In your informative and well-balanced September 16th article, "In the Name of the Bored", you framed the dispute between Greece and FYROM as a "four-year quarrel over the former Yugoslav republic's determination to adopt an ancient Greek name." By Jove you've finally got it right . . . although a bit too late I'm afraid. Now that Greece has agreed to drop the embargo (it was not a "blockade" as you mistakenly state, and there is an important difference between the two) FYROM has no incentive to distance its choice of nomenclature from the expansionist ideology that has been part and parcel of this choice since Yugoslavia's post-war communist regime began manufacturing a Macedonian ethnicity for Vardaska Banovina's Bulgarophonic Slavs.
FYROM's insistence on keeping the name "Macedonia", and the international community's irresponsible de facto recognition of FYROM under that name, will no doubt spell Trouble later on. The media's and the international community's uncompromising support of FYROM in its dispute with Greece has not extinguished this Balkan brushfire but has simply forced it underground in the form of glowing embers which may one day find a more obliging set of circumstances and erupt into a full-fledged firestorm. The source of this danger has never been Greece's stubborn resistance to FYROM's misappropriations of her history and heritage, but rather, Skopje's underlying expansionist agenda, buttressed by a patently indefensible historical and ideological farce.
Regardless of what the Skopje government formally pronounces in the context of its recent bilateral agreement with Greece, the very raison d'être of a land-locked Skopjean "Macedonia" would be the eventual annexation of Macedonia and the establishment of an Aegean outlet. It is not as if FYROM's choice of name was simply an artifact of history which may have been initiated with an expansionist intent under a distant communist regime but which now has been wholly divorced form its original purpose. Article 74 of FYROM's Constitution still curiously provides for the expansion of FYROM's borders upon a referendum and a 2/3 vote of the Assembly. Internally, the rhetoric about "Solun" (Thessaloniki) becoming "liberated" one day continues, complimented by the wide dissemination of official maps showing Greater Macedonia; an area which includes Greece's northern province.
More importantly, a whole new generation of young Skopjeans are being taught this dangerous national ideology along with its underlying false historical revisionism; in 1992 and 1993, Gligorov's government issued new school textbooks showing FYROM's "geographical ethnic boundaries" ("geografsko-etnitska granitsa") encompassing the whole of Greece's northern province of Macedonia. Schoolchildren continue to be taught that Alexandros and his fellow Macedonians were not Greek but somehow their own direct ancestors, despite a thousand-year gap between Alexander's Greek-speaking Macedonians and the first Slavic incursions into the area.
Turkey's intervention in the south Balkans
You state that ethnic violence stemming from ex-Yugoslavia's Albanian minority "might well draw Albania itself and even Turkey into a war to protect fellow Muslims".
Perhaps the media's most naive, if not most dangerous, position is its legitimization of Turkey's involvement in a region which it not only has no business to be in, but whose explosive presence would be the surest way to ignite the wider intra-NATO war feared most by commentators.
Firstly, Bosnia's Muslims are not ethnic Turks, but rather, are predominantly ethnic Slavs. More importantly, even a cursory investigation behind Ankara's rhetoric would reveal that Turkey's interest in Bosnia's Muslims has little to do with religious or ethnic affinity, and certainly nothing to do with a genuine desire "to protect fellow Muslims". The manner in which the Turkish Government treats its Kurdish, Yazidi, and Alawite Muslim minorities, as evidenced by scores of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and State Department documents and testimonials, should lay any such reveries to rest.
Rather, since its role as NATO's eastern bulwark against communist Russia had dissipated along with the iron curtain, Turkey's attempt to become a major player in a region it has had absolutely no authority, involvement or legitimate interests in since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire is part of its dangerous expansionist quest to recreate an Ottoman Empire, dressed in modern garb. Turkey has so far lacked the political clout and financial resources to extend its influence eastward over the ex-Soviet Turkic republics. As a result of this failure, Turkey's imperialistic and militaristic instincts (witness northern Cyprus, Iraqi and Turkish Kurdistan, and claims on Greek territorial waters) have now turned westward. Were the West genuinely concerned with stability and peace in the Balkans, it would not dare unleash such a harbinger of catastrophe in a region whose fanaticism, irrationality and blood feuds can be directly traced to the Balkan peoples' five-century-long feudal existence under their Ottoman overlords.
Furthermore, any right-minded person with only a 21-year memory should shudder when Turkey begins to talk about getting involved in a region based upon its concern for co-ethnic or co-religious minorities; this was the very pretext used for its massive and ruthless invasion of Cyprus, where thousands perished and hundreds of thousands of Greeks were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homelands.
If the West attempts to exercise control in the region through an alien in fact unanimously despised and distrusted proxy power such as Turkey, such a tragic strategy will cause far greater destruction, pain and suffering than even the Serbs, Croats and Muslims have been inflicting upon each other.
Scenario of Greek involvement in a wider Balkan War
You state that violence involving ex-Yugoslavia's Albanian minority "might well draw Albania itself and even Turkey into a war to protect fellow Muslims. Greece might then join in, under the banner of defending its northern borders." Your scenario of how Greece would most likely become involved in a larger Balkan War is not only unclear, but unlikely. Even a Balkan invasion by Turkey under the pretext of "protecting fellow Muslims" would not compel Greece to open war against its aggressive, and far more powerful, NATO neighbor particularly without U.S. approval. As Nicholas Cage and other commentators have envisioned, the far more likely scenario is that, were hostilities to erupt between Albania and Serbia, Greece would be dragged into the conflict as a result of renewed pogroms, reprisals, and ethnic cleansing campaigns by a fanaticized Albanian regime and citizenry against the 250,000 ethnic Greeks in southern Albania in response to that minority's real or imagined pro-Serbian sympathies.
As possibly the only official expression implying the use of force by Greece (other than in imminent defense of Greece's immediate territory) since the fall of the Junta in 1974, the Greek Government recently guaranteed the beleaguered minority of Northern Epirus protection from any future threats to its existence. Such a strong message implying the possibility of humanitarian intervention is warranted given the savage and widespread human rights abuses endured by the Northern Epirots under past Albanian regimes in contravention of the 1914 Protocol of Corfu and the International Court of Justice's attendant 1935 decision; a landmark treaty and legal precedent which have served as prototypes in international law for the protection of minorities, and which explicitly protect the Northern Epirots from human rights abuses (in addition to granting them a substantial degree of autonomy).[*];
It is this threat of a resurgence of an Albanian policy of eradication vis-a-vis its Greek minority, in response to a Serb-Albanian war initiated by Kosovo's secessionist and increasingly militant Albanian majority, which could most likely drag a decidedly unwilling Greece into a greater Balkan War. As Turkey has made clear its intentions to use its Albanian co-religionists as a pretext for intervention in the south Balkans, Turkey could very well further use this opportunity to accomplish against Greece militarily what it has not yet been able to accomplish through its politics and diplomacy.
Very truly yours,
Phillip Spyropoulos, Esq.[*] Northern Epirus, the area now encompassing the southern extremity of Albania, had been populated by Greeks for millennia. Throughout most of this century, the Greek minority in Albania had been subjected first to a savage Muslim overlordship and then to the mass persecutions of the communist despot Enver Hoxha. Under his regime, thousands of Greeks were executed, tens of thousands were tortured, imprisoned, and sent to labor camps, and thousands more were forced to relocate from their ancestral homes in the south of the country to the north in order to further dilute their numbers. After the communist cloud lifted in 1992, the hopes of the estimated 300,000 Greeks living in Albania were dashed as the Berisha government continued to persecute its Christian Orthodox minority, arresting ethnic Greek human rights activists and prosecuting them in a Stalinist show-trial which Helsinki Watch's Bjorn Elmquist characterized as "manipulat[ive] propaganda and a staged process" and which even Gramoz Pashko, the former deputy leader of Albania's ruling Democratic Party, confessed that "the trial was part of a government strategy to use the ethnic Greek minority as a hostage".
Although the outright ethnic-cleansing campaigns of the Hoxha regime have not yet been resurrected, other more insidious methods have replaced them. Albanian gangs beat, rob and rape ethnic Greeks, and set fire to their homes, businesses and churches with the implicit, and sometimes explicit, blessing of the Albanian authorities.
The Albanian minister of education had ordered the closing of all Greek language classes in the three areas of Northern Epirus most populated by Greeks Aghies Sarandes, Argyrokastro, and Delvino, where Hellenes comprise 45 to 60 percent of the population. While Albania's predominantly Muslim population is encouraged to begin worshipping its faith after decades of communist suppression, Orthodox Christians' right to practice their own religion continues to be heavily infringed upon. For example, churches and church property confiscated during the Hoxha dictatorship have not yet been returned, and the Albanian Government has refused to allow Orthodox bishops, appointed by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, to help resuscitate the nearly extinct Albanian-Orthodox Church.
Greek-Albanians have been expelled en mass from civil service, military and other government positions the kiss of death in a socialistic economy comprised predominantly of public sector jobs. What is worse, even the growing but still tiny private sector is not an option, as ethnic Greeks are effectively forbidden to participate in the privatization of state concerns.