Helena Smith: The row over Macedonia's name rumbles on
[Helena Smith is the Guardian's correspondent in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus.]
Can one of the world's more abstruse diplomatic disputes finally be resolved with the election of a man widely seen as an unyielding Balkan nationalist?
If senior foreign ministry officials in Athens are to be believed following the emphatic re-election of Macedonia's Nikola Gruevski, the answer is a resounding yes.
The hardliner's victory with a result that has surprised even his own VMRO-DPMNE party – his will be the healthiest majority in Skopje's 120-seat house in more than a decade – has unexpectedly been met with barely concealed delight in Greece.
Never mind that the fresh-faced leader campaigned on a wave of nationalist anger over Athens' disruption of his country's bid to join Nato. Or that the poll was marred by gun-battles and accusations of electoral fraud. Or even that, earlier this week, his foreign minister, Antonio Milososki, managed to up the ante by raising the taboo issue of the right of "Greece's exiled Macedonian civil war refugees" to reclaim lost property – a point of contention if ever there was one for the Greeks.
As he focuses on putting together a coalition government, Gruevski is being seen as the right man at the right time to finally end the 17-year-old festering row between the two neighbours over the mini-state's nomenclature.
Rather than believing the scale of his victory will give him no other option but to hold firm, Greek policy wonks hope that his re-invigorated credibility will allow him to accept a compromise solution in the struggle that has resulted in his country having to go by the tortuous name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or Fyrom, for far too long.
More specifically, there are hopes that from his consolidated power base Gruevski will be able to sell a new composite name, such as Northern Macedonia, to his people.
That the Greeks have been their own worst enemy in this dispute cannot be denied. Few beyond the borders of Greece can understand Athens' hypersensitivity, or hostility, to the mini-state calling itself the Republic of Macedonia. Nor can they really understand Athens' claim that the name conveys covert territorial ambitions over the agriculturally rich adjacent Greek province of Macedonia. After all, say skeptics, isn't Greece the region's pre-eminent EU state with an economy roughly 16 times bigger than that of dirt-poor, soldier-scarce Macedonia?
The miscomprehension has been reinforced by a propaganda machine whose spin-doctoring begins in 323 BC, the year of the death of the original Macedonian, Alexander the Great.
Mercifully, Athens' ruling conservatives have taken a more pragmatic approach, eschewing arguments that delve back into antiquity and raise the spectre of the great Macedonian soldier king.
Instead, they have focused on more recent claims starting with Greece's brutal civil war of 1946-49 when Tito, with the help of slavophone Greek communists, attempted to create a Greek Macedonia that stretched to the warm-water port of Salonika, then much coveted by Stalin. Textbooks, maps, articles and banknotes that have depicted the former republic expanding into Greek-held "Aegean Macedonia" have also been cited.
And despite loud opposition from Greek nationalists – a hardcore bunch who for the first time in years are now represented in parliament – Athens has agreed to accept a synthetic name that would include the M-word as long as it denotes the ex-communist nation's geographical designation. Not that long ago, that would have been unthinkable...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Can one of the world's more abstruse diplomatic disputes finally be resolved with the election of a man widely seen as an unyielding Balkan nationalist?
If senior foreign ministry officials in Athens are to be believed following the emphatic re-election of Macedonia's Nikola Gruevski, the answer is a resounding yes.
The hardliner's victory with a result that has surprised even his own VMRO-DPMNE party – his will be the healthiest majority in Skopje's 120-seat house in more than a decade – has unexpectedly been met with barely concealed delight in Greece.
Never mind that the fresh-faced leader campaigned on a wave of nationalist anger over Athens' disruption of his country's bid to join Nato. Or that the poll was marred by gun-battles and accusations of electoral fraud. Or even that, earlier this week, his foreign minister, Antonio Milososki, managed to up the ante by raising the taboo issue of the right of "Greece's exiled Macedonian civil war refugees" to reclaim lost property – a point of contention if ever there was one for the Greeks.
As he focuses on putting together a coalition government, Gruevski is being seen as the right man at the right time to finally end the 17-year-old festering row between the two neighbours over the mini-state's nomenclature.
Rather than believing the scale of his victory will give him no other option but to hold firm, Greek policy wonks hope that his re-invigorated credibility will allow him to accept a compromise solution in the struggle that has resulted in his country having to go by the tortuous name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or Fyrom, for far too long.
More specifically, there are hopes that from his consolidated power base Gruevski will be able to sell a new composite name, such as Northern Macedonia, to his people.
That the Greeks have been their own worst enemy in this dispute cannot be denied. Few beyond the borders of Greece can understand Athens' hypersensitivity, or hostility, to the mini-state calling itself the Republic of Macedonia. Nor can they really understand Athens' claim that the name conveys covert territorial ambitions over the agriculturally rich adjacent Greek province of Macedonia. After all, say skeptics, isn't Greece the region's pre-eminent EU state with an economy roughly 16 times bigger than that of dirt-poor, soldier-scarce Macedonia?
The miscomprehension has been reinforced by a propaganda machine whose spin-doctoring begins in 323 BC, the year of the death of the original Macedonian, Alexander the Great.
Mercifully, Athens' ruling conservatives have taken a more pragmatic approach, eschewing arguments that delve back into antiquity and raise the spectre of the great Macedonian soldier king.
Instead, they have focused on more recent claims starting with Greece's brutal civil war of 1946-49 when Tito, with the help of slavophone Greek communists, attempted to create a Greek Macedonia that stretched to the warm-water port of Salonika, then much coveted by Stalin. Textbooks, maps, articles and banknotes that have depicted the former republic expanding into Greek-held "Aegean Macedonia" have also been cited.
And despite loud opposition from Greek nationalists – a hardcore bunch who for the first time in years are now represented in parliament – Athens has agreed to accept a synthetic name that would include the M-word as long as it denotes the ex-communist nation's geographical designation. Not that long ago, that would have been unthinkable...