A meeting of academics due to take place in northern Greece in July – jointly coordinated by the Melbourne-based Australian Macedonian Human Rights Committee (AMHRC) – will inflame tensions, cultivate regional instability and is a political stunt, according to leading Greek Australian commentators.
The AMHRC, together with the Greek political party Rainbow and Brussels-based European Free Alliance party, announced they are to organise an ‘International Scholarly Conference on Macedonian matters’ to take place in Florina between July 16 and 19.
The Victorian organisers of the event say it will be similar to one coordinated by the AMHRC at Melbourne’s Monash University two years ago, “marking the 100th anniversary of the end of the second Balkan War and the partition of Macedonia”.
A media release for the July meeting said “given the success of the first … the AMHRC, in cooperation with scholars who participated in the earlier conference, have decided to assemble for a second … historic conference in Lerin … and culminate with the annual ‘Ilinden’ Macedonian cultural festival in the village of Ovchareni [Meliti in Greek]”.
AMHRC says the conference’s intention is “to make a substantial contribution to an understanding of modern Macedonian history from a variety of perspectives, including sociological, linguistic, anthropological and political”.
The press release for the conference refers to it as taking place in “Lerin [Florina in Greek] Aegean Macedonia, Greece…” and that members of the European Parliament will also be in attendance.
Meanwhile the event has been described as “a provocation and political stunt” by Greek Australian community leaders and academics.
Professor Anastasios Tamis told Neos Kosmos the event would “inflame already intense tensions in the region and cultivate instability”, and that the conference would be “a politically motivated assembly of extreme nationalists whose aim is to portray that ‘Macedonia’
is not just a geographic region – where various ethnicities lived for hundreds of years – sharing common cultural concepts and religious perceptions, but the country of the new ethnicity of the Balkans, namely the ‘Macedonians’ “.
“The conference is simply being called in Florina, Greece to negate the claims of Greeks on Macedonia and to generate ill tensions,” added the professor.
Meanwhile, the ‘history wars’ continue. Another much-respected Australian historian described the event – according to the details supplied in its publicity – as “one-sided”.
Emiritus Professor John Melville-Jones of the University of Western Australia told Neos Kosmos that information included in the conference’s press release was historically inaccurate.
“A century ago there was no separate country called Macedonia, so it was not ‘partitioned’. The revival of ‘Macedonia’ (in the sense of the enlarged province that was created by the Romans in the middle of the second century BC) was only an idea – being pushed by activists in Serbia and Bulgaria and perhaps in northern Greece”.
“It would have been more accurate to say that after World War I, Macedonia was restored approximately to the boundaries that had existed before the Roman conquest, so that the Greeks received approximately what Philip II had made into Macedonia, and the Serbians and Bulgarians received the rest. Also, in the Balkan Wars there was no such thing as a Macedonian army”.
Neos Kosmos approached the conference organisers requesting further information on the event. The request was declined.