviet academician Avraam Rankovitch states that the culture created by
Alexander and his successors (Hellenistic period) was inherited by Rome,
Byzantium, and the people of the Far East and strongly influenced the modern
era.
In a special study signed by Staggan
Stolpe in 1995, the Swedish Institute for Foreign Affairs and the University of
Lund point out that the history of Macedonia is not only the history of the
Greeks, but the history of all Europeans, because the Macedonians propagated
Greek culture, which still influences us today.
The re-establishment of the Alexandrian Library, with funding
(US$200,000,000) from UNESCO, the international community, and the Egyptian
government, is a major cultural achievement of the third millennium and
underlines the role of the Hellenistic period, one of the achievements of which
was the legendary ancient Alexandrian Library, which was founded by the
Macedonian Ptolemy I and
developed by all the Ptolemies until Cleopatra, whom Liz Taylor played in the
film of the same name as a Greek.
Philology and the sciences were developed by the Alexandrians (p. 117 of
my book).
The geographical territory of Macedonia, a bridge between East and West,
North and South, has always been a target of aggressive designs, especially on
the part of our northern neighbors.
Two events have been the main sources of problems in Macedonia.
The first was the Treaty of San Stefano in May 1878, by which the
victorious Tsarist Russia forced the defeated Ottoman Empire to cede Thrace and
most of Macedonia to Bulgaria. The Tsar’s aim was to gain access to the Aegean.
Following Greek protests, the European powers, which were also affected,
forced the Tsar, with the Treaty of Berlin in July 1878, to revoke the San
Stefano Treaty.
The Bulgarians used special gangs (Komitadjis) to try to change
the demographic make-up and led to the Macedonian Struggle (1903-8) between
Greeks and Bulgarians. This was followed by the first and second Balkan Wars
and the First World War, the end of which found Russia under the communist
regime.
The second event that was the source of the current problem with Skopje
was the decision in Moscow in July 1921 by the Comintern and the Balkan
communist parties (including the Communist Party of Greece) to make Macedonia
and Thrace autonomous socialist republics.
The decision was reportedly taken in Lenin’s presence and proposed by
the Bulgarian communist Kollarov.
In Moscow in September 1924 at the seventh Congress of the Balkan
Communist Federation and at the fifth Congress of the Third International, with
the intervention of Russian representatives on both occasions, the idea of
autonomy was abandoned and it was decided to create an independent Macedonian
state. The decision was ratified at the Panhellenic Congress of the Communist
Party in December 1924 in the presence of representatives of the Third
International. Apostolidis and Kordatos raised objections and were expelled.
Also, when the Germans invaded Greece in 1941, Bulgaria, as Hitler’s
ally, invaded and annexed Thrace and a large part of Macedonia.
With the German invasion of Greece and Serbia in April 1941, the Kingdom
of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which had existed since 1919, was abolished
and the communist Tito prevailed and renamed the kingdom ‘Yugoslavia’.
In 1944, thanks to Churchill’s intervention at Yalta, Greece escaped
becoming a communist country. Tito, certain that communism would prevail in
Greece also, with the support of the Communist Party of Greece and with
Stalin’s agreement, in the hope of attaining the aim of the Comintern and the
Balkan communist parties and especially the decision of 1924 in Moscow,
fraudulently changed the name of southern Serbia (which had been known as
Vardaska since 1912) to the ‘Socialist Republic of Macedonia’ and christened
its Slav inhabitants ‘Macedonians’.
He then proceeded to create on paper the non-existent component elements
of the non-existent ‘Macedonian Nation’, in 1944 a ‘Macedonian government’ and
a ‘Macedonian parliament’, and in 1944 he named the pro-Bulgarian dialect
spoken in the Skopje area the ‘Macedonian language’.
In 1968 he established in FYROM an autocephalous Macedonian Church,
which is not recognized by any church, and 1969 saw the publication of the
three-volume History of the (pseudo-) Macedonian Nation, which is the biggest
political and historical hoax the world has ever seen.
FYROM:
the ticking bomb in the Balcans
Paddy Ashdown, speaking as a candidate for the post of UN High
Representative in Kosovo in December 2000, described FYROM as the ‘ticking bomb
in the Balkans’.
With the stolen Greek name of ‘Macedonia’ FYROM is a cancer permanently
threatening peace in the region.
All the neighboring people, who are well aware of the treaties and of
Tito’s aspirations when he created the Republic of Macedonia, consider it
foredoomed to failure and regard their ethnic kinsfolk as a vehicle for
political aspirations.
The Bulgarians regard the Slavs of FYROM as Bulgarians, and Zhelev, as
President of the Republic of Bulgaria on an official visit to Sweden in June
1993, declared that the ‘Macedonian Nation’ created by the Comintern after the
War was a crime committed by Tito and Stalin.
In 1997, Arben Xhaferi, leader of the Albanians in FYROM, accused
Gligorov of falsifying his neighbors’ history, and stated that his
Macedonianism was not real but fictitious.
On August 4, 2003, the Serbs banned an official delegation from FYROM
from entering Serbian territory to visit the Monastery of Prohor Pcinjski,
where Tito founded the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1944.
The false and, to Greeks, objectionable assertion by the Slavs of FYROM,
which was used as the cornerstone of their fictitious nation, that the ancient
Macedonians were not Greeks and that they themselves became Macedonians, is an
insult not only to the Greeks but to any rational person with the most
elementary knowledge of history.
At the same time, Skopje’s assertion that there are supposedly
‘Macedonian minorities’ in Greece, Bulgaria, and Albania is a permanent
provocation and the motive behind constant peace-threatening claims and
provocations, which risk fragmenting FYROM.
The only solution for FYROM to prosper and constitute a stable factor
for peace in the Balkans is a new name, agreed on by all the ethnic groups,
which live there, so that it can nip its neighbors’ aspirations in the bud.
This solution was proposed by Mr. Thomas Niles, US Undersecretary of
State, before a Congress subcommittee on June 22, 1992.
There is, after all, the precedent of Byelorussia, which, by Stalin’s
own admission (Doc. 5) was created by the communist party itself and is now
member of the United Nations.
American data indicate that the agreement between the
United States and ‘Macedonia’ is a
political mistake
1)
The USA has been criticized for
ignoring the United Nations over the war of Iraq. With the above-mentioned
agreement, the United States’ critics have an additional argument that the
United States had disdained that international organization on a matter of equal
importance to the war. As you know, the UN has ruled that the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia shall be known as FYROM until a mutually acceptable name
can be found and agreed upon; and the negotiations are taking place under UN
auspices.
2)
Those who proposed that the
agreement be signed under the name of ‘Macedonia’ insult the memory of
Stettinius, Secretary of State under the Roosevelt administration, who, with
circular airgram 868.014/26 Dec. 1944, immediately denounced any ‘talk of
“Macedonian nation”, “Macedonian fatherland”, or “Macedonian national
consciousness” as ‘unjustified demagoguery’ (Doc. 1). He regarded it as ‘a
possible cloak for aggressive intentions against Greece’ and stated that the
United States would take steps against those who would help Yugoslavia and
Bulgaria to foment a Macedonian question.
Therefore, the recent agreement between the United States and
“Macedonia” unfortunately helps to exacerbate a Macedonian question.
3)
It is an insult to the memory of
President Truman, whose Truman Doctrine helped to bring about the collapse of
the communists’ plans. Had they occupied Macedonia and Thrace, the communists
would have smashed NATO’s eastern wing, with serious wider consequences. So it
was thanks to sacrifices by American taxpayers and the blood of the Greeks that
Macedonia was saved from being incorporated into FYROM.
4)
This agreement if contrary to
President Clinton’s position, who in October 2, 1992 prior to the elections
declared that “The United States position must be clear. If the southernmost former Yugoslav Republic
wishes to receive American recognition, it must first accept the principles of
the Helsinki Final Act, satisfy its neighbors and the world community that its
intentions are peaceful, and abide by the European Community’s decision which
rejects the use of the name Macedonia. A Clinton Administration will stand by
these principles and ensure that Greece’s legitimate concerns are met”.
5)
With this agreement, we see two
American administrations, each under a President Bush, adopting contrary
positions over an issue with political and moral implications. On an official
visit to Greece in 1991, President George H.W. Bush praised Greece, because
during the difficult period between 1947 and 1949, Greece alone, of all the
countries of Europe, halted Soviet expansionism. However, these Soviet efforts,
which were so dangerous to the democratic nations and the United States, were
assisted with separate armed divisions by FYROM, which had its eye on
Macedonia.
In 2003, with this agreement, a United States government under President
George W. Bush has retrospectively legitimized that hostile (to Greece and the
USA alike) act during what President Bush termed in 1991 “that difficult
period”.
6)
The agreement between the USA and
Macedonia lends credit to Henry Kissinger, who at the annual meeting of
Management Centre Europe in 1992 stated: ‘Greece is right [about the name]… I
know history, which is not the case with … most of the government and
administration in Washington. The strength of the Greek case is that of
history, which I must say that Athens has not used so far with success’ (Doc.
2).
7)
The agreement goes against the clear
statement made by Bill Clinton a month before he was elected President of the
United States that he would not accept the name ‘Macedonia’.
8)
The agreement is an insult to the
American people, who, as a democratic and liberal people, respect the truth,
which is an indispensable condition of democracy.
Two recent examples reveal that, just as American governments and US
Presidents have condemned and exposed this political and historical deception,
informed Americans reject the fraudulent construct that the communist parties
have built up over decades.
The legislative bodies of, to date, eleven US states have unanimously
resolved that ‘the ancient and the modern Macedonians were and are Greeks, and
only Greeks’.
The second example is the decision by the SOUTHERN BELL telephone
company, which I shall discuss later.
Mr.
President,
Those who proposed the signing of
the agreement between the United States and ‘Macedonia’, as also those who
refer to FYROM as ‘Macedonia’, are going to find themselves in a difficult
position over what they are going to call the people of FYROM.
They cannot call them ‘Macedonians’,
because only the Greeks are, and ever have been, Macedonians.
The Greek identity of the
Macedonians is confirmed by:
i.
The Old and New Testaments (pp. 63 -
64 of my book);
ii.
The works of ancient Greek, Jewish,
and Roman writers (pp. 66 - 72 of my book);
iii.
More recent events: treaties wars,
censuses (pp. 74– 85 of my book);
iv.
Skopje’s false assertions (pp. 86 -
93 of my book).
They could not be called ‘Macedonians’ even if the Greeks were not
Macedonians.
Historically,
the Macedonians existed a thousand years before the Slavs arrived in the
Balkans in the sixth century AD.
It is therefore absurd for them to
assert that as communists they discovered fourteen centuries later that they
had united with the Greek Macedonians and became Macedonians themselves.
The absurdity is also self-evidently
laughable. There is no such precedent in history for the metamorphosis of one
person into another.
It is also absurd for Skopje to
refer to itself as the capital of Macedonia. In the ancient and the Roman period,
Skopje was the capital of Dardania. In the Ottoman period it was the capital of
Kosovo; and from 1912 to 1944 it was the capital of Vardaska (Doc. 14).
Ever since 319 BC, the capital of
Macedonia (the metropolis of Macedonia, according to Strabo, Geography VII
21) has been one of the oldest and most historic
cities in Europe: Thessaloniki.
After 2,300 years, Skopje has
renamed it ‘Solun’ and deleted it from the roster of Greek cities, because even
in its modern school textbooks FYROM shows Greece’s northern border limited to
Mount Olympus.
Skopje has been taught a lesson for
its absurd and improper actions by the Southern Bell American telephone
company. The story is as follows.
During the Olympic Games in Atlanta,
Melas Yanniotis, Managing Director of Intersalonika S.A., consulted the
Southern Bell telephone directory in order to make a telephone call to
Thessaloniki. To his surprise, he found that Thessaloniki was not included
among the cities of Greece; and he found a map showing Greece’s northern border
limited to Mount Olympus and Thessaloniki marked as ‘Solun’.
On returning to Thessaloniki, he
sent a letter citing chapters 16 and 17 of the Acts of the Apostles, in which
it is written that St. Paul was summoned in a vision by ‘a man of Macedonia’
and came to Macedonia, where he baptized the first Christian in Europe at
Philippi, and that Greek men and women in Thessaloniki and Berea believed.
The biblical text confirms:
i.
The Greek identity of the
Macedonians, for the cities which St. Paul visited had the same Greek names
then as they still have today;
ii.
That there were Greeks and Jews in
Macedonia, giving the lie to those in FYROM who dare even today to teach in
schools (Doc. 11) that there were no Greeks in Macedonia;
iii.
That the language of the Macedonians
was then, and has been ever since, the Greek language, for St. Paul spoke in
Greek and wrote his epistles to the Thessalonians and the Philippians in Greek.
On the strength of what is written in the Acts of the Apostles, Southern
Bell changed its directory, now including Thessaloniki as a major Greek city
and listing the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as FYROM, not as
Macedonia (Doc. 21).
These two cases also confirm that a political mistake was made when the
US-Macedonia agreement was signed.
Those who proposed the signing of the agreement between the United
States and ‘Macedonia’ have also insulted:
1)
Pope John Paul, who has stated that
Macedonia is the land of Philip, Alexander, and Cyril and Methodius and that
Macedonia is Greek (Doc. 4).
2)
The United Nations, which (Doc. 3)
set up a special committee at the suggestion of the United States, and
concluded that the communists had aggressive intentions towards Greece and
described as an act of genocide the forcible abduction from Macedonia and
Thrace of 28,296 children, who were taken to communist countries, where they
were brainwashed on the subject of Macedonia, and a number of them now
spearhead Skopje’s campaigns.
3)
Stalin’s admission has been ignored
(Doc. 5): ‘They have no Macedonian consciousness, but they will acquire it, ….
just as communism created the Byelorussian nation and now no-one questions it’.
4)
The US-‘Macedonia’ agreement goes
against the political heritage of the late, great founders of Greece’s two
major parties, Constantine Karamanlis and Andreas Papandreou.
In a letter to the heads of the European Union nations (Doc. 9),
Constantine Karamanlis, as President of the Hellenic Republic, stated: ‘The
so-called “Republic of Macedonia” has absolutely no right, either historical or
ethnological, to use the name of Macedonia’’; and he concluded: ‘It is
inconceivable today, after the end of the Cold War, to grant a historical
legitimation to Stalin’s and Tito’s aspiration to gain access to the Aegean by
wresting Macedonia away from Greece.’
The most competent Greek, in
this case as Mr. Karamanlis a native of Macedonia, presented the Macedonian
problem to his opposite numbers as a fact and a circumstance of the Cold War
between East and West. He was particularly preoccupied by the subject of the
Cold War on his official visit to the White House as a guest of President
Kennedy in 1961. A Greek-American who met me in Athens some years ago told me
that, at an official dinner given by Greek-Americans for President Nixon, the
guest of honor revealed that President Kennedy had told him that Mr.
Karamanlis’s presence at the White House during the Cold War had been a ‘ray of
light’.
In a letter of Iakovos, Archbiscop of North and South America, Andreas
Papandreou, then Prime Minister of Greece, assured him (Doc. ….) that ‘there is
no question of my consenting to the recognition (de jure or de facto)
of the name “Macedonia” used, whether qualified or not, in the name of Skopje’s
statelet’.
The same stance was adopted by the
council of all the political leaders, under President Karamanlis.
The recent agreement between the United States and Macedonia may also be
criticized as a political mistake with reference to the German assault on the
fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace in April 1941
The
failure of the Germans to overcome the English resistance during the Battle of
Britain in 1940, ii) Greece’s victorious confrontation with fascist Italy in
October 1940, and iii) the German invasion of Greece in April 1941 starting at
the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace, which delayed the German
attack on the Soviet Union and ultimately led to the defeat of the Germans on
the Russian front (pp. 75-81 of my book), were the three events of which
separately thwarted the victorious Axis advance during the Second World War.
America’s
entry into the War in December 1941 heralded, as in the First World War, the
victory of the democratic people.
The battle for the fortified
positions of Macedonia and Thrace has one distinctive feature, however. The
heroism and self-sacrifice of the Greek defenders of the fortified positions,
as also the public recognition awarded them, and the respect and treatment of
the surrendering fighters by the German units, constitute acts of military
virtue that were perhaps unparalleled in the Second World War.
Addressing the Reichstag on May 4,
1941, Hitler declared that historical justice compelled him to state that of
all the armies, which Germany had confronted, the Greek soldiers had fought
with most exceptional heroism and self-sacrifice, and had surrendered only when
further resistance was futile. On Hitler’s orders, the Greek Army was not taken
captive and the officers retained their personal arms. On 11 June, Hitler’s
general headquarters reported that select Greek troops had defended the
fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace with exceptional heroism.
Profoundly impressed by the heroism
of those who had defended the fortified positions, the German commanders
ordered their troops to present arms to the surrendering fighters. The German
flag was not raised until the last soldier had disappeared from view.
One German officer wrote in a book
that the positions changed hands four times.
Your correspondent, as a reserve
officer, served along the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace in April
1941 and experienced the frightful assault of the German Stukas and also the
heroism of the men who defended the
fortified positions.
On April 6, 1941, simultaneously
with the assault along the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace, German
troops coming from Bulgaria also marched into Skopje, the capital of Vardaska.
In the fortified positions of
Macedonia and Thrace, the Greeks defended themselves heroically.
In Skopje, by contrast, the Germans
were hailed as liberators by thousands of Bulgarian flags, and then entered
Greece and flanked the Greek forces.
Consequently, the battle for the
fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace, the military archives, and other
documents, such as the New Cambridge Modern History (Doc. 13), all reveal that
in 1941 Macedonia existed only in Greece.
Skopje, however, as we can see from
a postage stamp (Doc. 14) and a map (Doc. 15) was the capital of Vardaska in
1941 also.
It was only on August 2, 1944 that
Tito renamed Vardaska and fraudulently created the Socialist Republic of
Macedonia.
This, together with the fact that
the Macedonians as Greeks have historically existed since the sixth century BC
and that Macedonians with their achievements as the Hellenistic period
influenced cultures and the history of humankind generally, to call FYROM
‘Macedonia’ and its inhabitants ‘Macedonians’ shows a serious lack of gravity.
The following point, together with
the battle for the fortified positions, is a telling one.
For five centuries, during the
period of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, Macedonia as an administrative area did
not exist.
With the First Balkan War of the
Balkan states against the Turks in 1912, when the Greek army liberated
Thessaloniki, the Governorate General of Macedonia was established immediately,
with its headquarters in Thessaloniki. It was universally accepted that Greece
had the right to do this and no one objected. Until 1944, no one ever conceived
of the existence of any other Macedonia.
The Treaty of Bucharest fixed the
border between Greece and Bulgaria in 1913, with no mention anywhere of the
word ‘Macedonia (Doc. 37).
With regard to the border between
Greece and Serbia, in accordance with the Treaty of May 19, 1913 (Doc. 38) it
was agreed (Art. 3) that the demarcation line should constitute the start of
actual occupancy, which is also the present border with FYROM.
In this Treaty too there is no
mention of the word ‘Macedonia’.
After 1921, when the Comintern and
the communist parties decided to wrest Macedonia away from Greece, the map of
the Roman administrative division of Macedonia was found and it was alleged
that Macedonia had been divided up in 1913, which is utterly false. That is why
all maps, such as the Cambridge map (Doc. 13), show Macedonia only in Greece,
but a Yugoslav map of 1937 (Doc. 14) also does not have Macedonia.
Consequently, if the Germans had not
invaded the Balkans in 1941, before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the
Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which had been founded in 1919 and
had never disputed that Macedonia was Greek, would not have been overthrown,
nor would the communist Tito have prevailed, who, as I have said, undertook to
fulfill the aspirations of the Comintern and the Balkan communist parties to
wrest Macedonia away from Greece.
The recent agreement between the United States and
‘Macedonia’ is not only a political, but a moral mistake
Greece, which is the country most insulted by this
agreement, fought alongside the democratic people during the First and Second
World War.
On October 28, 1940, when the Soviet
Union was allied with Hitler and almost all of Europe had been subjugated by
the Axis, when the Greek Prime Minister received an ultimatum from the Italian
ambassador at three o’ clock in the morning for Greece to surrender, he said
“NO”. The Greek people fought heroically and trounced the Italians in the
mountains of Northern Epirus. English ministers and officials stated that if
Greece had been defeated or had surrendered, the Axis would have won the War.
In February 1941, Athony Eden,
England’s Foreign Minister told Greek Prime Minister that Turkey and the
Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had refused to fight Germany.
Although Churchill had stated that Greece should not be pressured into a
hopeless struggle, Koryzis declared that Greece would fight alone against
Germany.
This statement resulted in the
German invasion of Greece in 1941.
The Greek Prime Minister and the
Greek people asked for nothing in return.
As a consequence of its struggles,
Greece:
i.
Suffered occupation by three hostile
nations (Germany, Italy and Bulgaria);
ii.
Terrible devastation (Truman’s
speech before Congress);
iii.
620,000 dead (including those who
died of hunger in 1941: Doc. 32), as against 400,000 American dead and a
similar number of English losses;
iv.
during the Second World War, Greece
lost 434 of the 533 ships in its mercantile fleet and 472 of its 717 motorized
sailing vessels; and suffered additional misery at the hands of the communists
in 1946-9.
But for the full magnitude of Greece’s contribution to be appreciated,
it is important to know how its neighbors conducted themselves.
Turkey. In the First World War, the Turks were allied with the Germans. In the
Second World War, they were described as ‘shrewdly neutral’, yet they helped
Hitler three times: i) in March 1941, when they signed a non-aggression pact with Bulgaria
in anticipation of the German invasion of Greece from Bulgarian territory, ii)
three days before Germany invaded the Soviet Union they signed a pact with
Hitler; and iii) when a pro-German rebellion broke out in Iraq, they allowed
the German airplanes to use their airports.
Bulgarians. During the First and Second
World War, they were allies of the Germans and invaded the territory of
Macedonia and Thrace, where the Greeks suffered nightmarish experiences, to the
extent that flight into German-held territory was regarded as a flight to
freedom. When the Red Army reached the Bulgarian border, the Bulgarians turned
communist from one day to the next.
Serbs. During the First World War they
fought alongside the democratic people. In the Second World War, on March 25,
1941, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes signed a friendship pact
with Hitler, which led to the overthrow of the government by the army. The
Germans launched a harsh assault on Belgrade. At the end of the War, the
communist Tito prevailed and proceeded to take actions against Greece.
Mr. President,
I enclose personally dedicated
copies of:
1)
My book The
Falsification of Macedonian History, which received an award from the
Athens Academy and has been translated into seven languages;
2)
The recently
published FYROM: The Antidemocratic Residuum in Europe and the Problematic
Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU;
3)
Photocopy of my
letter to your predecessor:
President George H. W.
Bush
4)
A DVD about the
new Alexandrian Library in 10 languages;
5)
Photocopies of
replies:
i)
From the White
House, dated August 28, 1991, including the assurance: “You may be sure that
your views and suggestions have been fully noted by the President’s foreign
policy advisers” and
ii)
From Mr. Johnson,
the Director of European Affairs in the US National Defense Department, dated
March 5, 1992, including the observation: “I always find it extremely
beneficial to obtain first hand documentation on matters of great importance”.
Mr. President,
The fabrication of FYROM, which was also an act against the United
States, which was fighting for democracy and the freedom of the people, is also
the greatest political and historical hoax, which only a harsh one-party regime
would have the effrontery to devise and impose upon its people and with its
machinery of propaganda to deceive naïve people with no knowledge of history
all over the world.
POSTSCRIPT
Mr. President,
I was very gratified to read, in the
context of your appeal of November 7, 2003 for democratic reforms in the Middle
East, your reference to the fact that the United States defended Greece in 1947
(and later Berlin also) to safeguard the free peoples democratic way of life
from Soviet expansionism. As you stated, in order to safeguard the democratic
way of life in Iraq, you are now working with the citizens of Iraq, who are
themselves preparing the ground for this.
However, in 1947 the immediate aim of the Soviet policy against Greece
was to wrest Macedonia away from Greece and create the Socialist Republic of
Macedonia with Skopje as its center.
In your recent statement, you too, like your predecessors in office
(Roosevelt, Truman and Bush), say that the United States defended Greece, as it
struggled to hold on to Macedonia and to prevent its being incorporated into
the Republic of ‘Macedonia’, which was fraudulently created by Stalin and Tito
in 1944 to serve their expansionist arms.
Consequently, those who recommended the recent signing of the agreement
between the United States and ‘Macedonia’ erroneously out of ignorance or
deceived or coerced by Skopje have made it seem that the United States is
abandoning its consistent policy (ever since 1944) of assertion that FYROM will
fall apart is untrue.
With a new name, the existing links between the neighboring people and
their ethnic kinsfolk in FYROM (links which threaten peaceful co-existence) will
be severed, and with the support of the United Nations, the USA, the European
Union, and above all Greece, the people of FYROM will prosper.
With the usurped name of ‘Macedonia’, not only is this republic a
provocation, not only does it vindicate Stalin and Tito, but it has no hope of
accession to the European Union.
Nicholaos
K. Martis
Former Gov.
Minister
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