Please find below:
(1) Relevant quotes from The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph advancing revisionist views regarding ancient Macedonia and Albanian irredentism;
(2) The longer of two responses forwarded by the American Hellenic Media Project (AHMP) to The Washington Post. A similar letter was forwarded to The Daily Telegraph;
(3) A letter by the Embassy of Greece that was published in The Washington Post on March 31st;
(4) The shorter of two responses forwarded by AHMP to The Washington Post; and
(5) Contact e-mails for The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph.
________________
(1)
DAILY TELEGRAPH:
"Macedonian folklore is filled with songs and poems of the heroic struggle against the Turks, but the modern state has no great martial tradition. Today's soldiers have little in common with those who followed Alexander the Great. He would probably have relegated them to guarding the pack mules or cooking duty." (The Daily Telegraph (UK), "Alexander's mule team goes to war", Askold Krushelnycky, Tuesday, March 27, 2001)
WASHINGTON POST:
"Tiny Macedonia--once an empire reaching from Greece to India under Alexander the Great--has become the focus of the latest Balkan crisis". (The Washington Post, What On Earth, "Macedonia In Crisis", March 24, 2001)
Included in this article was a map of Alexander's empire and a circle around "Present-Day Macedonia" with the caption "Alexander the Great, the most famous Macedonian, conquered huge areas of Asia"
Further note: A map published by The Washington Post on March 29th erroneously showed the northwestern Greek province of Epirus as "Heavily ethnic Albanian". To view the map, surf to http://www.ahmp.org/wpalbgr.gif. To view the pertinent article, surf to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12931-2001Mar29.html. A Greek embassy official stated that the Post was issuing a correction.
________________
(2)
March 29, 2001
Via fax & e-mail
To the Editor of The Washington Post:
Your article "Macedonia in Crisis" (World News, March 24, 2001) embraces the false revisionism that lies at the heart of much of the Balkans' woes by erroneously suggesting that the nascent Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) is the same state as Alexander the Great's ancient kingdom of Macedonia.
Albanians and those living in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia imagine that Alexander the Great and his celebrated teacher, Aristotle, were one of their own -- hence the Greek province of Macedonia must be theirs too. Never mind that the region's Slavic ancestors settled there almost a millennium after Alexander, and that historical consensus leaves little doubt that Alexander and the ancient Macedonians were Greeks.
The very notion of a non-Hellenic Macedonian ethnicity was an invention of Yugoslavia's communist state.* In one fell swoop Tito sought to maintain claims against Greek Macedonia and delegitimize Bulgarian claims on Yugoslav Macedonia, whose population is Bulgarian-speaking.
What doublethink was incapable of accomplishing in half a century of communist rule, Western folly managed to achieve in a year -- the recognition of Macedonia's invention of itself dovetailed conveniently with the dismantling of Yugoslavia, a Russian client state, and Greece's (albeit grating) objections to this artifice were dismissed offhand.
Greece's objections largely lay in the fact that the region's Hellenic past has spurred ultranationalists throughout the Balkans and Turkey to use revised Greek history as a peg to hang irredentist aspirations on. Which illustrates that the lesson to be learned here is not only relevant to historians.
NATO's foreign policy in Yugoslavia has been a disaster in large part due to a lack of insight into the region's history, both ancient and modern. This has resulted in our bombing and estrangement of the Serbs, a hitherto pro-US and democratically-minded population that stubbornly fought alongside the West in WWII; in our grooming of an undemocratic and expansionist-minded Turkey as regional policeman, even though its Ottoman past has made Turkey the one nation that Balkan enemies loathe more than each other; and in Western support for Albanian expansionism, which now threatens to engulf our closest regional allies in Macedonia, Slav and Greek alike.
Very truly yours,
P. D. Spyropoulos, Esq.
Executive Director
* In a January 6, 1945 report entitled "Necessity of Russian Agreement to oppose Aggression Against Greece in Guise of a Movement for Macedonian independence", UN Charter co-founder Edward Stenttinius confirmed during his tenure as U.S. Secretary of State that "The agitation for an independent Macedonia, a twentieth-century phenomenon which has been kept alive primarily by Macedonian emigres in Bulgaria and the United States, represents no ethnic nor political reality, nor was there ever a 'Macedonian nation' or 'race'." _______
American Hellenic Media Project
PO Box 1150
New York, NY 10028-0008
ahmp@hri.org
www.ahmp.org
The American Hellenic Media Project (AHMP) is a non-profit organization created to address inaccuracy and bias in the media and encourage independent, ethical and responsible journalism.
________________
(3)
WASHINGTON POST
Letters to the Editor
Alexander The Great's Macedonia
Saturday, March 31, 2001; Page A19
What on earth was your paper thinking when it connected Alexander the Great to FYROM, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia ["What on Earth?," March 24]? Because of his enormous appeal, Alexander the Great was claimed by many as their own, but to imply that he was an ancestor of the present-day inhabitants of FYROM is baseless. The Slavs who live there arrived in the 7th century AD, 1,000 years after the death of Alexander, who came from the northern Greek kingdom of Macedonia, the Greek word for "Land of the Tall."
Alexander was as Greek as the southern Greeks were, spreading the Greek language and civilization throughout his vast empire and leaving nothing but Greek footprints everywhere he went in his short life. Except for a narrow strip in the south, FYROM's territory has never been part of ancient Macedonia.
Further, this state never existed before 1945, when it was created by Marshal Tito as one of the constituent republics of communist Yugoslavia. The name Macedonia, which our neighbor has adopted, denotes a wider geographic -- and not ethnic -- area, extending over Greece (51.5 percent), FYROM (38.5 percent) and Bulgaria (10 percent). During the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, Greece liberated its province of Macedonia from the Ottoman rulers and did not conquer foreign territory.
Why should we care about ancient history? Because a distortion of history is the tool of the irredentism and nationalism that we need to eliminate from the Balkans. That is why Greece -- in talks with its neighbor and strategic partner FYROM under the auspices of the United Nations -- continues to seek a mutually acceptable name that will differentiate this new Balkan state from the northern Greek province of Macedonia, the birthplace of Alexander the Great.
-- Achilles Paparsenos
The writer is press counselor at the Embassy of Greece.
________________
(4)
March 29, 2001
Via fax & e-mail
To the Editor of The Washington Post:
Your article "Macedonia in Crisis" (World News, March 24, 2001) embraces the false revisionism that lies at the heart of much of the Balkans' woes by erroneously maintaining that the nascent Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) is the same state as Alexander the Great's ancient kingdom of Macedonia.
Albanians and those living in FYROM imagine that Alexander the Great and his celebrated teacher, Aristotle, were one of their own. Historical consensus leaves little doubt that Alexander, Aristotle and their fellow Macedonians were Greeks, and that the vast majority of ancient Macedonia's territory, including Alexander's capital Pella, lies in present-day Greece.
While the notion of a non-Hellenic Macedonian ethnicity was an invention of communist-era Yugoslavia, the recognition of FYROM as "Macedonia" by the West dovetailed conveniently with the dismantling of Yugoslavia, a Russian client state.
NATO's Yugoslav policy has been a disaster due to just such a lack of insight into the region's history, both ancient and modern. This has resulted in our bombing and estrangement of the Serbs, a hitherto pro-US and democratically-minded population that stubbornly fought alongside the West in WWII, and in Western support for Albanian expansionism, which now threatens to engulf our closest regional allies in Macedonia, Slav and Greek alike.
Very truly yours,
P. D. Spyropoulos, Esq.
Executive Director
________________
(5)
letters@washpost.com; ombudsman@washpost.com
dtletters@telegraph.co.uk
__________________________________
American Hellenic Media Project
PO Box 1150
New York, NY 10028-0008
ahmp@hri.org
www.ahmp.org
The American Hellenic Media Project (AHMP) is a non-profit organization created to address inaccuracy and bias in the media and encourage independent, ethical and responsible journalism.
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