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Emigres Take Battle Over Macedonia’s Name to America

18 04 2007  When it comes to taking up a hard-line position, no one equals the Greek Americans or their Macedonian counterparts.

By Amanda Rivkin in New York (Balkan Insight, 18 April 07)

UN gift shop: FYR Macedonia key chains - photo: Amanda Rivkin

Details matter in diplomacy, as His Excellency Igor Dzundev, Macedonian Ambassador to the United Nations, should know. His office at 866 UN Plaza, a non-descript building in Manhattan is the one place at the UN where the sign on the door reads Republic of Macedonia, as opposed to the UN-approved acronym, FYROM, short for Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

His office is a rare “safe haven” from this cumbersome-sounding term, because the UN inserts the two words Former Yugoslav before the name Republic of Macedonia for all official purposes. This two-word distinction is at the heart of a 14-year long dispute between Ambassador Dzundev’s country and its more powerful neighbor, Greece.

“Each delegation has its name plate on the desk and ours is the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia or FYROM,” said Dzundev of his plaque at the General Assembly. “We feel discriminated against because we are not allowed to be a member state there using our constitutional name,” he said, referring to the fact that the country calls itself the Republic of Macedonia in its constitution.

In the Balkans, battles are etched deep in the soil. Athens is not about to abandon its insistence that the word Macedonia is 100 per cent Greek. Through sheer determination the Greek government has pestered one international institution after another into submission, including the UN and the European Union. Within NATO, only Turkey, Greece’s historic rival, recognises the Republic of Macedonia as such.

Athens disputes the existence of a neighboring state called Macedonia, believing that the legacy of classical Macedonians like Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon is on the line. Its northernmost region is also called Macedonia. Therefore two Macedonias not only share a border but a name, a situation many Greeks find intolerable.

Panos Spiliakos, a 6ft-4ins tall Greek-American, is foremost among those who are determined to defend Greece’s standpoint in the US to the limit.

As the most vocal Greek-American in the name dispute, Spiliakos describes himself as “an apostle of the truth.” His Pan-Macedonian Association resents the use of the name Macedonia by anyone not of Greek origin.

“No one ever challenged the Greekness of Macedonia before 1944,” Spiliakos said referring to the date when the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito endorsed the creation of a Macedonian republic within the new Yugoslav federation.

Ambassador Dzundev, on the other hand, says documents show the Greek government briefly used the name the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in 1992 without complaint. “Our position on this is that we are not a party to the problem because we do not have a problem with our name,” said Dzundev.

There is also the fact that many of the two million inhabitants of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia are not pleased to be the only remaining heirs to the name Yugoslavia, and dislike the way Greeks lump them in with all the other southern Slavs.

Both Greek nationalists - and the Albanian minority in the republic - insist that Macedonians are Slavs who speak a dialect of Bulgarian. They are not members of a separate Macedonian nation, the argument goes, but mountain Bulgarians who lost their way.

The issue has lingered on unresolved for 14 years. Neither side approves of the UN’s provisional name. Even Matthew Nimetz, the UN envoy who mediated the compromise, concedes that the name FYROM is “offensive to the people of that country”. Appointed UN Special Envoy for the FYROM/Republic of Macedonia Name Dispute Negotiations in 1999, he has been involved in the issue since the early 1990s.

Before stepping into this role, Nimetz had a distinguished career in the US State Department, serving as an undersecretary of state and worked under Cyrus Vance during the peace negotiations between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus in the 1970s. In many ways, Nimetz subscribes to the sentiments of many Cold War-era diplomats: stalemates should be regarded as successes.

These days, Nimetz works for General Atlantic, a leading venture-capital firm, and he travels to the Balkans only a few times a year, most recently in January 2007, after the Macedonian government announced plans to rename Skopje’s international airport after Alexander the Great.

When both sides are at the negotiating table, Nimetz said he refers to the two countries using the capital cities Athens and Skopje. “It’s very difficult to have a conversation about it without being made to seem like you are trying to make a particular point,” he said.

This is a difficulty anyone devoted to the dispute encounters almost immediately. The name Macedonia is too vague but the other options simultaneously offend and inhibit any effort at dialogue.

“I will occasionally use Republic of Macedonia after using the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” the envoy said. “I don’t ever use Macedonia.”

Early on, he found a good way to talk around the problem. “When I am in the country I try to avoid using the word. I prefer ‘this great nation’,” he said.

The “great nation’s” most spectacular diplomatic breakthrough was an unexpected one. On November 4, 2004, US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher abruptly announced Washington’s decision to recognize the name Republic of Macedonia during a press conference. The transcript of the event shows that barely four lines were devoted to the Macedonian question. Most actors in the dispute were caught totally off guard.

“They very kindly called me just a few hours before it was announced,” recalled Nimetz. He was not the only one caught by surprise.

Spiliakos, the supreme president of the Pan-Macedonian Association, was shocked. He viewed the decision as a grave error. “They never informed us; they did it at night,” he said during an interview last January in his parked car, near Manhattan`s Central Park. “It’s insane.”

The setback has not deterred the Greeks in the US from continuing their campaign. Greek diplomats have even converted such benign locations as the UN gift shop into the battleground. Hanaa Shoukry, the buyer at the shop, said complaints forced her to change the signs labeling gifts from Macedonia.

Macedonian-Americans are lobbying hard in the US, too. Meto Koloski, founder and head of the United Macedonian Diaspora, was energised by the US move to recognise the name Macedonia in November 2004. That morning, he recalls being awakened in his dorm at Manhattanville College in White Plains, New York by a friend calling from Macedonia with the unexpected news of the State Department announcement.

Koloski said he jumped out of bed and ran to his college library to email every Macedonian he knew from New Jersey to Belica, the western Macedonian village where his father was born. “It was one of the best days of my life,” said Koloski. He skipped classes and took his college friends out to a bar that night to celebrate.

Koloski, 23 grew up in Garfield, New Jersey, the son of parents who immigrated separately to the US in the late 1970s and early1980s. Today, Garfield is home to more than 3,000 Macedonians.

When Koloski was little, his parents sent him to live with his grandparents in the Macedonian countryside for two years. It was there that he learned the language that is still the lingua franca of his mother’s New Jersey home. In Garfield, he said, “you will find a Macedonian on every corner”.

Koloski said he began exploring his national identity while still in high school. He first co-founded the Macedonian Orthodox Youth Association of North America, also known by the cumbersome acronym MOYANA. A week before his father`s death in July 2000, his father was reading the international Macedonian magazine, Makedonsko Sonce (the Macedonian Sun) when he came across an article about Meto’s election as secretary of the North American chapter of the World Macedonian Youth Congress. It made him very proud.

In recent years, Koloski has turned his attention to creating a new organisation, the United Macedonian Diaspora, which has a growing reputation as the most active Macedonian émigré organisation. Koloski himself is an encyclopedia of facts about his homeland. He also likes to boast that he makes “a good tafche grafche”, a traditional Macedonian stew of baked white beans and tomatoes.

Koloski encounters his Pan-Macedonians enemies at many public events. He has made efforts to contact them over the years, but so far the Pan-Macedonians have been unwilling to meet. Spiliakos and his Pan-Macedonian colleagues dismiss Koloski and his United Macedonia Diaspora as extremists.

Koloski said his first encounter with the Pan-Macedonians was at his local public library in Garfield. He found that a copy of a 576-page volume, Macedonia: 4,000 Years of Greek History, was the only book about Macedonia available in the library. He believes the Pan-Macedonian Association paid for the book to be distributed free of charge to “every library in America”. When he talks about the book, his cool and diplomatic demeanour fades.

“I have to admit, I took it,” Meto said with a grin. “No actually, I think I returned it.”

But years later, Spiliakos and his fellow Pan-Macedonians continue to deny Koloski and his countrymen the use of the name Macedonia, suggesting that “Slavalbania” or “Albania-slavia” might be more suitable. He also champions the name Republika Vardarska, or Vardar Republic, after the river that traverses the disputed Macedonia. Spiliakos cannot understand why the people of FYROM insist on appropriating a foreign identity.

The Pan-Macedonians have convinced 18 state legislatures in the US to pass nonbinding senate resolutions, reaffirming that Macedonia is Greek.

Spiliakos acknowledges the resolutions will have no bearing on the dispute but says they show the Greek lobby is not to be trifled with. “It is not enough to be right, you have to be powerful enough to establish that you are right,” he said.

South Carolina state senator Phil Leventis, who sponsored the resolution in his state, is typical of the many legislators who sponsored such resolutions. His knowledge of the background to the dispute appears hazy, to say the least, and he was not able to say where Macedonia was on the map, asserting that the issue was “all about the former Czechoslovakian area”.

But Spiliakos says the senators do not need to understand the history of the region: the Greeks can supply the requisite facts. Nina Peropoulos, a Houston-based Midwest coordinator for the Pan-Macedonians who helped push a resolution through the Wisconsin state assembly, says the Greeks have all the “authentic historical data” on their side in the dispute. Like Spiliakos, Peropoulos also champions the name Republika Vardarska as a potential title for Macedonia.

Last summer, the Pan-Macedonian Association held a three-day convention in Las Vegas that included a keynote speech from George Papavizas, author of a book titled Blood and Tears and Claiming Macedonia: Communism’s Pivotal Role in the ‘Macedonian’ Ethnogenesis.

Papavizas charged that “history has now reached the absurd and untenable point in which a small mountainous enclave calling itself ‘Republic of Macedonia’ may not only demand – by the power of its apprehended name – to be a Macedonia, but the only Macedonia; and its Slavic people may not only demand – by the power granted to them by a dictator – to be some Macedonians, but the only Macedonians”.

Spiliakos has visited the nation he will only call the FYROM. But in the US he will only meet with Macedonian officials in what amounts to staged confrontations at various diplomatic and university events. In the US, Matthew Nimetz is perhaps the only official to have met with all sides involved in the dispute, including Koloski’s United Macedonians and Spiliakos’ Pan-Macedonians.

“I sometimes say to myself that this is a thankless type of job, on an issue where neither side is willing to make a concession to get an agreement on the issue,” said Nimetz.

He has proposed at least a half a dozen alternative names to both sides over the years but none has stuck. His personal favorite among the discarded suggestions was New Macedonia, which he called “one nice name”.

“I am a man of many interests,” declared Nimetz. “To some of the one-issue people I meet with, I feel like saying, ‘Get a life.’”

Amanda Rivkin is a student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Balkan Insight is BIRN’s online publication.