Nicholaos K. Martis, Former Gov. Minister
Kaisareias 8, 115 27 Athens, GREECE
Athens, March 29, 2004
The President of the United States
Mr. George Bush
Washington
USA
As President of the United States of America, the world’s mightiest political, economic, and military power, with a prestigious record of playing a decisive part, together with its struggling allies, during two World Wars and the Cold War which followed, in safeguarding the democratic way of life of the people o Europe, you are in a position to ensure that the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia ceases to constitute the antidemocratic communist residuum in Europe.
The fraudulent creation of Stalin and Tito, FYROM, with the stolen Greek name of ‘Macedonia’, has been strongly criticized and invariably treated by the American side as a hostile act, not only against Greece.
The Slavs of FYROM, whom Tito christened ‘Macedonians’ in 1944, have usurped the history and the cultural patrimony of the people who have lived in Macedonia, and are deceiving international public opinion.
A recent example is a speech made by Kiro Gligorov at the University of Columbia in New York on the subject of ‘The Contribution of Ilinden to the Awakening of Macedonian Consciousness’. Ilinden was the name given to the uprising against the Turks in 1903 in the area of Monastiri (now Bitola).
The uprising was fomented by Bulgarians, but FYROM presents it as an uprising of ‘Macedonians’. This was contradicted at the time by the consuls of the United States, England, France, and Austria, who were in Monastiri. In a book titled The Events of 1903 in Macedonia as Presented in European Diplomatic Correspondence (Doc. 34), the four consuls report in dozens of documents to their respective foreign ministers that the uprising was fomented by Bulgarians (Doc. 34). A report by the Turkish Ambassador to France (Doc. 39) also contradicts what FYROM says.
Gligorov also deceived the international community from the rostrum of the United Nations (p. 91 of my book FYROM: The anti-democratic residuum in Europe and its problematic Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU and Doc. 43).
Skopje also deceived the Vatican and the Italian people in 1986 when it exhibited Greek icons as ‘Macedonian’ icons in a room in the Vatican.
Following protests by the Archbishop of Athens, the Vatican stated: ‘We were tricked by Skopje’.
All their assertions are false (p. 87-93 of my book). Under the name of Macedonia, FYROM is a cancer threatening peace in the region. The only solution for its survival –which would be an important factor for peace in the Balkans - is a new name, agreed on by all the ethnic groups of which it is made up. It is a solution, which was supported by an American Undersecretary of State in 1992.
As a Macedonian myself, as Minister for Macedonia and Thrace for seven of my twelve years as a government minister, and as a reserve officer who saw 83 months of service during the Second World War and fought in the battle for the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace during the German invasion of Greece in 1941 and then at El Alamein, Rimini, and the Battle of Athens in December 1944, I consider it my duty, as I did towards your predecessors Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, to inform you too about the Macedonian question.
I am also spurred to write to you by the recent judicial assistance agreement between the USA and FYROM, not, however, under its present legal name of the ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, but under the stolen Greek name of ‘Macedonia’.
As you will realize, this agreement using the name of ‘Macedonia’ was a political mistake and the blame is shared by those who bowed to coercion from Skopje and recommended that it be signed.
The agreement between the USA and ‘Macedonia’ was also surprising because it confutes the USA’s and the UN’s firm positions against FYROM as ‘Macedonia’.
In 1944, no sooner had Tito created the ‘Republic of Macedonia’ that the Roosevelt administration condemned all their assertions as demagoguery with veiled threats, and ever since then American presidents and important figures have condemned or taken steps against FYROM as ‘Macedonia’.
Tito’s declared aim of wresting the geographical area of Macedonia away from Greece to gain access to the Aegean, which would neutralize the line of defense of the democracies (Greece and Turkey), the President Truman’s statement in his memoirs, based on reports by the information services, that Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania were waging a campaign to create a communist Greece, led to the enunciation of the Truman Doctrine.
The Truman Doctrine, which also covered Turkey, and the statement in the President’s speech that the loss of Greece’s independence would also have repercussions for the countries of Europe show that the United States regarded the creation of a Macedonian problem as the first incident in a cold war, which was also obvious from the circular airgram issued by Stettinious.
Arthur Vanderberg, the President of the Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs, was more explicit in a letter of 1947, in which he stated that the problem of Greece was symbolic of the global ideological conflict between the Eastern bloc and Western democracy.
As a cold-war incident, however, the Macedonian problem evolved in Greece and especially in Macedonia as a warm-war incident.
This was pointed out by President George H. W. Bush on an official visit to Greece in 1991, when he stated that Greece alone had halted Soviet expansionism in Europe during the difficult period.
The Roosevelt government’s blunt (and still appropriate) description of Skopje’s assertions as ‘democracy’ would be charitable if applied to FYROM’s latest deliberate hoodwinking of international public opinion.
In 2001, FYROM signed an association agreement with the European Union.
However, on the Skopje government’s official website it is stated that ‘The Republic of Macedonia –not FYROM- signed an association agreement not with the European Union, but with the (named) fifteen member countries of the European Union, including Greece (Doc. 12).
When they learn that the member states of the European Union, including Greece, and also the United States have accepted ‘Macedonia’ as FYROM’s name in the recent agreement, Internet users all over the world will have no reason to wait for the UN decision regarding a new name, mutually acceptable to both FYROM and Greece.
The whole ‘Macedonian problem’ is not a local squabble, nor is it simply a matter of FYROM’s name.
The history of Macedonia constitutes an important part of the infrastructure of Western civilization. Consequently, respect for the historical truth about Macedonia is not a matter that concerns the Greeks alone.
By disseminating Greek culture and establishing Greek as the only language of the people, Alexander the Great and his successors (the Ptolemies and the Seleucids) profoundly influenced the history of the human race.
Christianity used the Greek language as the medium by which it was transmitted. Of the 48 books of the Old Testament, eight were written in Greek and the other 40 were translated into Greek. The New Testament was written entirely in Greek and these two sacred texts were translated from Greek into hundreds of other languages (p. 99 of my book).
In his book Hellenistic Period, the Soviet academician Avraam Rankovitch states that the culture created by Alexander and his successors (Hellenistic period) was inherited by Rome, Byzantium, and the people of the Far East and strongly influenced the modern era.
In a special study signed by Staggan Stolpe in 1995, the Swedish Institute for Foreign Affairs and the University of Lund point out that the history of Macedonia is not only the history of the Greeks, but the history of all Europeans, because the Macedonians propagated Greek culture, which still influences us today.
The re-establishment of the Alexandrian Library, with funding (US$200,000,000) from UNESCO, the international community, and the Egyptian government, is a major cultural achievement of the third millennium and underlines the role of the Hellenistic period, one of the achievements of which was the legendary ancient Alexandrian Library, which was founded by the Macedonian Ptolemy I and developed by all the Ptolemies until Cleopatra, whom Liz Taylor played in the film of the same name as a Greek.
Philology and the sciences were developed by the Alexandrians (p. 117 of my book).
The geographical territory of Macedonia, a bridge between East and West, North and South, has always been a target of aggressive designs, especially on the part of our northern neighbors.
Two events have been the main sources of problems in Macedonia.
The first was the Treaty of San Stefano in May 1878, by which the victorious Tsarist Russia forced the defeated Ottoman Empire to cede Thrace and most of Macedonia to Bulgaria. The Tsar’s aim was to gain access to the Aegean.
Following Greek protests, the European powers, which were also affected, forced the Tsar, with the Treaty of Berlin in July 1878, to revoke the San Stefano Treaty.
The Bulgarians used special gangs (Komitadjis) to try to change the demographic make-up and led to the Macedonian Struggle (1903-8) between Greeks and Bulgarians. This was followed by the first and second Balkan Wars and the First World War, the end of which found Russia under the communist regime.
The second event that was the source of the current problem with Skopje was the decision in Moscow in July 1921 by the Comintern and the Balkan communist parties (including the Communist Party of Greece) to make Macedonia and Thrace autonomous socialist republics.
The decision was reportedly taken in Lenin’s presence and proposed by the Bulgarian communist Kollarov.
In Moscow in September 1924 at the seventh Congress of the Balkan Communist Federation and at the fifth Congress of the Third International, with the intervention of Russian representatives on both occasions, the idea of autonomy was abandoned and it was decided to create an independent Macedonian state. The decision was ratified at the Panhellenic Congress of the Communist Party in December 1924 in the presence of representatives of the Third International. Apostolidis and Kordatos raised objections and were expelled.
Also, when the Germans invaded Greece in 1941, Bulgaria, as Hitler’s ally, invaded and annexed Thrace and a large part of Macedonia.
With the German invasion of Greece and Serbia in April 1941, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which had existed since 1919, was abolished and the communist Tito prevailed and renamed the kingdom ‘Yugoslavia’.
In 1944, thanks to Churchill’s intervention at Yalta, Greece escaped becoming a communist country. Tito, certain that communism would prevail in Greece also, with the support of the Communist Party of Greece and with Stalin’s agreement, in the hope of attaining the aim of the Comintern and the Balkan communist parties and especially the decision of 1924 in Moscow, fraudulently changed the name of southern Serbia (which had been known as Vardaska since 1912) to the ‘Socialist Republic of Macedonia’ and christened its Slav inhabitants ‘Macedonians’.
He then proceeded to create on paper the non-existent component elements of the non-existent ‘Macedonian Nation’, in 1944 a ‘Macedonian government’ and a ‘Macedonian parliament’, and in 1944 he named the pro-Bulgarian dialect spoken in the Skopje area the ‘Macedonian language’.
In 1968 he established in FYROM an autocephalous Macedonian Church, which is not recognized by any church, and 1969 saw the publication of the three-volume History of the (pseudo-) Macedonian Nation, which is the biggest political and historical hoax the world has ever seen.
FYROM: the ticking bomb in the Balcans
Paddy Ashdown, speaking as a candidate for the post of UN High Representative in Kosovo in December 2000, described FYROM as the ‘ticking bomb in the Balkans’.
With the stolen Greek name of ‘Macedonia’ FYROM is a cancer permanently threatening peace in the region.
All the neighboring people, who are well aware of the treaties and of Tito’s aspirations when he created the Republic of Macedonia, consider it foredoomed to failure and regard their ethnic kinsfolk as a vehicle for political aspirations.
The Bulgarians regard the Slavs of FYROM as Bulgarians, and Zhelev, as President of the Republic of Bulgaria on an official visit to Sweden in June 1993, declared that the ‘Macedonian Nation’ created by the Comintern after the War was a crime committed by Tito and Stalin.
In 1997, Arben Xhaferi, leader of the Albanians in FYROM, accused Gligorov of falsifying his neighbors’ history, and stated that his Macedonianism was not real but fictitious.
On August 4, 2003, the Serbs banned an official delegation from FYROM from entering Serbian territory to visit the Monastery of Prohor Pcinjski, where Tito founded the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1944.
The false and, to Greeks, objectionable assertion by the Slavs of FYROM, which was used as the cornerstone of their fictitious nation, that the ancient Macedonians were not Greeks and that they themselves became Macedonians, is an insult not only to the Greeks but to any rational person with the most elementary knowledge of history.
At the same time, Skopje’s assertion that there are supposedly ‘Macedonian minorities’ in Greece, Bulgaria, and Albania is a permanent provocation and the motive behind constant peace-threatening claims and provocations, which risk fragmenting FYROM.
The only solution for FYROM to prosper and constitute a stable factor for peace in the Balkans is a new name, agreed on by all the ethnic groups, which live there, so that it can nip its neighbors’ aspirations in the bud.
This solution was proposed by Mr. Thomas Niles, US Undersecretary of State, before a Congress subcommittee on June 22, 1992.
There is, after all, the precedent of Byelorussia, which, by Stalin’s own admission (Doc. 5) was created by the communist party itself and is now member of the United Nations.
American data indicate that the agreement between the
United States and ‘Macedonia’ is a political mistake
1) The USA has been criticized for ignoring the United Nations over the war of Iraq. With the above-mentioned agreement, the United States’ critics have an additional argument that the United States had disdained that international organization on a matter of equal importance to the war. As you know, the UN has ruled that the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia shall be known as FYROM until a mutually acceptable name can be found and agreed upon; and the negotiations are taking place under UN auspices.
2) Those who proposed that the agreement be signed under the name of ‘Macedonia’ insult the memory of Stettinius, Secretary of State under the Roosevelt administration, who, with circular airgram 868.014/26 Dec. 1944, immediately denounced any ‘talk of “Macedonian nation”, “Macedonian fatherland”, or “Macedonian national consciousness” as ‘unjustified demagoguery’ (Doc. 1). He regarded it as ‘a possible cloak for aggressive intentions against Greece’ and stated that the United States would take steps against those who would help Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to foment a Macedonian question.
Therefore, the recent agreement between the United States and “Macedonia” unfortunately helps to exacerbate a Macedonian question.
3) It is an insult to the memory of President Truman, whose Truman Doctrine helped to bring about the collapse of the communists’ plans. Had they occupied Macedonia and Thrace, the communists would have smashed NATO’s eastern wing, with serious wider consequences. So it was thanks to sacrifices by American taxpayers and the blood of the Greeks that Macedonia was saved from being incorporated into FYROM.
4) This agreement if contrary to President Clinton’s position, who in October 2, 1992 prior to the elections declared that “The United States position must be clear. If the southernmost former Yugoslav Republic wishes to receive American recognition, it must first accept the principles of the Helsinki Final Act, satisfy its neighbors and the world community that its intentions are peaceful, and abide by the European Community’s decision which rejects the use of the name Macedonia. A Clinton Administration will stand by these principles and ensure that Greece’s legitimate concerns are met”.
5) With this agreement, we see two American administrations, each under a President Bush, adopting contrary positions over an issue with political and moral implications. On an official visit to Greece in 1991, President George H.W. Bush praised Greece, because during the difficult period between 1947 and 1949, Greece alone, of all the countries of Europe, halted Soviet expansionism. However, these Soviet efforts, which were so dangerous to the democratic nations and the United States, were assisted with separate armed divisions by FYROM, which had its eye on Macedonia.
In 2003, with this agreement, a United States government under President George W. Bush has retrospectively legitimized that hostile (to Greece and the USA alike) act during what President Bush termed in 1991 “that difficult period”.
6) The agreement between the USA and Macedonia lends credit to Henry Kissinger, who at the annual meeting of Management Centre Europe in 1992 stated: ‘Greece is right [about the name]… I know history, which is not the case with … most of the government and administration in Washington. The strength of the Greek case is that of history, which I must say that Athens has not used so far with success’ (Doc. 2).
7) The agreement goes against the clear statement made by Bill Clinton a month before he was elected President of the United States that he would not accept the name ‘Macedonia’.
8) The agreement is an insult to the American people, who, as a democratic and liberal people, respect the truth, which is an indispensable condition of democracy.
Two recent examples reveal that, just as American governments and US Presidents have condemned and exposed this political and historical deception, informed Americans reject the fraudulent construct that the communist parties have built up over decades.
The legislative bodies of, to date, eleven US states have unanimously resolved that ‘the ancient and the modern Macedonians were and are Greeks, and only Greeks’.
The second example is the decision by the SOUTHERN BELL telephone company, which I shall discuss later.
Mr. President,
Those who proposed the signing of the agreement between the United States and ‘Macedonia’, as also those who refer to FYROM as ‘Macedonia’, are going to find themselves in a difficult position over what they are going to call the people of FYROM.
They cannot call them ‘Macedonians’, because only the Greeks are, and ever have been, Macedonians.
The Greek identity of the Macedonians is confirmed by:
i. The Old and New Testaments (pp. 63 - 64 of my book);
ii. The works of ancient Greek, Jewish, and Roman writers (pp. 66 - 72 of my book);
iii. More recent events: treaties wars, censuses (pp. 74– 85 of my book);
iv. Skopje’s false assertions (pp. 86 - 93 of my book).
They could not be called ‘Macedonians’ even if the Greeks were not Macedonians.
Historically, the Macedonians existed a thousand years before the Slavs arrived in the Balkans in the sixth century AD.
It is therefore absurd for them to assert that as communists they discovered fourteen centuries later that they had united with the Greek Macedonians and became Macedonians themselves.
The absurdity is also self-evidently laughable. There is no such precedent in history for the metamorphosis of one person into another.
It is also absurd for Skopje to refer to itself as the capital of Macedonia. In the ancient and the Roman period, Skopje was the capital of Dardania. In the Ottoman period it was the capital of Kosovo; and from 1912 to 1944 it was the capital of Vardaska (Doc. 14).
Ever since 319 BC, the capital of Macedonia (the metropolis of Macedonia, according to Strabo, Geography VII 21) has been one of the oldest and most historic cities in Europe: Thessaloniki.
After 2,300 years, Skopje has renamed it ‘Solun’ and deleted it from the roster of Greek cities, because even in its modern school textbooks FYROM shows Greece’s northern border limited to Mount Olympus.
Skopje has been taught a lesson for its absurd and improper actions by the Southern Bell American telephone company. The story is as follows.
During the Olympic Games in Atlanta, Melas Yanniotis, Managing Director of Intersalonika S.A., consulted the Southern Bell telephone directory in order to make a telephone call to Thessaloniki. To his surprise, he found that Thessaloniki was not included among the cities of Greece; and he found a map showing Greece’s northern border limited to Mount Olympus and Thessaloniki marked as ‘Solun’.
On returning to Thessaloniki, he sent a letter citing chapters 16 and 17 of the Acts of the Apostles, in which it is written that St. Paul was summoned in a vision by ‘a man of Macedonia’ and came to Macedonia, where he baptized the first Christian in Europe at Philippi, and that Greek men and women in Thessaloniki and Berea believed.
The biblical text confirms:
i. The Greek identity of the Macedonians, for the cities which St. Paul visited had the same Greek names then as they still have today;
ii. That there were Greeks and Jews in Macedonia, giving the lie to those in FYROM who dare even today to teach in schools (Doc. 11) that there were no Greeks in Macedonia;
iii. That the language of the Macedonians was then, and has been ever since, the Greek language, for St. Paul spoke in Greek and wrote his epistles to the Thessalonians and the Philippians in Greek.
On the strength of what is written in the Acts of the Apostles, Southern Bell changed its directory, now including Thessaloniki as a major Greek city and listing the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia as FYROM, not as Macedonia (Doc. 21).
These two cases also confirm that a political mistake was made when the US-Macedonia agreement was signed.
Those who proposed the signing of the agreement between the United States and ‘Macedonia’ have also insulted:
1) Pope John Paul, who has stated that Macedonia is the land of Philip, Alexander, and Cyril and Methodius and that Macedonia is Greek (Doc. 4).
2) The United Nations, which (Doc. 3) set up a special committee at the suggestion of the United States, and concluded that the communists had aggressive intentions towards Greece and described as an act of genocide the forcible abduction from Macedonia and Thrace of 28,296 children, who were taken to communist countries, where they were brainwashed on the subject of Macedonia, and a number of them now spearhead Skopje’s campaigns.
3) Stalin’s admission has been ignored (Doc. 5): ‘They have no Macedonian consciousness, but they will acquire it, …. just as communism created the Byelorussian nation and now no-one questions it’.
4) The US-‘Macedonia’ agreement goes against the political heritage of the late, great founders of Greece’s two major parties, Constantine Karamanlis and Andreas Papandreou.
In a letter to the heads of the European Union nations (Doc. 9), Constantine Karamanlis, as President of the Hellenic Republic, stated: ‘The so-called “Republic of Macedonia” has absolutely no right, either historical or ethnological, to use the name of Macedonia’’; and he concluded: ‘It is inconceivable today, after the end of the Cold War, to grant a historical legitimation to Stalin’s and Tito’s aspiration to gain access to the Aegean by wresting Macedonia away from Greece.’
The most competent Greek, in this case as Mr. Karamanlis a native of Macedonia, presented the Macedonian problem to his opposite numbers as a fact and a circumstance of the Cold War between East and West. He was particularly preoccupied by the subject of the Cold War on his official visit to the White House as a guest of President Kennedy in 1961. A Greek-American who met me in Athens some years ago told me that, at an official dinner given by Greek-Americans for President Nixon, the guest of honor revealed that President Kennedy had told him that Mr. Karamanlis’s presence at the White House during the Cold War had been a ‘ray of light’.
In a letter of Iakovos, Archbiscop of North and South America, Andreas Papandreou, then Prime Minister of Greece, assured him (Doc. ….) that ‘there is no question of my consenting to the recognition (de jure or de facto) of the name “Macedonia” used, whether qualified or not, in the name of Skopje’s statelet’.
The same stance was adopted by the council of all the political leaders, under President Karamanlis.
The recent agreement between the United States and Macedonia may also be criticized as a political mistake with reference to the German assault on the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace in April 1941
The failure of the Germans to overcome the English resistance during the Battle of Britain in 1940, ii) Greece’s victorious confrontation with fascist Italy in October 1940, and iii) the German invasion of Greece in April 1941 starting at the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace, which delayed the German attack on the Soviet Union and ultimately led to the defeat of the Germans on the Russian front (pp. 75-81 of my book), were the three events of which separately thwarted the victorious Axis advance during the Second World War.
America’s entry into the War in December 1941 heralded, as in the First World War, the victory of the democratic people.
The battle for the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace has one distinctive feature, however. The heroism and self-sacrifice of the Greek defenders of the fortified positions, as also the public recognition awarded them, and the respect and treatment of the surrendering fighters by the German units, constitute acts of military virtue that were perhaps unparalleled in the Second World War.
Addressing the Reichstag on May 4, 1941, Hitler declared that historical justice compelled him to state that of all the armies, which Germany had confronted, the Greek soldiers had fought with most exceptional heroism and self-sacrifice, and had surrendered only when further resistance was futile. On Hitler’s orders, the Greek Army was not taken captive and the officers retained their personal arms. On 11 June, Hitler’s general headquarters reported that select Greek troops had defended the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace with exceptional heroism.
Profoundly impressed by the heroism of those who had defended the fortified positions, the German commanders ordered their troops to present arms to the surrendering fighters. The German flag was not raised until the last soldier had disappeared from view.
One German officer wrote in a book that the positions changed hands four times.
Your correspondent, as a reserve officer, served along the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace in April 1941 and experienced the frightful assault of the German Stukas and also the heroism of the men who defended the fortified positions.
On April 6, 1941, simultaneously with the assault along the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace, German troops coming from Bulgaria also marched into Skopje, the capital of Vardaska.
In the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace, the Greeks defended themselves heroically.
In Skopje, by contrast, the Germans were hailed as liberators by thousands of Bulgarian flags, and then entered Greece and flanked the Greek forces.
Consequently, the battle for the fortified positions of Macedonia and Thrace, the military archives, and other documents, such as the New Cambridge Modern History (Doc. 13), all reveal that in 1941 Macedonia existed only in Greece.
Skopje, however, as we can see from a postage stamp (Doc. 14) and a map (Doc. 15) was the capital of Vardaska in 1941 also.
It was only on August 2, 1944 that Tito renamed Vardaska and fraudulently created the Socialist Republic of Macedonia.
This, together with the fact that the Macedonians as Greeks have historically existed since the sixth century BC and that Macedonians with their achievements as the Hellenistic period influenced cultures and the history of humankind generally, to call FYROM ‘Macedonia’ and its inhabitants ‘Macedonians’ shows a serious lack of gravity.
The following point, together with the battle for the fortified positions, is a telling one.
For five centuries, during the period of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, Macedonia as an administrative area did not exist.
With the First Balkan War of the Balkan states against the Turks in 1912, when the Greek army liberated Thessaloniki, the Governorate General of Macedonia was established immediately, with its headquarters in Thessaloniki. It was universally accepted that Greece had the right to do this and no one objected. Until 1944, no one ever conceived of the existence of any other Macedonia.
The Treaty of Bucharest fixed the border between Greece and Bulgaria in 1913, with no mention anywhere of the word ‘Macedonia (Doc. 37).
With regard to the border between Greece and Serbia, in accordance with the Treaty of May 19, 1913 (Doc. 38) it was agreed (Art. 3) that the demarcation line should constitute the start of actual occupancy, which is also the present border with FYROM.
In this Treaty too there is no mention of the word ‘Macedonia’.
After 1921, when the Comintern and the communist parties decided to wrest Macedonia away from Greece, the map of the Roman administrative division of Macedonia was found and it was alleged that Macedonia had been divided up in 1913, which is utterly false. That is why all maps, such as the Cambridge map (Doc. 13), show Macedonia only in Greece, but a Yugoslav map of 1937 (Doc. 14) also does not have Macedonia.
Consequently, if the Germans had not invaded the Balkans in 1941, before the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which had been founded in 1919 and had never disputed that Macedonia was Greek, would not have been overthrown, nor would the communist Tito have prevailed, who, as I have said, undertook to fulfill the aspirations of the Comintern and the Balkan communist parties to wrest Macedonia away from Greece.
The recent agreement between the United States and
‘Macedonia’ is not only a political, but a moral mistake
Greece, which is the country most insulted by this agreement, fought alongside the democratic people during the First and Second World War.
On October 28, 1940, when the Soviet Union was allied with Hitler and almost all of Europe had been subjugated by the Axis, when the Greek Prime Minister received an ultimatum from the Italian ambassador at three o’ clock in the morning for Greece to surrender, he said “NO”. The Greek people fought heroically and trounced the Italians in the mountains of Northern Epirus. English ministers and officials stated that if Greece had been defeated or had surrendered, the Axis would have won the War.
In February 1941, Athony Eden, England’s Foreign Minister told Greek Prime Minister that Turkey and the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had refused to fight Germany. Although Churchill had stated that Greece should not be pressured into a hopeless struggle, Koryzis declared that Greece would fight alone against Germany.
This statement resulted in the German invasion of Greece in 1941.
The Greek Prime Minister and the Greek people asked for nothing in return.
As a consequence of its struggles, Greece:
i. Suffered occupation by three hostile nations (Germany, Italy and Bulgaria);
ii. Terrible devastation (Truman’s speech before Congress);
iii. 620,000 dead (including those who died of hunger in 1941: Doc. 32), as against 400,000 American dead and a similar number of English losses;
iv. during the Second World War, Greece lost 434 of the 533 ships in its mercantile fleet and 472 of its 717 motorized sailing vessels; and suffered additional misery at the hands of the communists in 1946-9.
But for the full magnitude of Greece’s contribution to be appreciated, it is important to know how its neighbors conducted themselves.
Turkey. In the First World War, the Turks were allied with the Germans. In the Second World War, they were described as ‘shrewdly neutral’, yet they helped Hitler three times: i) in March 1941, when they signed a non-aggression pact with Bulgaria in anticipation of the German invasion of Greece from Bulgarian territory, ii) three days before Germany invaded the Soviet Union they signed a pact with Hitler; and iii) when a pro-German rebellion broke out in Iraq, they allowed the German airplanes to use their airports.
Bulgarians. During the First and Second World War, they were allies of the Germans and invaded the territory of Macedonia and Thrace, where the Greeks suffered nightmarish experiences, to the extent that flight into German-held territory was regarded as a flight to freedom. When the Red Army reached the Bulgarian border, the Bulgarians turned communist from one day to the next.
Serbs. During the First World War they fought alongside the democratic people. In the Second World War, on March 25, 1941, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes signed a friendship pact with Hitler, which led to the overthrow of the government by the army. The Germans launched a harsh assault on Belgrade. At the end of the War, the communist Tito prevailed and proceeded to take actions against Greece.
Mr. President,
I enclose personally dedicated copies of:
1) My book The Falsification of Macedonian History, which received an award from the Athens Academy and has been translated into seven languages;
2) The recently published FYROM: The Antidemocratic Residuum in Europe and the Problematic Stabilization and Association Agreement with the EU;
3) Photocopy of my letter to your predecessor: President George H. W. Bush
4) A DVD about the new Alexandrian Library in 10 languages;
5) Photocopies of replies:
i) From the White House, dated August 28, 1991, including the assurance: “You may be sure that your views and suggestions have been fully noted by the President’s foreign policy advisers” and
ii) From Mr. Johnson, the Director of European Affairs in the US National Defense Department, dated March 5, 1992, including the observation: “I always find it extremely beneficial to obtain first hand documentation on matters of great importance”.
Mr. President,
The fabrication of FYROM, which was also an act against the United States, which was fighting for democracy and the freedom of the people, is also the greatest political and historical hoax, which only a harsh one-party regime would have the effrontery to devise and impose upon its people and with its machinery of propaganda to deceive naïve people with no knowledge of history all over the world.
POSTSCRIPT
Mr. President,
I was very gratified to read, in the context of your appeal of November 7, 2003 for democratic reforms in the Middle East, your reference to the fact that the United States defended Greece in 1947 (and later Berlin also) to safeguard the free peoples democratic way of life from Soviet expansionism. As you stated, in order to safeguard the democratic way of life in Iraq, you are now working with the citizens of Iraq, who are themselves preparing the ground for this.
However, in 1947 the immediate aim of the Soviet policy against Greece was to wrest Macedonia away from Greece and create the Socialist Republic of Macedonia with Skopje as its center.
In your recent statement, you too, like your predecessors in office (Roosevelt, Truman and Bush), say that the United States defended Greece, as it struggled to hold on to Macedonia and to prevent its being incorporated into the Republic of ‘Macedonia’, which was fraudulently created by Stalin and Tito in 1944 to serve their expansionist arms.
Consequently, those who recommended the recent signing of the agreement between the United States and ‘Macedonia’ erroneously out of ignorance or deceived or coerced by Skopje have made it seem that the United States is abandoning its consistent policy (ever since 1944) of assertion that FYROM will fall apart is untrue.
With a new name, the existing links between the neighboring people and their ethnic kinsfolk in FYROM (links which threaten peaceful co-existence) will be severed, and with the support of the United Nations, the USA, the European Union, and above all Greece, the people of FYROM will prosper.
With the usurped name of ‘Macedonia’, not only is this republic a provocation, not only does it vindicate Stalin and Tito, but it has no hope of accession to the European Union.
Nicholaos K. Martis
Former Gov. Minister