THE NEW BULLY OF THE BALKANS

Noel Malcolm on how Greece's profound

neurosis about its own identity is the biggest single impediment to any sensible EEC policy in the region

Salonica YOU BEGIN to notice it the moment you arrive on Greek soil. If you land at Athens airport, you can find crude posters declar- ing 'Macedonia is Greek' in the customs hall. If you are crossing by land from the former Yugoslavia, you will find the pass- port control booth covered with stickers making the same point, some of them in English more hysterical than grammatical: 'Macedonia is Greece Since Ever'.

Inside the country, the barrage contin- ues. Posters fill the windows of shops and offices: 'Greeks, awaken! Beware of the conspiracies of the great powers and the neighbouring states!'; 'An end to the provocations of Skopje!'. In Florina, a town close to the former Yugoslav border, one building on the main square flies a large banner reading, 'Macedonians shed their blood for Greece!'; the graffiti on a build- ing up the road say, 'Freedom to the Greeks of Northern Macedonia' and 'Macedonia is One and Greek'. Glancing at the print-out on a computerised bus-ticket, I found, in the space where you might expect 'Have a nice trip', the statement, 'Macedonia was and shall be Greek'. Never outside the communist bloc have I had such a sense of an all-pervading and unani- mous campaign, in which all levels of pub- lic life are mobilised to whip up popular feeling. If one adds the world-wide cam- paign run under the cover of the Greek Tourist Board, it must be the most expen- sive publicity campaign in Greek history. It is also the silliest. Only fear for my personal safety has prevented me from emending some of those graffiti, changing them from 'Macedonia is Greek' to 'Greek Macedonia is Greek'. Other bits of Mace- donia, self-evidently, are not. Throughout the last two centuries, 'Macedonia' has been a geographical expression: it refers to a whole region, which in 1913 was divided between Greece, Bulgaria and what became Yugoslavia. The part which Greece obtained was named 'Macedonia' by the Greek authorities. The part which Yugoslavia obtained was named 'the Republic of Macedonia' in 1946; the peo- ple who lived there had already been wide-

ly referred to as `Macedo-Slays', and their language as 'Macedonian', for decades. When the people of that Yugoslav republic voted for independence last year, it was not surprising that they wanted their new state to be called 'Macedonia' — they had no other name.

But at this point the Greek government claimed a kind of copyright on the word, on the grounds that Alexander the Great, that well-known representative of the mod- ern Greek state, had used it first. (This way madness lies: modern political geography is not and cannot be mortgaged to ancient history. One might as well complain that the borders of modern Germany do not correspond to what Tacitus meant by 'Ger- mania'.) Initially, the Greek government did also have some reasonable objections. A handful of extreme nationalists in Yugoslav Macedonia did make speeches about 'liberating' the part of geographical Macedonia which is now in Greece; and the draft constitution for the new state did speak ambiguously about 'caring for' the interests of Macedonians who lived beyond the state's frontiers. A high-level commis- sion of jurists from the EEC asked for amendments renouncing any territorial claims against neighbouring states. These were duly enacted, and the jurists recom- mended immediate recognition. But Greece still blocked it; and at the Lisbon summit at the end of June, the EEC resolved never to recognise the new Mace- donian state so long as its name contained the word 'Macedonia'. This was a triumph for Greek obduracy, a surrender to Greece's maximal demands — ruling out any compromise solution along the lines of 'Slav Macedonia', 'North Macedonia' or even 'Skopje Macedonia'. (The Greeks refer to it only by its capital city: 'the Skop- je Republic'.) It would take the pen of a Swift or an Orwell to explore all the ramifications of this. More than a million people who have spent their lives thinking that they spoke Macedonian, that they read Macedonian literature and watched Macedonian televi- sion, are now to be told, at the whim of 12 people lunching in Lisbon, that they speak some nameless thing which may eventually be called `Skopjan', or possibly 'Central Balkan'.

We are dealing here with the strangest and yet in some ways most typical of all Balkan states — a state with a profound neurosis about its own sense of identity. I refer, of course, to Greece. Much has been written about the problems of ex-Yugoslav Macedonia, and the potentially catastroph- ic consequences of the EEC's destabilising policy towards it. But little is ever written about the root cause of the problem: the neurotic nature of Greek nationalism.

One of the ways in which Greek attitudes reveal themselves as typically Balkan is in this wilful confusion of modern politics and ancient history. (Compare the Serbian line on medieval Kosovo, or the Rumanian obsession with Roman Dacia.) But the appeal to ancient history is vital to the Greeks precisely because it is their way of arguing that they are utterly unlike the riff- raff peoples of the Balkans. Their unbro- ken descent from Plato, Aristotle and Demosthenes sets them apart; theirs is a higher civilisation, a higher destiny. They have nothing to do with the messy history of the Balkans north of their ancient and immemorial border (established in 1913 and 1919).

This approach to history requires skim- ming rather selectively over the thousands of years when there was no such thing as a national Greek state. The early Slav inva- sions, which reached far into the Pelopon- nese and left settlements which spoke Slav well into the 15th century, are preferably Ignored. So, too, are the influxes of Albani- ans which settled many parts of eastern and central Greece at the invitation of Byzan- tine, Catalan and Ottoman rulers. In the early 19th century, the population of Athens was 24 per cent Albanian, 32 per cent Turkish and only 44 per cent Greek. In the early 20th century, Salonica was 60 per cent Spanish-Jewish, 18 per cent Turk- ish and 18 per cent Greek. Things have changed since then, of course. The popula- tion exchange with Turkey in the 1920s got rid of nearly 400,000 Turks and assorted Muslims; and Kurt Waldheim's fellow-offi- cers during the war ensured that Salonica is now a thoroughly Greek city. But just changing the people was not enough. In the mid-1920s, nearly all the Slav, Vlach or Other non-Greek place-names were sup- pressed. Even personal names were not exempt. One Greek Slav told me that his father, whose name was Boris, had been instructed by the local officials that he must change it to a proper Greek name: the choice they offered him was between 'Peri- cles' and 'Byron'. The consequence (or rather, the basis) of these policies is that Greece is that rare thing, almost unknown in Europe, a coun- try with no national minorities. They do not exist: the Greek government says so. For such a phenomenon to be found in the Balkans of all places is indeed a miracle — a sign that Greece is certainly not like Other countries. Sitting at a café in a Slav Village near Florina, in northern Greece, surrounded by people talking in the Slav Macedonian language, I pondered this minor miracle. 'They say we don't exist,' said one of them; tut tell me, do I look like a ghost?'

How many of these Slays still live in Greece is not known. The 1940 census reg- istered 85,000 'Slav-speakers'. The 1951 census (the last to record any figures for Speakers of other languages) put it at 41,000; many who had fought on the losing Side in the civil war had fled, but other evi- dence shows that all the censuses heavily underestimated the Slays' numbers. The lack of a question on the census-form is not, however, the only reason for their Obscurity. They are a brow-beaten popula- tion whose culture has been and is being suppressed. Within Greece, there are no newspapers or radio broadcasts in their language (which, being the language of the 'Skopje Republic', is officially not recog- nised as a language by the Greek govern- ment). One group of these Slays has started a small monthly newsletter, with an estimated readership of 10,000. But they have great difficulty finding a printer (even though it is in Greek), and they say that if copies are sent through the post they tend to 'disappear'. 'Even if we find a sympa- thetic printer,' one told me, 'he's usually too scared to take the work: he's afraid of losing all his other contracts, or perhaps of getting bricks through his window.' Anoth- er group has applied for permission to start a cultural society in Florina; the application has been turned down, on the grounds that it is 'anti-Greek'. They are not even allowed to sing songs in their language: the last time this happened, at the village festi- val of Melitis two years ago, proceedings were broken up by the police.

A few bold individuals have taken their case to human rights conferences at Helsinki, Copenhagen and Moscow. I talked to three of these people, each of whom had encountered certain • career problems on his return to Greece. Hristos Sideropoulos was a forestry worker living near Florina; soon after his return from Copenhagen he was told.that he was being transferred to a distant island off the west coast of Greece. Not wishing to abandon his wife and children for months at a time, he refused the posting, and was sacked. He has been unemployed ever since. His friend Stavros Anastasiadis owns a small trucking company. On his return, he was told that his regular contract with a local firm was being terminated; other contracts proved strangely hard to find, and his trucks now stand idle. And the grave and dignified Archimandrite Nikodemos Tsarkinias, who also testified at Helsinki, showed me a peremptory letter from his bishop telling him that he must leave his parish work and withdraw into a monastery.

The public hysteria over the 'Skopje Republic' certainly does not help. The weekly nationalist-extremist newspaper Stohos (`Aim' or 'Target') now issues regu- lar personal threats against these individu- als and their friends, listing names and addresses; its more general articles on this subject carry titles such as 'Cut Off Their Heads'. Stohos is not a typical paper, of course (it refers to Slav Macedonians as 'Skopje gipsies' and to Turks as `Mongols'); but if is widely available at news-stands in northern Greece, and there is a curious continuity between its views and those of public or quasi-official figures. When I attempted to discuss these issues with Pro- fessor Konstantopoulos, director of the Institute of International Public Law in Salonica, I was assured that the so-called Slays were just bilingual Greeks and that their second language was not a real lan- guage but a mere patois ('the "idiom", as Stohos sneeringly calls it). 'Why can't they have a newspaper in their own language?' I asked. 'They don't want one!' shouted the professor. 'Some of them do want one,' I said. 'Two or three people — paid agents of Skopje!' he roared. He showed me a crude propaganda-sheet demanding the 'liberation' of Greek Macedonia. 'You see,' he thundered, 'these are the views of the Skopje government!' The corner of the sheet was stamped, in Cyrillic: 'People's Liberation Front'. 'Why do you say these are the views of the Skopje government?' I asked. 'This was issued by an extremist émigré organisation — I might just as well show you some Greek extremist pamphlet 'Oh dear me, sir — dangerously worn tread. . claiming that Skopje belongs to Greece.' His anger was cataclysmic. 'So you try to make excuses! If you want to make excuses, that is your affair! Qui s'excuse, s'accuser A few minutes later, he assured me that 'secret figures' revealed that 18 per cent of the population of Yugoslav Macedonia are Greek — a piece of ethnographic nonsense so gross that even Stohos might blush to print it.

The Greek Slav Macedonians are caught between the hammer and the anvil of Greek policy on minorities: assimilation or expulsion. To see successful assimilation in action, one has only to visit the Vlach region in the Pindus mountains of northern Greece. The Vlachs, who speak a language closely related to Rumanian (with a little practice the two become mutually intelligi- ble), have a population of perhaps no more than 50,000 in Greece, and have seldom sought any kind of political nationhood in modern times. (The one exception was a short-lived fascist 'Principality of the Pin- dus' set up with Italian help during the last war: most of its supporters either died in battle or emigrated.) At the annual festival in one remote mountain village I found the square decked from end to end with Greek flags; all the Vlachs I spoke to seemed either puzzled or offended when I asked whether they thought that being Vlach made them somehow less than completely Greek.

Most modern Greek writings about the Vlachs claim that they are 'pure Greeks', descended from ancient Greeks who just happened to acquire a Latinate language when they did military service for the Romans; and most Vlachs believe these highly improbable claims. The current issue of Ellinismos ('The Greek Race'), a mid- dlebrow magazine devoted to the discus- sion of Greek ethnicity (can you imagine a magazine actively concerned with English ethnicity?), devotes four pages of dismal

pseudoscholarship to this argument; and one recently published Greek book about the Vlachs gives a list of words in the Vlach language borrowed from Greek, and con- cludes in all seriousness that Vlach is 'a Greek dialect'. Under these conditions and provisos, Vlach culture is allowed to con- tinue: there are songs, festivals, cultural societies and so on. The Vlachs are the good boys of Greek nationalism, and that is their reward. But at the same time their language is dying; it is hard to find anyone under the age of 40 who can speak it, and within two generations it will have disap- peared off the face of the Greek father- land.

The 100,000 Turks of western Thrace, on the other hand, have a much stronger sense of ethnic identity. Yet in the eyes of the Greek state they are not Turks at all; they are 'Greek Muslims', a religious minority, not an ethnic one. When Dr Sadik Ahmet, a surgeon who stood for parliament in 1989, referred in a campaign leaflet to 'the Turkish minority', he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using the word 'Turk- ish'. Books and newspapers from Turkey are strangely unavailable in this, the neigh- bouring area of Greece. Anyone who want- ed to read such things would have to go and live in Turkey instead — which is, it seems, the long-term aim of the Greek pol- icy.

When I visited Dr Ahmet at his surgery in Komotini, six hours east of Salonica by slow train through the heat-scorched foothills of the Rhodope mountains, I found him surprisingly up-beat. 'Things have improved in the last two years,' he said. 'For a start, Turkish farmers can now get tractor licences.' (The Turkish popula- tion is mainly agricultural; though they have tractors, they have not been granted licences in the past. This gave the local police a hold over tractor-driving Turks — a classic example of the 'legal limbo' tech- 'I'd hurtle a million miles for one of your smiles, my mammy!' nique favoured by east European regimes.) Two things seem to have brought about the recent improvements: Dr Ahmet's election as the local MP, and a blistering New York Helsinki Watch report in 1990, entitled Destroying Ethnic Identity: the Turks of Greece. This was the most critical human rights report on an EEC country ever pub- lished — until, that is, this summer's Amnesty report on torture and ill-treat- ment in Greek prisons and police stations (many of the case-histories in which just happen to concern Turks, Albanians and other non-Greek victims).

But not everything is rosy in Western Thrace. The new Greek electoral law will prevent Dr Ahmet from being re-elected next time, and when he loses parliamentary immunity he may face another deferred prosecution. And the long-standing policy of driving these Turks out of Greece con- tinues: more than 500 of them were stripped of their citizenship last year while travelling abroad, and were refused re- entry. But the best way to get rid of an agri- cultural population is to deprive them of their land. More than 3,000 acres have been confiscated for various public projects in the last ten years, and there is now a plan to seize 15,000 acres of farm-land which at present support 20,000 Turks) for a new 'open prison'. Some of these Turks might be forgiven for thinking that they live in a kind of open prison already — 'open's that is, in the unusual sense that they are encouraged to leave it and never come back.

Fear of Turkey is, in the long run, a greater stimulus to neurotic Greek nation- alism than the Macedonian issue. The fall of the communist bloc has badly damaged Greek self-esteem: whereas ten years ago Greece was a vital bulwark of Nato, today that role seems unimportant, and it is Turkey that is emerging as the strategic power-base of the whole region from the Balkans to Central Asia. Hence the psycho- logical importance for Greece of the EEC, as a Turk-free top table. 'Maastricht,' trum- pets a Greek government television adver- tisement every night, 'means equal status or "equal honour": isotimi] for Greece in Europe!' — a statement either meaningless or mendacious, and all the more powerful for that. Personally, I have found that whenever I have long conversations with EEC politicians or officials, there always comes a point when they say, 'Between you and me, I can't understand how we ever let Greece in.' With its peculiar brand of para- noid nationalism, Greece's foreign policy is now the biggest single impediment to any sensible EEC policy in the Balkans; and if the Greek public mood intensifies any fur- ther, it may threaten not only the future of ex-Yugoslav Macedonia but the territorial integrity of Albania as well. Amid all the discussions about the procedure for new members to join the EEC, has anyone thought of a polite way of inviting one member to leave?