The Macedonian question in the Diaspora

Similar, and even more marked, phenomena have been observed in the countries, such as Canada and Australia, to which scores of thousands of people from all three zones of Macedonia emigrated since the Second World War. The emigrants from Yugoslavian Macedonia were, naturally enough, carriers of the Slavo-Macedonian ideology as taught to them in their homeland. They attempted to impose this ideology, with all its distorting historical misinterpretations, in the host countries, and to that end exploited to the full all the scope which countries such as Canada and Australia, which implement 'multi-cultural' policies, afforded them - the free development of their particular linguistic and cultural features.

They demanded that they be recorded as a special slavic group under the name 'Macedonians', that they be taught the 'Macedonian' language in Canadian and Australian schools and that they be free to promote their 'Macedonian' cultural characteristics. The demand to be allowed to retain their cultural and linguistic features was not an unreasonable one. The Greek emigrants, too, made full use of the opportunities given them to cultivate and develop their own ethnic and cultural identity. But what caused sharp reaction on the part of the Greek communities was the attempt of the Yugoslavian emigrants from the Socialist Republic of Macedonia to monopolise the name "Macedonians" as indicative of their own national identity and to impose on the Australian or Canadian educational system their interpretation of the historical past of Macedonia.

The Greek reaction was entirely natural and the force of their protests fully justified, given that Macedonians from Greek Macedonia constituted a considerable proportion of the Greek communities in the host countries. These emigrants were proud of their homeland and its history - as are Greeks from all the other parts of the country - they set up Macedonian associations and federations (such as the Panmacedonian Associations of the USA, Canada and Australia), and gave prominence to their local Macedonian customs, songs and dances. How could they ever have imagined that anyone would call into question their national heritage or -still worse - forbid them even to use their own name, Macedonians?

This confusion was further intensified by the fact that among the emigrants were a few thousand Slav-speakers from Greek Macedonia. Some of these people - for reasons that have to be traced chiefly to the period 1940-50 - had embraced the 'Macedonian' national ideology. However, having been born in Greece and spent their childhoods there, they did not wish to lose the reflected cultural glory of descent from the Ancient Macedonians and Kings Philip and Alexander. As a result, they resorted to a theory of their own about the origins of today's 'Macedonians' - a theory which was even more conceptually ambitious than the myths invented by the historians of Skopje. They claimed that today's 'Macedonians' are a peculiar blend of nation which in the course of its history has thrown up great historical figures as diverse as Alexander the Great, Czar Samuel (of the Bulgarians) the Byzantine Emperors of the Macedonian dynasty, the Greek freedom fighters Karatasos and Gatsos (who were active in Macedonia during the Greek War of Independence of 1821), the Bulgarian leaders of the 1903 Ilinden rising (among them Goce Deltsev and Yanne Sandaski), the founders of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia of 1944 and the organisers of the Slavo-Macedonian movement in Greek Macedonia during the period 1943- 49.

There was no danger of this theory being challenged since in the multicultural societies in which it was developed, absolute ignorance of history went hand-in-hand with absolute toleration. The watchword "you are what you say you are" covered even the most peculiar tales. Thus it is not an exaggeration to say that in the host countries there began to appear a mongrel pattern in which the ancient Macedonian, medieval Slavic and contemporary Balkan historical heritages were all jumbled up, and a new 'Macedonian' identity began to gain ground. It would not be running too great a risk of absurdity to call this identity the 'Canado-Macedonian' or 'Australo-Macedonian' theory. However, the emotional charge created by semi-ignorance and the cleverly engineered nationalism instilled by the various missionaries sent out by Skopje to centres of immigration led, inevitably, to extreme behaviour. Among the characteristic examples of this were the public demonstrations of Slavo-Macedonians against the Ist International Academic Congress on Macedonia held in Melbourne in February 1988 and organised by the Greek Institute for Macedonian Studies of Melbourne, and the protests against the unique exhibition of archaeological finds from Ancient Macedonia which the Greek Ministry of Culture sent on tour round various Australian cities in November 1988. In both cases it was clear that the Slavo-Macedonian protests were the result of the fact that the Greeks had 'dared' to use the name Macedonia and to exhibit Macedonian cultural treasures.