The pro-FYROM group Australian Macedonian Human Rights Committee (AMHRC) will host an international conference in early September on the “passing of 100 years since the partition of Macedonia”, as they claim.
The activist organisation, founded in Melbourne in 1984, fights not only for the self-proclaimed ‘Macedonian’ identity but also for a ‘greater’ Macedonia.
The conference, entitled ‘The Partition of Macedonia and the Balkan Wars of 1912-13’, is the highlight of a number of commemorative events designed to recognise the “importance of the partition of Macedonia in 1913”, in their words, and commemorate the “annexation of Macedonia by Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria”.
Some of the speakers, for example Peter Hill from the University of Hamburg and Loring Danforth from Bates College in the USA, are known not only from their work but also from their previous visits in Melbourne.
Other academics include Andrew Rossos and Christina Kramer, from the University of Toronto in Canada, Victor Freedman from the University of Chicago, Keith Brown from Brown University in the USA, and Katerina Kolozova, a renowned gender studies expert from the American University College in Skopje.
The proceedings of the conference, as the organisers say, will be published so that they can be distributed to tertiary institution libraries.
The AMHRC in its official language, amongst other claims, makes reference to the ‘Aegean’ and the ‘Pirin Macedonia’, terms loaded with wider geopolitical implications for the Balkan peninsula.