Greek "No!" to Macedonian Refugees Returning Home

By David Edenden,

Macedonia is finally bringing up the issue of the rights of the Macedonian "Greek Civil War" era refugees for property redress and citizen issues. (See "Begasli"). The Greek government is not amused!

The Macedonian government has its back to the wall after its membership to Nato was vetoed by Greece with the enthusiastic approval by Sarkozy, even though Bush steadfastly supported Macedonia's bid.

Macedonia's (along with Turkey's) EU bid is also slated to be vetoed by Greece. Macedonia is now merely going through the motions of applications with "zero" chance of admission to either Nato or the EU. (Where is Putin when we need him?)

Macedonia has nothing to lose and everything to gain by pushing this issue. It should press Matthew Nimetz to address this issue in public and in print so that the politicians in Washington, who have adopted the Greek position on the Macedonian question, can have their feet put to the fire!

I'm talking to you Barack Obama!

"The Guardian" on Macedonian Refugees from Greece

Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly

A London Play About Modern Macedonian Refugees from Greece (Olympia Dukakis as a Macedonian - Yikes!)

See "Refugee" Links at Maknews

FYROM pushes ‘refugee’ demands
Kathimerini

Thursday July 3, 2008

Athens yesterday rebuffed calls by the foreign minister of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) for current citizens of FYROM who left Greece during the civil war to be allowed to reclaim lost property and apply for Greek citizenship.

Sources dismissed the comments by Antonio Milososki as a departure from the focus of talks between Greek and FYROM government officials which are aimed at finding a mutually acceptable name for FYROM. But Milososki said Athens was trying to address other issues. “If we follow this logic, then it would be good to close all issues that might cause misunderstandings in the future,” Milososki said. “This applies also to the restitution of properties of the refugees from Greece who are Macedonian citizens, but have grounds for receiving Greek citizenship too,” Milososki said.

Greek diplomatic sources said it was FYROM, not Greece, that has been trying to divert ongoing UN-mediated talks from the name issue. Greece has said solving the name dispute is a priority.

The same point was made in a letter sent by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to his FYROM counterpart Branko Crvenkovski. “Macedonia is fully qualified to join NATO but it should resolve the name dispute with Greece beforehand,” Sarkozy said in the letter, made public yesterday. In a speech before the Greek Parliament last month, Sarkozy had said France would stand firmly by Greece’s side in the name dispute.

In a related development, sources told Kathimerini that groups representing FYROM citizens in Greece are organizing a rally at the Niki border crossing with FYROM in which they have invited “all refugees chased out of Greece” to participate.

New Book by Andrew Rossos

Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History
by Andrew Rossos:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 26, 2008

(See Full Preview At Google Books Here)

STANFORD— Macedonia, from antiquity to the present day, is surveyed by historian Andrew Rossos in Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History (Hoover Institution Press, June 200

8). Throughout recorded history, Macedonia has been a strategic and economic crossroads. “Although Macedonia figured prominently in history, it remained a little known land, virtual terra incognita, until the nineteenth century,” said Rossos.

The book reveals how the so-called Macedonian question has long dominated Balkan politics and how, for wellover a century and a half, it was the central issue dividing Balkan peoples, as neighboring nations struggled for possession of Macedonia and denied any distinct Macedonian identity—territorial, political, ethnic, or national.

Macedonia and the Macedonians shows how, during the long struggle for Macedonia, as some ethnic Macedonians adopted or had to adopt the national identity of one of the competing nations, most chose a Macedonian identity—and how Macedonia’s struggle to establish a distinct national identity goes on even today. The author concludes that Balkan acceptance of a Macedonian identity, nation, and state has become a necessity for stability in the Balkans and in a united Europe.

In Macedonia and the Macedonians Rossos offers a comprehensive and accessible view of this land and its people.

Rossos is a professor of history at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Russia and the Balkans: Inter-Balkan Rivalries and Russian Foreign Policy, 1908-1914 (1981). His studies on Macedonian history have also appeared in the Slavonic and East European Review (1991), the Slavic Review (1994), National Character and National Ideology in Interwar Eastern Europe (1995), the Journal of Modern History (1997), East European Politics and Societies (2000), and Yugoslavia and Its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (2003).

Macedonia and the Macedonians is part of the Hoover Institution Press's acclaimed Studies of Nationalities series. The series examines the histories of the principal nationalities in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. It explores issues of identity and conflict, political and social organization, and modernization.

Macedonia and the Macedonians: A History
by Andrew Rossos

ISBN: 978-0-8179-4881-8	$40.00 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8179-4882-5	$25.00 paper
367 pages	June 2008

People Are Correct to Believe that Barack Obama is Half Muslim!

By David Edenden,

Those who condemn American voters who believe that Barack Obama is at least "half Muslim" are silly and purposely naive.

In many places around the world, including some parts of the USA, your religion is part of your ethnic identity. In a real sense you are born Catholic, born Protestant, born Jewish, born Muslim. It is not a smear or a plot.

In Bosnia if a Muslim family converts to a Catholicism, many in Bosnia, Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox would still see them as Muslims.

In Northern Ireland, if someone converts to Buddhism and is stopped by thugs in a dark alley, here's how the conversation could go:

Thug: Are you Catholic or Protestant?
Victim: I am Buddhist!
Thug: Are you a Catholic Buddhist or Protestant Buddhist?

Being a Buddhist in this situation is not going to stop you from being knee-capped.

The Weekly Standard, home of the "Neo-Con Conspiracy" has, as one of its writers a Suffi Muslim whose name is ... wait for it ... Stephen Schwartz. Apparently Schwartz is half Jewish and was raised in a secular environment, so according to him... he was never Jewish. Tell it to the Marines ... most people in the US as well as the immigration officials for the State of Israel (for obvious reasons) still recognize him as Jewish.

Obama's task it to convince ordinary Christians and Jewish Americans that the religion of his birth, Muslim, will not affect his loyalty to his current religion, Christianity, or to that of his country.

Given that Barack Obama's father abandoned him while he was still a child ... it should not be too hard a task.

Barack Obama tries on a typical Kenyan AND Muslim robe of his father's tribe!

He looks so proud!

Roger Casement (Again) on Macedonia!

By David Edenden,

This is a follow-up to my first post on Roger Casement (here)

To Do List:

Someone should do a definitive analysis of the attitudes of Irish Rebel leaders prior to Irish independence with regard to the Macedonian question. If a Macedonian has an Irish spouse, this could be a good project to bring them together.

Are there any other articles by Casement or other Irish leaders on Macedonia? Are the current Irish leaders ashamed of the treatment of Macedonia regarding Nato membership at the Bucharest meeting (here) (here).

Do Michael Martin, Foreign Minister and Prime Minister, Brian Cowen have a suppressed desire to knee-cap themselves for their crimes against Macedonians?

Inquiring minds want to know!

The Crime Against Europe
A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914
Sir Roger Casement

Let us first inspect the moral argument on the lips of these professors. We are assured, by it, that the claim of the Balkan Allies to expel Turkey from Europe rests upon a just and historic basis.

Briefly stated it is that the Turk has held his European provinces by a right of conquest only. What the sword took, die sword may take away. When the sword was struck from the Ottoman's grasp his right to anything it had given him fell too. Thus Adrianople, a city he has held for over five hundred years, must be given up to a new conqueror who never owned it in the past and who certainly has far less moral claim to be there to-day than the descendants of Selim's soldiers.

But the moral argument brings strange revenges.

If Turkey has no right to Adrianople, to Thrace—"right of sword to be shattered by the sword"—what right has England to Ireland, to Dublin, to Cork? She holds Ireland by exactly the same title as that by which Turkey has hitherto held Macedonia, Thrace, Salonika—a right of invasion, of seizure, of demoralization.

If Turkey's rights, nearly six hundred years old, can be shattered in a day by one successful campaign, and if the powers of Europe can insist, with justice, that this successful sword shall outweigh the occupation of centuries, then, indeed, have the Powers, led by [pg 50] England, furnished a precedent in the Near East which the victor in the next great struggle should not be slow to apply to the Near West, when a captive Ireland shall be rescued from the hands of a conqueror whose tide is no better, indeed somewhat worse than that of Turkey to Macedonia. And when the day of defeat shall strike for the Turkey of the Near West, then shall an assembled Europe remember the arguments of 1912-13 and a freed Ireland shall be justified on the very grounds England to-day has been the first to advance against a defeated Turkey.

"But the Turk is an Asiatic," say the English Bashaws: to which indeed, Europe might aptly reply, "and are the English European or non-European?" The moral argument, and the "Asiatic argument" are strange texts for the desecrater of Christian Ireland to appeal to against that continent which she would fain hem in with Malayan and Indian battleships, and Canadian and Australasian dreadnoughts. Not the moral argument, but the anti-German argument, furnishes the real ground for the changed British attitude in the present war.

The moral failure of Turkey, her inability to govern her Christian peoples is only the pretext: but just as the moral argument brings its strange revenges and shows an Ireland that has suffered all that Macedonia has suffered, and this at the hands of Christians, and not of Moslems, so the triumph of the Balkan Allies, far from benefiting Britain, must, in the end, react to her detriment.

The present apparent injury to German interests by the closing of South-eastern Europe, and the road to Asia Minor, will inevitably force Germany to still more resolutely face the problem of opening the Western seaways. To think otherwise is to believe that Germany will accept a quite impossible position tamely and without a struggle.

Hemmed in by Russia on the East and the new Southern Slav States on the South-east, with a vengeful France being incited on her Western frontier to fresh dreams of conquest, Germany sees England preparing still mightier armaments to hold and close the seaways of the world. The Canadian naval vote, the Malayan "gift" of a battleship come as fresh rivets in the chain forged for the perpetual binding of the seas, or it might more truly be said, for the perpetual binding of the hands of die German people.

We read in a recent London periodical how these latest naval developments portend the coming of the day when "the Imperial navy shall keep the peace of the seas as a policeman does the [pg 51] peace of the streets. The time is coming when a naval war (except by England), will be as relentlessly suppressed as piracy on the high seas." (Review of Reviews, December, 1912.)

The naïve arrogance of this utterance is characteristically English. It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of the Churchill Glasgow speech, and the fullest justification of the criticism of the Kreuz Zeitung already quoted. It does not stand alone; it could be paralleled in the columns of any English paper—Liberal as much as Conservative—every day in the week. Nothing is clearer than that no Englishman can think of other nations save in terms of permanent inferiority.

 Thus, for instance, in a November (1912) issue of the Daily News we find a representative Englishman (Sir R. Edgecumbe), addressing that Liberal journal in words that no one but an Englishman would dream of giving public utterance to. Sir R. Edgecumbe deprecated a statement that had gone round to the effect that the Malayan battleship was not a free gift of the toiling Tamils, Japanese, Chinese, and other rubber workers who make up, with a few Malays, the population of that peninsula, but was really the fruit of an arbitrary tax imposed upon these humble, but indifferent Asiatics by their English administration.

Far from being indifferent, Sir R. Edgecumbe asserted these poor workers nourished a reverence "bordering on veneration" for the Englishman. "This is shown in a curious way by their refusing to call any European 'a white man' save the Englishman alone. The German trader, the Italian and Frenchman all are, in their speech coloured men."
After this appreciation of themselves the English cannot object to the present writer's view that they are non-Europeans.

Thus while the Eastern question is being settled while I write, by the expulsion of the Turk from Europe, England, who leads the cry in the name of Europe, is preparing the exclusion of Europe from all world affairs that can be dominated by sea power. Lands and peoples held for centuries by Turkey by a right not less moral than that by which England has held Ireland, are being forcibly restored to Europe. So be it.

With settlement of the Eastern question by this act of restitution Europe must inevitably gain the clarity of vision to deal with the Western question by a similar act of restoration.
The Western Macedonia must go the way of its Eastern fellow. Like those of the Orient, the problems of the Occident for Europe are twofold—a near Western and a far Western question. Ireland, [pg 52] keeper of the seas, constitutes for Europe the near Western question.

The freedom of those seas and their opening to all European effort alike on equal terms constitutes the far Western question. But in both cases the antagonist of Europe, the non-European power is the same. The challenge of Europe must be to England, and the champion of Europe must be and can be only Germany. No other European people has the power, the strength of mind, of purpose and of arm to accomplish the great act of deliverance. Europe too long blinded to her own vital interests while disunited, must now, under the guidance of a united Germany, resolutely face the problem of freeing the seas.
That war of the seas is inevitable. It may be fought on a continent; it may be waged in the air—it must be settled on the seas and it must mean either the freeing of those seas or the permanent exclusion of Europeans from the affairs of the world. It means for Europe the future, the very existence of European civilization as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon world domination. In that war, Germany will stand not alone as the champion of Europe, she will fight for the freedom of the world.

As an Irishman I have no fear of the result to Ireland of a German triumph. I pray for it; for with the coming of that day the "Irish question" so dear to British politicians, becomes a European, a world question.

With the humbling of Great Britain and the destruction of her sea ownership, European civilization assumes a new stature, and Ireland, oldest and yet youngest of the European peoples, shall enter into free partnership with the civilization, culture, and prosperity that that act of liberation shall bring to mankind.

For a Great Greek Director, Who Lives in Florina, Macedonians Don't Exist

By David Edenden

The Facts:

1. Fiachra Gibbons interviews Greek director Theo Angelopoulos.

2. He know he lives in Florina (Lerin) where 50% of the residents are ethnic Macedonians.

3. He does not ask him how he can live with people, yet ignore their existence in his movies.

The Assumption:

I don't know Fiachra, but I can only assume that he likes Greece and he does not want to do anything that would make it difficult for his to work or vacation there.(Greek Islands Ya Know) He has no problem discussing Turkish problems with the Armenian genocide.

Fiachra Gibbons

Theo Angelopoulos

The Prediction:

Apparently Fiachra Gibbons is writing a book on the Ottoman legacy in Europe. I predict that he will ignore the treatment of ethnic Macedonians in Greece and he certainly won't criticise Theo Angelopoulos for aiding and abetting cultural genocide in Florina. We really need someone who can review his films and life

Tale of the century

Greece's greatest living film-maker has embarked on his most ambitious
project yet. Theo Angelopoulos talks to Fiachra Gibbons

Wednesday January 19, 2005
The Guardian, Fiachra Gibbons

It is easy to joke about Theo Angelopoulos, maker of such exceeding long and
exceedingly slow intellectual epics as Eternity and a Day, a film that felt
only marginally shorter than its title. It's even harder to resist parody
now the great master is making a trilogy of films that modestly set out to
define the past century.

On the evidence of The Weeping Meadow, however, we may have to find a new
butt for our jokes. No one is saying the famously stern Greek auteur has
gone mainstream, but this is his most accessible film in decades and
contains such nakedly bourgeois fripperies as emotions and characters that
might almost be real.

When I tell him how many people cried when they saw his first instalment,
the story of Greek refugees from the Russian revolution adrift in their
ancient homeland, he jolts back in his chair, momentarily horror-struck. Yet
The Weeping Meadow, which contains several close-ups and other barefaced
sops to populism, clearly shows Angelopoulos is going soft in his old age -
or what he prefers to term his "Aristotelian period". But then, even
arthouse legends have occasionally to consider the audience, particularly
when they are in danger of not having one any more.

I meet him in Thessaloniki, the northern Greek city where the new film is
centred, on one of these bright clear winter days Angelopoulos hates. Living
in Europe's sunniest country is a constant trial for a man who only shoots
in fog or rain. It is so clear, in fact, you can see Mount Olympus across
the gulf, on whose lofty heights Angelopoulos has all but dwelt since The
Travelling Players made him an art-cinema immortal a quarter of a century
ago. It's easy to sympathise with young Greek film-makers frustrated by the
way he has hogged the top of the heap, and the country's limited resources,
for so long.

Which is why he takes me by surprise the next day by revealing how even gods
feel vulnerable when they are staring 70 in the face. Listen, he says,
gesturing with the ghost of the cigarette he is no longer allowed to smoke,
I have only really made one film, and I've made it again and again. "Of all
the thousands of scenes I've shot, there have only been one or two images I
can honestly say were original - that were from my own gaze, my own
experience. The first one was in December 1944. I was nine and Athens was in
the turmoil of civil war - there were dead bodies everywhere and I remember
my mother holding me by the hand as we walked through the city looking for
my father's corpse. I remember looking for him on a plot of land full of
dead bodies. We didn't find him. Fortunately, he had not been executed.

"Then I remember as I was playing in the street one afternoon when my father
returned. He was dressed in rags and I shouted to my mother, and she came
out to meet him. There was a very deep and absolute emotion in this. There
was nothing for supper, we had some thin soup, and we couldn't talk. That is
the first sequence in Reconstruction, my first film.

"In all these years, they are the only images I can say that are truly
mine."

He stops himself, looking for a suitably philosophical rationale for this
uncharacteristic confession. "My earlier films were emotional in the second
degree; now they are in the first degree," he says.

You can see that even in the way this film looks. The usual motifs are
there: the fogs; the tiny figures lost in a huge canvas like matchstick men;
the spectacular, lingering set-piece shots; the eternal refugees with their
suitcases. But there is an intensity now that says we are nothing in the
face of history, and those who try to change its course risk being destroyed
by it. Like Odysseus, his favourite mythological character, we are in the
lap of unfeeling gods.

As is Angelopoulos himself. Taking on the story of the 20th century might
seem like megalomania, but that is not how the small, edgy man appears
without entourage, fuss and cameras.

Though his films divide Greeks, they are undeniably national events. His
shoots are like circuses, with thousands of tourists and rubberneckers
descending on the remote lakes and mountains of Greek Macedonia, where he
likes to assemble his huge painterly tableaux. At weekends there are traffic
jams, fast-food vans and Gypsy bands to entertain the crowds, which stay at
a reverent, un-Greek-like distance as he waits for the weather to close in
so he can shoot. Many of these people will not go to the films; they come
simply because he is great and Greek.

But there is more than national pride at stake now. Angelopoulos's
motivation for so huge and risky a project so late in his career could not
be more personal. He came up with the idea of the trilogy while watching his
mother die.

"By the time I got to her bedside she couldn't speak, and I thought, this
woman has experienced the whole century - she was born at the beginning and
is dying at its end. She has seen its hopes and disasters and now it is too
late for her to pass those on to me. I had just returned from Cannes with
the Palme d'Or for Eternity and a Day, and it was not what I was expecting.
I thought it might be a good idea to tell this story through a woman. Women
more than men are tragic figures. My mother, for example, was Antigone at
times or Hecuba other times. In her life she played different roles."

The second part of the trilogy - for which he has not yet found funding,
despite winning a European Film award last month for The Weeping Meadow -
starts in the Soviet Union in 1953, on the day Stalin died, with a train
taking home an international brigade of disillusioned activists who have
lost faith with socialism.

The resonances for Greece, where a popular leftwing government was
overthrown by the British and Americans after the second world war and
150,000 refugees were sent into exile in the eastern bloc, could not be
stronger. Angelopoulos himself had to carve out his career under the beady
eyes of the military dictatorship of the early 1970s, which was again
supported by Washington. In some ways, his distinctive cinematic style grew
from the mists of symbolism in which he had to cloak his early films to stay
out of jail.

"My last film will be about the future, and our visionary relations with
it," he says. But he refuses to elaborate. He has a flight to Rome to catch.
He is receiving another award, this time the Vittorio de Sica prize from the
Italian government. I congratulate him but he looks at me as if I'm mocking
him, suddenly pained. "Prizes are prizes, but I still need to tell that
story. And being simple is the hardest thing."

Macedonian Movie better than Da Vinci Code!

By David Edenden
"The Secret Book", a film written by Jordan Plevnes, is Macedonia's entry to the Cannes film festival. I can't wait to see this movie. Fiachra has a good sense of humour.

Like him, I smell a plot! I think he should look into the Greek film Ulysses' Gaze, by Theo Angelopoulos through the prism of Greek treatment of its Macedonian minority. We will find a real plot there!

Cannes, Cathars and Conspiracy

Fiachra Gibbons
Friday May 26, 2006
The Guardian

Purporting to rock Christendom and the Papacy to its white silk slippers, the Da Vinci Code opened the Cannes film festival last week and quickly became one of the fastest grossing films of all time. But has a hidden hand been at work here?
Why, you may wonder, with so much money at stake, did its producers take the risk of releasing it at the world's snootiest film festival, knowing it might suffer the critical mauling it got?
It may be because they knew that another film about the real heretical "bible" suppressed by the church for the past 1,000 years - a film begun before Dan Brown even set pen to paper -was finally about to be shown.
The Secret Book is the official Macedonian entry at Cannes. But you won't have read anything about it. Oh no. They have made sure of that. Call the Cannes press office and you will be told, as I was, "Quel film est ca? Mais il n'existe pas . . ." It may as well not, for its premiere was hidden away in a tiny screening room at the festival' fag end.
Coincidence or conspiracy? You decide. Brown's novel is based on the "discovery" of a set of highly disputed parchments called Les Dossiers Secret identifying members of a secret society, the Priory of Sion, allegedly descended from the Cathars. The Macedonian film is based on Le Livre Secret, a real mystical book written by the Bogomils, a Manichean cult whose ideas, carried back to France and Italy from the Balkans by returning crusaders in the 11th century, became the basis of the Cathar heresy. Like them, the Bogomils were massacred by the church and their name almost burned from history.
Two later copies of the Secret Book survive - one still hangs in punishment from the ceiling of the Museum of the Inquisition in Carcassonne - but the original written in Glagolic, the old Slavic script wiped out by the cyrillic alphabet imposed by the church, has never been found. Strangely, there is no mention of the book, or indeed of the Bogomils, in Brown's book.
Since it wrapped four years ago - a year before the Da Vinci Code was published - the Secret Book has been beset by obstacles. But Jordan Plevnes, one of three brothers who wrote the script (symbologists take note), is too much of a diplomat to suggest that the whole Da Vinci Code phenomenon is an elaborate smokescreen cooked up to obscure the light they shed on the Bogomils. He is after all, the Macedonian ambassador to France, one of the Balkans' leading playwrights, and his latest novel, the Eighth Wonder of the World, has won one of France's top literary prizes, the Silver Jasmine.
"But it does make you think," he confessed. "And yes, there is definitely a conspiracy at work - a conspiracy of blandness. There is a tyranny of banality now ruling the world; Hollywood and Dan Brown are part of that. This is our European story and we should be allowed to tell it ourselves."
So will we ever see Plevnes' film? That depends on a secretive, semi-masonic group, more powerful than any inquisitor, who decide in darkened rooms what films we get to see - the Distributors of the Priory of Soho.
So if you never hear of the Secret Book again, you will know that they, like Opus Dei and the mad monk Silas, have done their work.
The Secret Book's website is www.tajnatakniga.com.mk

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

From:
David Edenden (note: transferred from my old site)

To:
Patrick Moore, Radio Free Europe,
Nicholas Whyte, International Crisis Group

March 17, 2007

I am siting at my computer drinking real Guinness stout in a real Guinness glass. I was in Ireland a few years ago and the first meal we had when we landed in Dublin was Irish stew. When I asked the young waitress whether they served Guinness, she was about to answer when she realized that I was just trying to tease her.

I hope you guys were not mad at me the last time I mentioned your name and organizations (RFE ... ICG). I noticed that SE Times which is funded by the Pentagon mentioned that Macedonians in Bulgaria were denied the right to form a political party while both of your groups remained silent. Ouch! Too bad, so sad ... nothing personal ... no harm, no foul ... water under the bridge.

Anyway, I thought that you might get one of your Irish friends to write about an Anglo-Irish diplomat (Roger Casement on Macedonia) who supported Irish independence circa Easter 1916 and was thoughtfully hanged by the British for treason. He was gay, if that helps you to identify him ... not that there is anything wrong with being gay. I was going to write something in honour of St. Patrick's Day but, I forgot. I can't remember his name, but he wrote about the plight of the Macedonians after the Balkan wars in 1912, when Macedonia was partitioned between Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. I read a quote from some Macedonian sources who quoted him as saying "only the Irish can know how the Macedonians feel" or vice versa. I am sure you both will know what he means.

I don't want you to write this yourself because you might get in trouble with your superiors. I am not sure why the RFE and ICG both continue to ignore the plight of Macedonians in Greece since both the State Department and the CIA have reported on this in the past and since the ICG and RFE are funded predominantly by the US. Its a mystery, I tell ya!

Maybe you can leak some information about this policy of your organizations to your Irish writer friends (... oh no! ... make that an English writer, that way your bosses will not be suspicious.)

I can't find the link right now, but on some Irish website, it was mentioned that Ireland was discovered by a Macedonian. Get some one to write that up also. The Irish may continue to reside in Ireland until the controversy of ownership with Macedonians can be adjudicated by Javier Solana.

All the best.

Colin Farrel's Alexander - Macedonians and the Irish vs Greeks and the English!

By David Edenden,

This is an old story from our friend Fiachra about Colin Farrell's Alexander. I saw the movie. Not much of a story, just enough to make Macedonians and Greeks look foolish.

Wouldn't be proper to mention the role of US/EU in this comedy. Wouldn't be prudent!. People are watching! Mum's the word.

Patriot games

Which people are the true descendants of the greatest military
commander in history? Fiachra Gibbons reports on how Oliver Stone's
epic Alexander is reigniting an ancient, bitter feud.

Friday November 19, 2004
The Guardian, Fiachra Gibbons



The first western imperialist ... Colin Farrell as Alexander

"We will come and kill you in your beds, cut your throats, and wipe
you from the face of the earth ... if Alexander the Great were alive
today he would grind you gypsy dogs into the dust, dig your dead from
their graves and silence forever your filthy language that insults his
name ..."

Internet chatrooms have never been the most decorous of forums but
even in the free-for-all that is cyberspace, those dedicated to
discussing Oliver Stone's new film, Alexander, are a case apart.

Since the combative director of JFK chose to make his first foray into
historical epics with a biopic of the most fought-over figure of the
ancient world, rivers of blood have been spilt - figuratively at least
- in a propaganda battle between Greek and Macedonian nationalists
over who has the right to claim the all-conquering hero as their own.

This very modern ethnic turf war is being fought with tortuously
argued historical blogs about which Macedonia Alexander conquered the
known world for - a tiny new Balkan republic that has only recently
come to see itself as the keeper of his flame, or a province that was
officially known as "Northern Greece" until the former Yugoslav
republic of Macedonia declared itself independent and bagged the name.

But the real blood and guts of the battle, the part Alexander would
have so enjoyed, is in the chatrooms, where fanatical foot- soldiers
taunt each other with blood-curdling threats heavy with echoes of the
short but brutish Balkan wars that carved up ancient land between
Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria almost a century ago.

Stone has remained uncharacteristically silent, preferring to wrestle
on set with war elephants and his leading man, Colin Farrell. Even for
such a seasoned controversialist, this is a scrap to stand back from.

For the struggle over who have the right to call themselves
descendents of the greatest military commander in history, and the
first real western imperialist, is neither pretty nor edifying. In the
early 1990s, Greece nearly invaded the newborn Republic of Macedonia
for "stealing" Alexander's symbol, the Star of Vergina, for its flag,
as well as the White Tower in the Greek Macedonian capital of
Thessaloniki for its banknotes, something the millions of ordinary
Greeks who took to the streets saw as "blatant acts of aggression".

The flag and the banknotes were hastily withdrawn, but Greek pride was
far from restored. To the horror of its European partners, Athens
briefly contemplated carving up its defenceless northern neighbour
with the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. In the end, Greece
stepped back, choosing instead to blockade the tiny republic of barely
two million people in an attempt to strangle it at birth. Since then
millions have been spent on a war of attrition to claim the name - and
Alexander - back.

You cannot walk more than a few hundred metres in any town in northern
Greece without tripping over a new statue, bust or monument to
Alexander, who extended the Hellenic world as far as India in the
fourth century BC with such slaughter that even today in Iran and
central Asia his name is used to scare unruly children. You will find
the most pointed statue of all at the border with Macedonia at Niki -
named after the Greek god of victory - where a giant Alexander angrily
brandishes a javelin at the upstart state across the frontier.

All over Greek Macedonia, streets, schools and airports have been
hastily renamed, while archaeologists, having all but ignored ancient
Macedonia until relatively recently, are digging furiously for its
traces. The spectacular tomb of Alexander's father, Phillip, at
Vergina near Thessaloniki, and the city's revamped museum, hammer home
the kingdom's Greekness.

Still, passions had cooled somewhat after an unhappy compromise over
the name that burdened Skopje with the cumbersome temporary moniker of
the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or "Fyrom" for short. Greek
investment also began to build bridges - until Stone and his army of
Hollywood stars appeared on the horizon to put nationalists on both
sides back on a hair-trigger.

It is into this fraught and febrile atmosphere that George W Bush has
now wandered. With the world waiting and wondering where the president
will start the next war, Bush chose as his first major foreign-policy
decision of his second term to recognise Fyrom by its "proper" name as
the Republic of Macedonia, prompting paroxysms of Greeks anger across
the globe and Athens to vow to block Macedonia's entry into the EU and
Nato.

Even before Bush's intervention, the very mention of the M-word in
Greek Macedonia risked a stern lecture on how it has been Greek since
antiquity. I nearly lost an ear to a particularly patriotic barber in
Thessaloniki last month when I mentioned that I had just arrived from
the "other Macedonia".

Those people are not Macedonian, he raged. "That is a Slav lie. We are
the real Macedonians. They are prostitutes and Gypsies and worse than
Albanians," he declared. His family, it turned out, were recent Greek
immigrants from Georgia who, he claimed, went "east with Alexander".
He liked to take his son on Sundays to the massive equestrian statue
of Alexander on the city's seafront promenade, where Greek
right-wingers gathered after Bush's bombshell to burn American and
Macedonian flags. "I tell him to be proud of his ancestors and how
lucky he is to have returned to the land of his forefathers."

But ask anyone four hours north in Skopje what Alexander was and they
will smile sheepishly and say, "Macedonian, of course!" And when
pressed about the obvious absurdity of a country that has a majority
Slavic population claiming a man who was born nearly 1,000 years
before the first Slav appeared in Macedonia, they answer, "Well, he
was certainly not Greek."

If the Macedonians were Greek, why did Alexander have to address his
troops in both Greek and ancient Macedonian, they argue. And every dog
can quote the Athenian orator Demosthenes' famous condemnation of
Alexander's father Philip as "not only no Greek, nor related to the
Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with
honour, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet
possible to buy a decent slave."

"No one is saying that Alexander spoke modern Macedonian, that is
ridiculous, but who is to say that there isn't something of him still
floating around in the genome," says Vojislav Sarakinski, a lecturer
in ancient history at the city's main Cyril and Methodius university.
It is easy to ridicule all this as archetypical Balkan lunacy until
you realise how much of the emotional heat of the dispute stems from
the insecurity of both countries about their borders, fears fully
justified by the region's recent history.

Stone has been well aware of these sensitivities from the start,
though initial Greek outrage at his film focused on Alexander's
omnivorous sexuality, in particular his fondness for eunuchs. His
film, he insists, is purely about the historical "man god", and so has
made no secret of showing Alexander's love for his friend Hephaestion.
There is, however, none of the lurid decadence promised from Baz
Luhrmann's planned film about Alexander, if it ever gets off the
blocks.

Evangelos Venizelos, the formidable former Greek culture minister and
a Macedonian, attempted to get Stone onside early on, offering him
Greek locations and the use of the army for battle scenes, but the
director demurred and instead diplomatically chose locations far away
from controversy in Morocco and Thailand. Confronted with angry MPs
unhappy with what they were hearing about Alexander's bisexuality,
Venizelos despaired, "What can I do? It's Hollywood."

Generally, though, most Greeks see the Stone film as a chance to
strike a blow against Skopje, given that it is based on the biography
by the Oxford academic Robin Lane Fox, whom both sides see as a
Hellenist.

None of the previous, deeply disappointing attempts to bring
Alexander's extraordinary life to the screen have had to walk the same
tightrope because, until Skopje broke away from Belgrade in 1991,
Alexander's origins were not in dispute. In fact he barely figured in
the old Yugoslav textbooks, and even in Greece he was something of a
forgotten figure - relegated to the second and third division of
Hellenic heroes behind Pericles, the great philosophers, and warriors
such as Leonidas. While the great Greek director Theo Angelopoulos
dealt obliquely with him in his film about a 19th-century Macedonian
brigand, Megalexandros, there has been no biopic in either country.

"Alexander lived long before nationalism and so is our common hero,"
says Vasil Tupurkovski, a former deputy president, who has written
four popular histories about him. "He would be laughing at us arguing
about him now."

Ah, but would he be laughing in Greek or Macedonian? Professor Nade
Proeva, the expert on ancient Macedonia in Skopje, thinks both.
"Alexander certainly spoke and wrote Greek, but then it was the lingua
franca of the time, like English is now. I speak French but that does
not make me French."

With such treacherous ground to negotiate, and amid thunderous
lobbying from both sides, Stone has chosen a remarkably adroit middle
course. His masterstroke has been to give Alexander and the men of the
Macedonian phalanxes Irish accents, while the Greeks speak clipped
English RP.

Macedonians of all complexions are content with this, each convinced
it favours their cause. So in another two millennia when people ponder
again the origins of the mysterious Macedonian who emerged from the
southern Balkans to rule the world at 25, they will turn their ears to
Colin Farrell's guttural brogue and conclude that he was in fact a
Dubliner.

Roger Casement on Macedonia

By David Edenden, (Transferred from my old site)

This excerpt from John Shea's book illustrates the unity in pain between the Macedonian and Irish people. It is a follow-up to my Happy St. Patrick's post. Download his book for free "The Crime Against Europe" which has two pages on Macedonia

Macedonia and Greece - The Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation,
John Shea, McFarland and Company Inc., North Carolina, 1997

My readings have established to my satisfaction the weakness of the Greek historical argument. It is also clear to me that national aspirations were alive and well in Macedonia long before Tito arrived on the scene. But by and large the Macedonians have had a pretty miserable time of it, dominated by one greater power or another for much of their history, a domination most recently perpetrated by the same European nations who were slow to support the Macedonians in the 1990s. As the Irish patriot Roger Casement (executed by the British after the 1916 uprising in Ireland) put it: “I know of two tragic histories in the world - that of Ireland, and that of Macedonia. Both of them have been deprived and tormented.”

Casement was speaking primarily of the Macedonians who then inhabited the lands that fell within the borders of the ancient Macedonian homeland. A majority of them were Slavic speakers when Greece conquered a large part of Macedonia, taking it from the Turks, just before the First World War. Casement's rather eloquent lines by themselves must cause us to ponder Greek claims that a non-Greek Macedonia was merely a Communist invention. "

July 2nd - Best Irish Pub in the World is Located in Kumanovo, Macedonia!

By David Edenden,

This is another example of the unity between the Irish and Macedonian people. I read somewhere that in the 20's and thirties, VMRO was feared more that the IRA, which at least had some success in founding the Irish Free State.

Unlikely Entrepreneur Creates Macedonia’s First Authentic Irish Pub: "2/17/2007 (Balkanalysis.com)

By Christopher Deliso

At first, Mark Murphy’s story might seem common enough; Western peacekeeper stationed in the Balkans falls in love with local girl whom he meets on the job. However, what happened after for this Irish soldier and resident of Kumanovo, a city of 100,000 in Macedonia’s northeast, is much more remarkable. For rather than returning home with the emigrant native daughter, a scenario witnessed countless times since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990’s, Murphy stayed on to create a business, becoming an improbable investor in a small country by bringing a bit of his own culture to it- appropriately enough, in the form of an Irish pub, The Harp.

Although it has only been operating for about two months, The Harp has become a popular place. While Macedonia already has several Irish pubs, the new one of Kumanovo is the most authentic. Murphy spent loving attention to details, decking out the spacious, two-floor bar with clan insignia, Celtic symbols, Irish flags and, of course, Irish music. Unlike the many Macedonian cafés with their bland décor and identical pop or techno music, the Harp has a warmth to it reminiscent of what you might find "