» A Slavic Minority Majority May not Decide a Country’s Future. «

Marcus A. Templar
Agora Dialogue

The FYROM Slavs belong to the presumptive majority which is the actual minority in the country if one groups all other “minorities” together.

It is what it is called a minority-majority. In the 2002, the official version of the census disclosed that the country’s population was 2.02 million, 64 percent Slavs (1.29 million) and 25 percent Albanians (509,000). The Albanian political leadership once again challenged the census as failing to portray the actual number of inhabitants in the FYROM.

Ethnic Albanian seasonal workers who at the time of the 2002 census were abroad were excluded from the final number. But that was not all. The Serbs reported figures of 300,000, the Turks 200,000, Roma 250,000, Greeks 250,000 and the Bulgarian and Vlachs reported 30,000 each. The 2002 census indicated a serious and probably intentional under-representation of all minorities causing an issue of legitimacy for the State Statistical Office and the FYROM government as a whole. Such discrepancies, forced the minorities, especially the Albanian minority to demand transparent procedures during the census, which however, the Skopjan government was unwilling to offer for obvious reasons.

But if 1,640,000 constitute the minorities grouped together, the majority is no longer majority, but a minority of 360,000 Slavs. Even if one curtails the above claims as excessive, one cannot, but accept that the worst scenario being that the number of the Slavs in the FYROM are equal to that of the Albanians.

Dr. Henry Kissinger made the following statement on April 5th, 1999 during an interview by journalist Chris Matthews and host of the MSNBC Sunday show “Hardball”.

“[T]he removal of Serbian combat forces from Kosovo, the return of refugees and the establishment of some international status for Kosovo that is under some sort of international supervision. Nothing else can now work. Serbia is a country of less than 10 million with poor resources and not very effective army except against unarmed civilians. After the ethnic cleansing and after the aerial bombardment, you cannot ask the refugees to return to Serbian sovereignty. We all talk about self-government for Kosovo. But the Balkans is a whole mixture of ethnic groups that have been thrown together there by a succession of wars. Once the objective in Kosovo has been reached, that will open the chapter of Macedonia, because in Macedonia, there are 800,000 Albanians and it’s going to be a problem to deny them what has just been granted to the Albanians in Kosovo. When that happens, the Slavs in Macedonia who are almost exclusively Bulgarians will raise their demands. And so we may face the disintegration of another country.”

Under such circumstances, the Slavs may not claim that the country belongs to them with the “others” just happen to live there. The Slavs may not even demand that the country must be called Macedonia, not only because there is no historical evidence to that, but mainly because all people have to be consulted and a referendum be held having the people decide on the name of their own country. Although many Slav politicians claim that the people of their country had decided on the name, only a hypocrite would accept such an argument, because nobody asked the people when Comintern decided on its “ethnicity”, nobody asked the people when Tito decided to name that area “Macedonia”. During the one party communist dictatorship instead of the people deciding its fate, the communist nomenklatura and their apparatchiks were deciding for the people. Thus when the Republic of Skopje brought up the issue of its own self-determination on September 8, 1991, the question on the ballot had nothing to do with the name of the new country. The name of the country was given and in essence the whole decision for independence was based on half of the population; so the region became an independent state under a name chosen by the communists.

Vlado Maleski, the poet who wrote the words of the partisan song for the People’s Republic of “Macedonia”, inserted in the poem the republic of Krushevo because it was the first communist republic in the world. Maleski stated that “The flag of the Krushevo Republic flies once more” having in mind their communist present. That is why he also inserted the names of people with revolutionary socialist, i.e. communist background such as Gotse Delchev, Pitu Guli, [Nikola] Karev, [Dimitar] Vlahov, [Yane] Sandanski. That song was modified and in 1992 was selected as the national anthem of the FYROM.

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