Tribune Excerpts

The following article appeared in the November 2006 Edition of the Macedonian Tribune

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New tensions arise between Sofi a and Skopie over identity and history...cont. from Page 1
by Nikoleta Popkostadinova, Transitions on Line (TOL)

According to this view, the Bulgarian president and foreign minister simply responded to intensifying attacks from Skopie.  But there are few signs that the Bulgarian government needs to fear its Macedonian minority, who number between 1,000 and 1,500, according to official statistics. Their main party, OMO Ilinden, was banned for its anti-constitutional activities in 2000 but re-established this year. No more than 50 people showed up for the ceremony. “I came here because I thought that all the Macedonians were going to unite and then we would have a banquet,” a participant told a Bulgarian daily. “Instead the two leaders quarreled over how to divide the money from the Macedonian Embassy.”

Patriotic election games

If Skopie is not a direct threat to Sofia, what really lies behind the midsummer tit-for-tat?

One factor that might be fueling Sofia’s fiery rhetoric is Parvanov’s re-election campaign; he is a member of the ruling Bulgarian Socialist Party and is running for a second term in October. Invoking Bulgaria’s glorious past is thought to always make for good electioneering.  After the unexpected success of Ataka (Attack), a new hard-right nationalist party, in the general election of June 2005, Parvanov has tried to shore up his own patriotic credentials. Others have played along: Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev, who leads the ruling BSP, described Parvanov as someone who “acts to protect the Bulgarian historic heritage” due to his “striking patriotic attitude and high national spirits.”

Parvanov’s support of Foreign Minister Kalfin’s somewhat cryptic statement that Sofia would not tolerate a Macedonian violation of Bulgarian history makes political sense in that context.  A focus on the “issue” of Macedonia perfectly advances Parvanov’s campaign. Not only does he emerge from this episode as a guardian of Bulgarian tradition, but he also manages to shake off some of the mud that stuck after he had to confirm that the Bulgarian secret service had kept the sort of file on him that would usually indicate an individual had collaborated with the spooks.

The official version was that Parvanov’s services were harmless, indeed patriotic -- to help a Bulgarian emigrant to prepare a book of memoirs about Macedonia from the end of the 19th century. Later it transpired that a report on the Macedonian political situation was written, though not signed, by Parvanov at around the same time, indicating that perhaps his activities for the secret service had been more substantial.

Tough neighborhood

But what for the Bulgarian media is a welcome relief in a slow summer may appear more serious to Brussels, as an unresolved dispute between two would-be members of the EU. It may well look from Brussels as if Bulgaria were trying to use its status as an accession country to gain an advantage over its neighbor, which last year gained official-candidate status but has not received a date for the start of accession talks. This risk evidently seems worth taking to Parvanov and his circle, for the sake of burnishing his patriotic credentials and boosting his chances in the presidential poll.

Instead of putting the situation of its smaller, less confident, and more troubled neighbor at the service of domestic politics, Bulgaria would do better to understand the complex background against which Macedonia strives to emerge as a stable state.

Greece disputes Macedonia’s name, claiming it implies irredentist designs on the Greek region of the same name. As a member of the EU, Greece has managed to convince Brussels (and many other countries) that Macedonia should be recognized only under the awkward name of Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM.  The Serbian Orthodox Church disputes the authority of Macedonia’s Orthodox Church.  Bulgaria itself refuses to recognize Macedonians as a separate ethnic group and considers them instead to be Bulgarians and their language a Bulgarian dialect.

On Aug. 2, Macedonia celebrated its national holiday, Ilinden, which marks a revolt 103 years ago in the Bitola region against the Ottomans in an early attempt at Macedonian statehood. Crvenkovski hailed the uprising as a “synonym for resistance and the foundation of the contemporary Macedonian state.” That same day Bulgaria celebrated the same event with a different slant. The Ilinden uprising, one parliamentarian said, was “the biggest Bulgarian revolt that came to show to the world that the Bulgarians in Macedonia and Ohrid Thracia deserved to live united with their brothers from the old borders in a free fatherland.”

Earlier this year, the Macedonian government had rejected, under pressure from historians and politicians, a Bulgarian proposal that the two countries celebrate the big day together.

Nikola, meanwhile, turned 72 on Aug. 2. “I listened to what our president said and what the Macedonian one said on my birthday,” he told us. “Basically one and the same thing. Then I couldn’t get and even remember what the dispute between them was about. And it was quite recent, wasn’t it?”

Nikoleta Popkostadinova is a journalist with Kapital weekly in Sofia.