The Macedonian Question ? 
At the same period, significant developments, which would later affect the situation in Greek Macedonia, were taking place in Yugoslavian Macedonia, most of which had been ceded to Bulgaria. Initially, a large part of the population, unhappy with the Serbian administration, greeted the Bulgarian army as liberators. Even the local communist leaders seceded from the Yugoslav Party and joined its Bulgarian counterpart. The inconsiderate behaviour, however, of the Bulgarian authorities created a much cooler climate which developed into hostility between the local population and the Bulgarian occupation forces. Thus, with considerable delay, the Titoist partisan movement began to spread also in Yugoslav Macedonia. It was at this critical moment that the Yugoslav communists announced their manifesto for the post-war reorganisation of the Yugoslavian state on a federal basis. One of the six federated republics was to be the "Socialist [at that time, 'People's'] Republic of Macedonia", whose Slav population would cease to be regarded as "Serbian' or 'Bulgarian' and would acquire a new name: 'Macedonian'.
The name 'Macedonian' was relatively widespread among the local South Slav population, but as an indication of geographical origin rather than an ethnic attribute. The use of this term as a definition of a particular national South Slav population group was a neologism, but it was one which served the political purposes of the new leaders of Yugoslavia. By giving ethnic content to a geographical term, the new political leaders hoped to be able to contruct a nationality cut off from both its Serbian and Bulgarian roots, particularly the latter.
The new leaders of Yugoslavia were not content, however, to restrict the implementation of their experiment only to their own country. Their aim was to exploit the strength of their position to impose their views on Greek and Bulgarian Macedonia as well. Having invented the 'Macedonian' nationality, they worked out a twin goal: to eliminate the Bulgarian influence on their own people, and at the same time to provide a final solution to the Macedonian question by incorporating both Bulgarian Macedonia and Greek Macedonia into a united Macedonian state which would then be converted into a federated state in the post-war Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
For that purpose, one of Tito's deputies, Vukmanovi@-Tempo, was sent to Greece in 1943 to persuade the leaders of the KKE and ELAS (the Popular Liberation Army) to set up a Joint Headquarters for all the guerrilla armies fighting in the Balkans. In reality, the aim of the Yugoslav partisans was to bring national resistance in Macedonia as a whole under their own command. Their proposal was turned down. Tempo then tried to form separate armed Slavo-Macedonian units in the hope of winning Greek Slav-speakers over to the 'Macedonian' ideology. Although this proposal, too, was rejected, permission was finally given for the formation of a political Organisation of Slavo-Macedonians, known as SNOF (the Slavo-Macedonian National Liberation Front) which was, in effect, guided covertly by Yugoslav partisans.
It is indeed true that in the last months of the occupation, as the might of Nazism crubled throughout Europe, many members of the Bulgarian Ohrana threw away the shoulder-flashes of the Fascist Bulgarian army and enlisted en masse in SNOF and the Slavo-Macedonian battalions passing themselves off as 'Macedonian' communist resistance fighters.
In the meantime, the secret contacts of the Slavo-Macedonians and their direct dependence on the Yugoslavian Macedonian military staff had begun to come to the attention of the leaders of ELAS and were causing serious concern to such a point that shortly before Liberation ELAS units in the Florina-Kastoria area clashed with armed Slavo-Macedonian detachments and pushed them back into Yugoslavia.
