The FYROM’s government’s antiquisation project of the country and its NATO membership through the back door aim to establish two goals.
Firstly, a connection of the Slavs to the ancient Macedonians in order to obtain legitimacy from the existence of the ancient kingdom and consequently claim on the ancient territories and secondly, to secure the FYROM’s stability in order for the country to avoid eradication.
Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo as an independent state would open the gates for the FYROM triggering a territorial rearrangement between the FYROM and Kosovo. The activation of the 1992 referendum for ‘Ilirida’ under the UN Charter articles 1.2 and 55 by the FYROM Albanians could do just that – bypassing normal procedures that mean the controlling power would have to recognise the results of the referendum on self-determination as ‘jus cogens’. Under the present conditions FYROM PM Nicholas Gruevski would be legally incapable of stopping the Albanians from seceding and joining their northern brothers, taking almost one third of the country including parts or perhaps the whole city of Skopje with them.
Gruevski knows it and expects it. He knows that NATO is the only rock of stability in the country while the FYROM retains its sovereignty. With NATO stabilising his country, Gruevski could continue searching for his ‘ancient roots’ in Mavro Orbin’s Kraljevstvo Slovena (The Realm of the Slavs) who, as Dr Nadezhna Dragova put it “like Pribojevic, Orbini unifies the Illyric and Slav mythic identities and interprets history from a pan-Slavic mythological position using the same discretionary research ‘methodology’ of the same false basis of autochthonism as Pribojević had done before and identified the Illyrians”. Consequently, the FYROM with its ethnocentric government would not have to negotiate anything with Greece. Therefore, Gruevski’s cry for the upcoming danger of disintegration of the FYROM is real, but the instability in his country and in the Balkans is neither Greece’s responsibility nor it is Greece’s fault, but due to Gruevski’s anachronistic, irrational, and outlandish governance.
Nonetheless, FYROM politicians expect that Greece will abide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision. But abide by what? The ICJ has not issued a remedy. It just issued an opinion that Greece violated the Agreement. Great! So what? The ICJ decision for the FYROM is an empty victory. The ICJ had also found the FYROM in violation of the Interim Agreement for displaying the symbol of the ‘Sun of Vergina’. In addition, the Court found itself incompetent to order any remedy (compare to the US case Marbury v. Madison) resulting in the FYROM not receiving what it was after, i.e. an automatic membership to NATO. Even if the ICJ had ordered NATO to accept the FYROM as a member, Turkey would have objected to such a move because it would have affected Cyprus’ membership to NATO (if Cyprus had applied for membership), but it would also have allowed Cyprus and Malta to join the EU/NATO strategic cooperation.
The EU is, as I put it, a ‘non-political’ confederation with highly integrated economies, but with only coordinated foreign and defence policies which fall under the Common Foreign and Security Policy. Despite the fact that the economic crisis in Eurozone affects mostly the countries in the eurozone, the issue of terrorism is threatening the national securities of each and every European country. European destabilisation invites Islamic fundamentalists who could illegally enter an EU country and then easily move to any other country, with the easiest border to the EU being the Turkish-Greek border. According to the agreement that Turkey signed with the EU on March 6th, 1995 Customs Union Agreement, Turkey has failed in its obligation to catch and return the illegal immigrants to their home country. The UK, France, Italy, and Germany would be among those that would suffer first and most because they have heavy Islamic minorities. Leaders of EU countries are not willing to expose their countries to turmoil and destabilisation in order to facilitate the stabilisation of the FYROM, a country that suffers from bad ethnocentric governance.
On the military side, pressuring Greece to accept something that goes against its national interests and therefore its national security would juxtapose the NATO criterion of ‘Creation of interior and easily defensive borders within the alliance’ and Greece’s own stability. NATO cannot pressure Greece to purposely destabilise itself so that the Alliance stabilises the FYROM. But, one must consider that the nature of the Deputy Prime Minister of the FYROM Mrs Teuta Arifi’s visit to Greece in January 2012 had a lot to do with Kosovo’s possible recognition by Serbia and Greece and its possible consequences of that recognition as the disintegration of the FYROM.
A few years ago, Georgi Daskalov, lecturer at the Department of History at Sofia University ‘St Kliment Ohridski’ stated a view on the status of the FYROM Slavs that should not be lightly dismissed. He expressed the prevailing opinion of his compatriots that the FYROM’s disintegration is only a matter of time. The question is whether the remaining land is going to be absorbed by the three neighbouring countries – Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece – or is it going to be annexed by Serbia as compensation for the loss of Kosovo? Dr Daskalov hopes that Greece would prefer the Slavic speaking lands of the FYROM to pass to Bulgaria in exchange for Bulgaria’s amnesia of the Bulgarian minority(!?). Thus far we had to deal with an imaginary ‘Macedonian’ minority that grows in a positive geometric progression while simultaneously all other populations decrease in a negative geometric progression. From now on we will be dealing with a Bulgarian ‘minority’ that grows the same way. This kind of thought is very common in the Balkans and so it does not surprise me. Perhaps Greece should raise the issue of a Greek minority in both Bulgaria and the FYROM. A true and valid EU sponsored population census in the FYROM will show who is what. But somehow the imaginary minority of ‘Macedonians’ in Greece have been perceived as Bulgarian minority by Dr Daskalov and friends. “Δύο γάϊδαροι μαλώνουνε σε ξένο αχυρώνα”.
By the way, is Dr Daskalov ready to admit to the torture and killings of innocent Greek civilians and destruction and stealing of Greek properties such as icons and other very precious religious items by the Bulgarian occupation forces of Eastern Macedonia during WWI and WWII? I highly doubt it.
*Markus A. Templar is an expert on the Balkans. He is a former President of the Macedonian Society of Greater Chicago, and an advisor to the Pan-Macedonian Association of the USA Committees of National Issues and Strategic Planning.