GREEKS: | ETHNIC CLEANSING | PERSECUTION | PROHIBIT LANGUAGE | HOME
GREECE PERSECUTES BULGARIAN-MACEDONIANS
Within the Greek schools, Macedonian-Bulgarian children from the earliest age were indoctrinated with negative Bulgarian imagery which portrayed the Bulgarian race as evil and barbarous. Children, as young as 4 and 5, who inadvertently spoke in their native Slavonic tongue, were sadistically beaten The policy of Greek rule has been to affect the cultural genocide of Macedonian-Bulgarians living in Aegean Macedonia (In Vardar the Serbs practised just plain genocide).
So common was Greek maltreatment of its non-Hellenic population that in 1924 the League of Nations, in one of its rare coordinated actions, found the Greek government guilty of violating the human rights of the Bulgarian minority. The particular incident involved a Greek officer, Doksaniks, who after seemingly ordering the detention and transfer of 19 local villagers to the town of Ser, gave further orders that they be executed on the road between Turnlis and Gorno Bordo. What then followed were Bulgarian executions en masse for their refusal to be expatriated to Bulgaria. Following the subsequent international uproar, protests, and threats of sanctions, a meeting between Politis (Greece) and Kalkoff (Bulgaria) was held in Geneva on 29 Sep 1924 in which the Greek government
agreed to fully acknowledge the existence (for the first time) and respect the rights of the Bulgarian minority in GreeceThis latter agreement (the Politis-Kalkoff Protocol) was also counter-signed by Sir Eric Drummond as secretary-general of the League of Nations.
Under direct scrutiny of the League of Nations, a special education department for the minorities was opened. However Greece
insisted that the "minority" it had just acknowledged as "Bulgarian", should not be educated in their native Bulgarian language, but rather in a "local" idiom, which used a Latin instead of a Cyrillic alphabetThe end result was publication of the primer ABECEDAR (1925). It has been said by some that ABECEDAR was an honest attempt by Greece to meet the requirements of their local population. This is untenable by any form of objective linguistic analysis. Thus Miletich, an expert on Slavic languages referred to the ABECEDAR as a document of
levantine carelessness, demi-culture and analphabetismMore recently Hill, another authority on Slavic linguistics, points out that many dialects used north of the border were also incorporated in the Greek "experiment" possibly aimed at the Macedonians in Yugoslavia. In fact it was Yugoslavia which pressured the Greek state to finally abandon the project.
Meeting the religious needs of the "minority" was also an obligation, but one for which the League of Nations released Greece, as in the end it did for everything else. Unfortunately for the Macedonians the League of Nations was no more than a bureaucratic body which merely catalogued their cries for human rights and dignity. This was well illustrated by the so-called right of minorities to directly petition the League of Nations on human rights violations. However in the Macedonian case it is well documented that the League chose to deliberately disregard such petitions to avoid re-opening the Macedonian question (see comments in CA Macartney - National States and National Minorities, London, 1934). The persecution and hardship the Bulgarians of Aegean Macedonia faced in this time was vividly described by the Englishman W Child, in a letter he sent from the very region
The Greeks not only persecute all alive Bulgarians, whom they alternatively call Bulgarian speaking or Slavonic speaking, but they also search for the graves of deceased Bulgarians, which are spread throughout Macedonia. They would not let them rest in peace even in the grave: they erase the Bulgarian inscriptions on the crosses, dig the bones from the graves and throw them outIn a particularly banal statement on 11 Oct 1930 the Greek Prime Minister Elefteros Vanizelos said
The issue of the Macedonian minority in Greece will be solved and I will be the first in Greece, who will engage himself to open Macedonian schools if that is requested by the peopleOf course anyone who made such a "request" earned themselves a one-way ticket to prison or worse. The following examples provide a truer perspective on Greece's commitment to this issue. On Jan 26 1926, Eliniki Makedoniki Pigmi, an organization fighting against Bulgarians, published the following directive
As from today we ban use of the Bulgarian dialect in all public places, in institutions, in trade relations, in meetings and gatherings, in festivities, receptions, weddings etc. We order that the Greek language be spoken in all the above stated cases. Police officers, authorities and government officials are not to speak with citizens in any other language but GreekDuring the dictatorship of Metaxas a law was passed that banned the use of the dialect (the term used to refer to the Bulgarian language). Here is an example:
Writ of Summons - The public prosecutor in the village of Kato Idruza (Dolno Kotori), based on the Articles 143-145 of the Criminal procedures, summons Georgus Jovanis Mitrusis, citizen of Polipotamos village (Nere) to appear personally in the court hall on May 15th, 1939, Monday, at 9.00am to be put on trial because on February 19, this year was caught speaking with another person in Slav language - thus violating Article 697 of the Criminal Law and in reference to the instruction of the police No.15/36. In case the person named above doesn't come he will be tried in absentiaElsewhere we have detailed how such practices were still important parts of Greek state policy well into the 1960s. In his book describing systematic Greek ethnic cleansing of Bulgarians during the last 90 years, Stoyan Bojadjief explains that even today a culture of xenophobia and paranoia still persists within Greek.
Public prosecutor - Polipotamos, April 4, 1939