Recycling Propaganda: Remarks on Recent Reports on Greece's "Slav-Macedonian Minority"[1]

by Vlassis Vlasidis - Veniamin KarakostanoglouMacedonian Press Agency-Institute for Balkan Studies

1996For fair use only

Between November 1993 and October 1994 various NGO reports focused on thealleged ethnic "Macedonian" minority living in Greece. Supported by a number of books and articles published during the same period, NGOs argue that "Macedonian"is a primordial ethnic identity embraced by a considerable proportion of thepopulation of Macedonia and still corresponds to a sizeable but suppressed andviolently assimilated ethnic minority in Greece.

This paper is not intended tochallenge the apparent ideological obstacles that an ethnic nation-state likeGreece faces when it has to deal with minority issues. It seeks to contest thegeneralising character of these accounts by revealing (a) the misuse of data andterms, (b) the use of deceptive data, (c) the selective use -indeed the recycling-of biased bibliographical sources.

The bottom line is that international observershave failed to give an objective view of the minority question in Greece. Basicallythis was due to a general misinterpretation of ethnicity in the Balkans and tovarious political necessities which unfortunately seem to be assessed together withhuman and minority rights.

In less than twelve months, between November 1993 and October 1994, at theheight of the controversy over the recognition of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (hereafter FYROM), at least five different NGO reports have focused onthe alleged ethnic "Macedonian" minority living in Greece. They all share anextremely critical point of view of Greek policy. I nNovember 1993, Professor ErikSiesby, on behalf of the Danish Helsinki Committee was the first to submit afifteen-page long report on The Slav Macedonians in Greece. Lois Whitman, DeputyDirector of Human Rights/Helsinki Watch, and her staff, followed in April 1994 witha most detailed booklet of 85 pages, under the poetic title, Denying EthnicIdentity. The Macedonians of Greece. These two accounts were the result of a jointvisit to Greek Western Macedonia in July 1993. A similar visit by two Oxford donsfollowed in May 1994. The report was prepared basically by a journalist, NoelMalcolm, and was sponsored under the hitherto unknown British Helsinki HumanRights Group. It was entitled Macedonian Minorities: The Slav Macedonians of Northern Greece and the Treatment of Minorities in the Republic of Macedonia anddrew a lot from the previous counterparts by Helsinki Watch. Siesby's andWhitman's views have been incorporated in the annual report by the InternationalHelsinki Federation published in the fall of 1994. Whitman's account was alsomentioned as a source in the U.S. Department of State annual report on HumanRights Practices in Greece for 1994, although the Department's authors werecareful to keep distance form Whitman's far-fetched assertions and conclusions. Inthe same period (fall 1994) Minority Rights Group International published its ownreview on the Southern Balkans. Its intention, as it is openly stated by the editorAlan Phillips (see p. 5), was to focus on the Greek case exclusively; but aftersecond thoughts it was considered preferable to expand the scope in order to avoida misinterpretation of their motives. In any case the chapter on "TheSlavomacedonian Minority in Greece: a case study in Balkan nationalism" occupiesalmost one half of the report. It was prepared by Minority Rights Group Greece,that is -in name at least- by its Greek representative

Mr Panagiotis Dimitras, a

lawyer who had also escorted Sies by and Whitman in their Greek Macedonianexpeditions in 1993 and apparently had been the main contributor to theirreports

. The very same year the MRG International reprinted for the third timeHugh Poulton's book, The Balkans: Minorities and States in Conflict, first publishedin 1989, whose views and conclusions on "Macedonians" in Greece fully correspondwith the above mentioned reports

[2] .

Indeed it appears that Poulton was thebasic source of all these reports. Similar views by the same author can be traced inthe 1989 report (No 82) of MRG International on Minorities in the Balkans, as wellas in a chapter on "The Rest of the Balkans", which he prepared for a book onMinority Rights in Europe published in the series "Chatham House Papers" in 19943.Students of Balkan affairs would be reluctant to accept the view that thepublication of all these reports has been purely coincidental. Indeed these twelvemonths (1993-94) have coincided with a period when relations between Greece andFYROM had reached a dead end. Therefore, it would be reasonable to assume thatthe heated international discussion of the Macedonian Question and the minorityissues which are part of it have attracted the interest of the relevant NGOs. Afterall, it is their task to monitor the living conditions of minorities, which duringperiods of international crisis, as a rule, deteriorate considerably.

However, athorough examination of these reports has revealed certain interesting aspectsthat cast a shadow on the objectivity, if not the motives, of their authors. Theterms, the arguments and the sources employed indicate that foreign observershave become active participants in the prolonged controversy between Greeceand FYROM. In other words instead of examining the minority issue ad hoc, i.e.outside its obscure diplomatic framework, these publications seem to havecontributed significantly to the crisis by creating additional points of frictionand misunderstanding.In brief all four reports as well as Poulton's studies and some recentanthropological articles, convey the impression that:(a)

"Macedonian" is a primordial ethnic identity embraced by a considerableproportion of the Christian population of Macedonia and still correspondswith a sizeable ethnic minority in Greece.

(b)

Since 1912 this alleged minority has been suppressed and assimilated bythe Greek State.

(c)

Persecution of the minority at various levels is still practised widely andsystematically by the Greek authorities.In support of these arguments an extensive -at least at first sight- bibliography hasbeen employed, together with interviews, xeroxed documents, and accounts of human rights violations. The uninformed reader as well as most foreign politiciansand diplomats, NGO activists and journalists are exposed to dozens of references toscholarly publications, even to unpublished articles, statistics, decrees, stategazettes, and textbooks which allegedly testify to the writers' competence andindustry and guarantee the objectivity of their views. This critique will not ventureeither to present historical counter arguments for each single point made in thereports or to undermine the validity of their interviews with the authors'informants. Instead it will seek to challenge the generalising character of theiraccounts (i.e. the idea of an on-going "ethnic cleansing") by revealing (a) the

misuse of data and terms, (b) the use of deceptive data, (c) the selective use -indeed the recycling- of biased bibliographical sources.

2.1.

To start with, it would be interesting to examine the views of theorganisations' observers about ethnic identities, an issue which has been thesubject of many anthropological studies

. For Erik Siesby the existence of aMacedonian ethnic identity in Greece is self-evident since there is a distinctive andcorresponding language. This is perhaps why most of his points, actually one thirdof his report, deal with the language rights both in the past and nowadays. As alawyer he even produced the testimony of a linguist who verified that the official"Macedonian" language spoken in FYROM exists! However, throughout his reportSies by used various terms, like "Slav-Macedonian", "Macedonian" and "local Slav-Macedonian" as identical to each other. Had he tried to define their content, asother observers after him did, he would have realised that they correspond toextremely ill-defined groups of people, bilingual, Greek- or Slav-speaking, of Greekethnic identity in their overwhelming majority. Groups which in any case would allagree that linguistic criteria are not only insufficient to denote ethnic nuances inthe Balkans; they can also be misleading.

2.2.

Others appear to be more familiar with local problems of identification -atleast at first sight. Whitman mentioned in her report (see p. 1) that during her fieldwork in Greek Macedonia she had met "ethnic Macedonians" who identifiedthemselves as such and they accepted their slavic origin; she also encountered"Macedonians" who claimed to be Greeks of Macedonian origin and "Greeks not of Macedonian descent" who considered themselves as "Greek". Then, on page five of her report, she regrouped the population of Greek Macedonia into two lots:

thelocals of Slavic origin (settled around the 6th century) and the Greeks, many of whom are inter-war Asia Minor refugees

. It would be interesting to know how andto whom the questions were asked and phrased and how they were translated fromEnglish into Greek and vice versa, since in the Greek language the terms "ethnic"and "national" are used as identical, while katagogi -another term which must havebeen employed often in the discussions- means not only ethnic but geographicalorigin as well. In any case Whitman and her staff opted (see p. 1 note 1) to use theterm "Macedonian" to refer to members of the "ethnic Macedonian minority" inGreece.

The majority of the Slavophone inhabitants of the districts visitedwould hardly agree with this conclusion, as they identify themselves as Greeks.It is interesting to learn after all why representatives of Helsinki NGOs appearto discard the right of a person to self-determination -as sanctioned by CSCEdocuments on the Human Dimension- and assume for themselves the role of detectors of such identification based on linguistic or historical data of dubiousvalidity.

Whitman's choice can only be understood if two points are clarified: Americanobservers although they copy a widely acceptable definition of ethnicity, appear tobelieve that it is a primordial and pure identity with immutable characteristics andtend to ignore that it is historically constructed. This is perhaps why they believethat people who claim to be Greek but are of "Macedonian origin" (i.e. "theydescend from a Slavic group which settled in the area around the sixth centuryA.D."!) must be classified as "ethnic Macedonians".