GREECE CONTINUES WITH THE POLITICS OF ASSIMILATING EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT GREEK

Interview by: Zaklina Mitevska

Edited by Risto Stefov

(Original at http://www.makedonskosonce.com/index_n.htm)

(PAVLE VOSKOPULOS IS A MEMBER OF THE COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP OF THE VINOZHITO POLITICAL PARTY IN GREECE)

Pavle Voskopulos was born in Lerin on November 25th, 1964. He finished elementary school and high school in his native city Lerin. He also attended one year of high school in Melbourne, Australia. After completing high school Pavle enrolled in the faculty of architecture in Belgrade from which he graduated in 1988. After his graduation he returned to his native Lerin, where he works and lives to this day.

Q. Mr. Voskopulos, if there was fear among Macedonians living in Greece in the past and if people were afraid to declare themselves as Macedonians, part of a Macedonian minority with rights and privileges according to world standards, is this fear still there or is it now gone?
Is there a turnaround on Macedonian issues in Greece considered taboo in the past?

VOSKOPULOS: When there is talk of the Macedonian minority in Greece and the expression of a Macedonian identity, certainly things have improved compared to how things were in past decades. The overall situation however is not as it should be. The Macedonian identity today is partly expressed through folklore and oral use of the Macedonian language. Expressions of identity at this level, even at best, are limited.
The obstacles against allowing a Macedonian identity to flourish and causes of its suppression lie in past and partly in present Greek State politics.
Greece has taken every measure possible to assimilate and discriminate against Macedonians, which in the past was very aggressive and cruel. These acts are still fresh in the minds of the older generation of Macedonians who still remember the cruelty of the Greek gendarmes, the penalties for speaking Macedonian and the persecutions for expressing the Macedonian identity. The young too are victims of Greek propaganda and assimilation politics. Greek institutions to this day continue to implement policies of assimilation, assimilating everything that is not Greek.
There were some positive steps taken to improve the situation, especially in the last few years, but these are initiatives of the representatives of the Macedonian minority, and not of the Greek State authorities.
The Greek State wants absolutely nothing to do with recognizing the Macedonian minority living in Greece. In fact from time to time Greece continues to discriminate against it. Case in point; the lawsuits and court proceedings launched against Vinozhito in the past decade.

Q. The court of human rights in Strasburg convicted Greece for not allowing Vinozhito activists in 1995 to place a sign with Macedonian writing on their building. Did the Strasburg verdict have any effect?

VOSKOPULOS: First, imagine a situation where the rights of the entire Macedonian minority in the whole of Greece, as far as I know, were represented by this single sign with Macedonian writing on it.
Four members of the Vinozhito leadership in 1995 were charged and sued for erecting a bi-lingual sign in front of the Party office in Lerin which according to the prosecutor “promoted hatred among the citizens”. By order of the prosecutor the police removed the sign. In 1998, with help and a strong reaction from international institutions, the charges were finally dropped.
To better understand Greek politics let me tell you a little more about our 1998 dismissal. The court did not dismiss the charges because we won the right to express our identity and our language, they dismissed them because the court decided that Vinizhito’s leadership did not have the intelligence necessary to understand or recognize that by erecting such a sign it would cause negative reaction among the citizens. In other words, the charges were dropped because according to the court, the Vinozhito leadership was too simple minded to understand its own actions!
The 1998 decision, among other things, stated that the Church Council of Lerin was in the right when it took a stand against Vinozhito. The city mayor was in the right when he publicly condemned Vinozhito. The citizens who demonstrated in front of our office, and eventually burned it down, were also in the right in doing so.
I am not telling you this just because we are being stereotyped. I am telling you this so that you can understand the types of principles the Greek State and most Greek society employs against us to this day.
I also want to tell you that all the names and various trumped-up charges against Vinizhito members who were named during the trial were given to the newspapers and electronic media which in turn called on the general public to take violent actions against them.
After the 1998 decision, when the courts declared that our leadership was too “stupid” to understand its own actions, we again erected the sign in front of our office where it is still standing to this today.
In 1995, after our office was vandalized and burned down, we filed our own charges not just against the criminals who did this but also against the Church Council of Lerin, the mayor and others who provided the criminals with moral support.
For seven years the Greek courts refused to bring charges against those perpetrators who burned down our office. They refused our appeal at all levels of the Greek judiciary.
After exhausting all legal avenues within Greece, we appealed to the European Court of Human Rights and after four long years of hard work the court finally decided in our favour which was a moral and political victory for our organization.

Q. Recently a Vinozhito delegation attended a European Parliament meeting where the rights of the Macedonian minority were discussed. Can you tell us some more about the outcome of that meeting?

VOSKOPULOS: This is not the first time we had to travel to Brussels, to the heart of European institutions, to make use of the international factor in our political activities. Last years we made many trips.
This most recent meeting was of importance and gave us a chance to lobby Euro-parliamentarians on some of our activities that are in progress in the European Parliament. Some time ago we submitted a petition to the European Parliament Commission for Petitions which was jointly prepared by our organization and the Macedonian Human Rights Movement of Australia, with whom we have established a cooperative relationship. The subject of the petition was Greece’s failure to comply with certain human rights agreements in accordance with European conventions, to which Greece is signatory. More specifically, we wanted to bring to the European Parliament’s attention Greece’s blatant discrimination against the “Macedonian political refugees from the Greek Civil War”. Greece is using its “law of repatriation” to discriminate against Macedonians by evoking the “Greek by birth” clause to prohibit Macedonians from returning to their homeland even though they were born in Greece and are Greek citizens.
Some time ago we received feedback from the president of the Petition Commission informing us that our petition was accepted. The Petition Committee, as we were told, will transfer the case to the European Commission.

Our aim is to take this issue as far as possible until the European Parliament adopts a resolution. Achieving our aim however, may not be that easy since not all petitions succeed in reaching the top but it’s worth a try. Even if we don’t get the desired results, the fact that European institutions have given us an audience to discuss this kind of issue is important enough on its own. By opening up discussions such as this the European Parliament is giving us hope that finally Greece will see things differently and will repatriate the Macedonian Political refugees as it has done with the Greek refugees.
We have also had discussions about holding open forum meetings next year somewhere in the halls of the European Parliament to discuss various issues concerning the Macedonian political refugees. We are planning on having a photo gallery, public discussions, documentary presentations and various other functions. The forum will be organized by us in cooperation with other world Macedonian organizations, including the refugees themselves worldwide. We will do this with the support of our principle party the European Free Alliance.
I just want to add here that during our visit to the European Parliament we also established a number of meetings for future activities about which we will provide more information when the time comes.

Q. Is it true that as things become more favourable in the fight for human rights, Greece is even more persistent in its battle of denying everything that is Macedonian, not just on its own territory but also outside? The Greek lobby is working hard to oppose everything that is done which is un-neighbourly and counter productive.

VOSKOPULOS: At the international level things are looking good for us because we have the ability to make contact with international organizations and institutions. At the local level Greek politics with regards to the Macedonian minority inside Greece have not changed at all. In some ways we are lucky because we are protected and can fight our political battles through the links we have made with European institutions.
Allow me to elaborate a little by using an analogy. Our situation with Greece and the European institutions is something like the cartoon where the black cat Sylvester is chasing the little yellow Tweety bird and when it catches it and is about to eat it, a big white dog appears and saves the bird. I feel as if we are in this situation with Greece. The Tweety bird is the Macedonian minority, Sylvester the cat is Greece and the big white dog is the European institutions.

Q. For a decade and a half now our neighbor to the South has attacked us on the millennium old name Macedonia to which we have full rights in every respect. Its attempts to re-baptize us grew more intense from the moment it began naming things with our name.

VOSKOPULOS:The Macedonians in Greece or the Macedonians in the Republic of Macedonia have the right to carry and use the name Macedonia not because that is a millennium old name or because of historical and other reasons, they have the right to use the name because it defines their identity. Every man, woman and child has the right to self identify and collectivity define his/her identity, language, culture, national affiliation, etc. It is a fact that after the Balkan Wars, and especially after World War II, Greece used terms relating to Northern Greece and Macedonia more intensely. A characteristic example of this is the Ministry of Northern Greece, which in 1982 was renamed to the Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace. Then, after the breakup of Yugoslavia, when it became obvious that the Republic of Macedonia would become independent, Greece intensified the use of the name Macedonia. The name of the Solun airport was changed from Mikra to Macedonia. Road signs were also changed in the vicinity of Solun which confused foreign truck drivers. Trucks took the roads to Macedonia thinking it was the road to the Republic of Macedonia and ended-up at Solun airport.

Q. History confirms that in a significant part of the Balkans, Macedonian roots existed long before the Greek ones. On what historical facts did the Greeks base their usurpation of Macedonia?

VOSKOPULOS: I don’t agree with the assertion of who came or didn’t come first or with making statements about ones roots. These kinds of assertions are dangerous and can lead to intolerance. It would be tragic for Macedonian nationalism if it became a caricature of Greek nationalism. National ideologies and nations are a modern phenomenon in Europe which appeared about two centuries ago after the collapse of feudalism. The need to create collectives to serve the manufacturing processes of modern European nations gave birth to nationalism. Nationalism became even more intense with the arrival of the industrial revolution. Over time, the process yielded the creation of so called national states and collectives. European nations in the first years of their creation, especially after their national consciousness matured, flirted with their past and with history in order to create national unity. National ideologies, generally speaking, were based on ethnocentric concepts (Germany for example) and citizenship concepts (France for example) with one purpose in mind to homogenize the state. When nationalism reached the Balkans the process of state homogenization followed.
As for post national collectives we have globalization, evolution in technology, evolution in science, the electronic revolution, etc., processes that are surfacing and shaping a new world. Here is where the Macedonian identity will find its place and expand beyond its well known national issues. There is a need for a different modern Macedonian approach, one that will go beyond the typical citizenship concept, because as the French model has shown, problems begin to appear and after the first romantic phase the citizenship concept gradually loses its appeal. The Greek approach of insisting on basing their model on historical information and argumentation is totally unacceptable at the present time, even funny from a scientific point of view which I would call “a political fossil concept”.
We can’t stop history and time, by will alone, for the sake of so called “national right”. History and time are rivers that constantly flow. It is simplistic and downright immature for modern states that never existed before to go back in time, in history looking for famous ancient roots by which to model their identity.

Q. Greece has portrayed itself as the cradle of democracy for a long time, but in reality and in the way it has treated its minorities which live on its territory proves just the opposite. Greece’s constitution, except for some minor religious stipulations, has no provisions for minorities.

VOSKOPULOS: Excuse me for asking but who exactly is portraying Greece as the cradle of democracy? If you mean the Ancient Hellenes yes we can discuss them but there too were shortcomings. Yes in Ancient Hellada democracy was practiced as a political system but it was not a democracy for all.
There were thousands of slaves for whom there was no democracy unfortunately this fact has been well hidden. Imagine Aristotle, a philosophical giant, inclined to support slavery, but we should look at or try to see things from a different perspective because the social situation, principles and habits of those people were different from ours today. Today’s Greece has no links to Ancient Hellada. The only thing that links modern Greeks to the Ancients is geography.
With regards to “rights for minorities” according to international organizations like the Helsinki Committee, the International Minority Group MGRI and others, we can safely say that Greece is at the bottom of the list for European States.

Q. Although Greece does not officially recognize the Macedonian minority and its language, there are documents that show the Macedonian language was included in official Greek lists (Greece in a 182 page document released a list dated December 19th, 1920 in which among other things declares Macedonian as one of the Greek mother languages. Greek, Spanish, Gipsy, Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian were all declared mother languages). Also, let us not forget the ABECEDAR another document that Greece produced which proves yet again that the Macedonian language existed. Even with all this, are you still required to prove something to someone?

VOSKOPULOS: Yes, all the information given about the language is correct. After World War I, European States became sensitive to the needs of their minorities. Then came the formation of the League of Nations, the predecessor to the United Nations, but unfortunately that did not help us much as Europe yet again went to war (World War II) even if it was for a short time. So it has only been in the last twenty years or so of the last century that a list was put together containing information on the various languages spoken by the population in Greece. Unfortunately this information might as well be a well kept secret because it is not readily available.
The ABECEDAR is another well kept secret since it was never delivered to the schools in Northern Greece. It was confiscated at the printing house right after Greece was forced by international institutions to print it.

Q. Outside of your political party Vinozhito, what other means or Macedonian ways do you employ to fight for Macedonian spiritual and national rights as well for the so called national aim?

VOSKOPULOS: The Macedonian way, as you call it, is an ambiguous term because today it is difficult to define. As EFA- Rainbow we are not involve in cultural issues. Today there are cultural organizations that are actively working exploring Macedonian culture, traditions and folklore.
Our aim as a political organization is to work hard to improve minority rights not just for the Macedonians but for all minorities in Greece. We would like to see Greece become a more democratic society.
I don’t agree with the use of the term “national” because it is limited in scope. Our view should be wider. Everyone has some kind of “national aim” which usually conflicts with someone else’s “national aim”. Conflicts of this sort create tension between people and ultimately lead to wars. We need to start thinking differently today, beyond just national aims.

Q. What is the next step, what are you going to do if Greece maintains the same course and continues to discriminate against the Macedonian population living in Greece?

VOSKOPULOS: We will continue to do in the future that which we have done to date. On the domestic level we will work not just with the Macedonians but also with all democratic Greeks to improve the situation of the Macedonian minority. We will work hard for the recognition of minorities and minority rights not just for Macedonians but also for the other minorities living in Greece. We are also trying to convince the Macedonian minority as well the Greek majority that minority recognition and rights in Greece will contribute to further the democratization of Greek society.
On the international level we intend to use every means possible to lobby international institutions in order to improve the minority situation in Greece among which is the Macedonian minority.

Q. In spite of Greek aggression and threats, Vinozhito held its first congress in Solun in 2004 which went without incident and was a big success. When are you planning to have your next congress?

VOSKOPULOS: Our congress coincided with other congresses of Macedonian organizations held in Solun a century ago. Solun is famous for congresses but this time we chose it because unfortunately this city today is the heart of Greek nationalism.
Our congress was successful because of our position of influence with the European Free Alliance. Greece would not dare let anything happen to us in front of our European guests. That is why two-thousand Special Forces troops were employed to protect us and keep us safe from the ultranationalists protesting outside.
The violent demonstrations, having to use police to keep the peace, are indicators of an undemocratic and intolerant Greek society. This is the problem with Greece today and its society is a reflection of its own politics.
If all goes well we will be holding our next congress four years after our last congress.

Q. How does the Macedonian government, specifically the Macedonian foreign minister and the Macedonian Ambassadors, fit in with the Macedonian minorities in the neighbouring States, especially in Greece?

VOSKOPULOS: Macedonian organizations in the neighbouring Balkan states must rely on themselves and work closely with the people they represent through the democratic framework of the state in which they are located. They must work together (or join together for a combined effort) with all democratic citizens and democratic movements in the country in which they live. This has been our motto and our primary principle for all our political activities.
We can’t rely on the Republic of Macedonia and its authorities to solve Macedonian minority problems in the neighbouring Balkan states, nor should we expect it to. What we need to do is focus on strengthening our links with the democratic processes in our own respective states and make use of the international factor and its world institutions dedicated to supporting minority rights. This may seem like the long and hard road to take but we strongly believe it is a better road that will lead to real democracy.