Comments | ontd_political: Killings Heighten Ethnic Tensions in Macedonia

13chapters in ontd_political

Killings Heighten Ethnic Tensions in Macedonia

Apr 20, 2012 18:08

On Orthodox Easter, one of the most sacred holidays for Christians here, Macedonians mourned the deaths of five Macedonian men amid speculation that their killers were ethnic Albanians, arousing fears of a new bout of intercommunal violence ( Read more... )

!request-a-tag, murder, macedonia, nato, europe

Comments 4

rebness April 21 2012, 06:31:53 UTC

This is really worrying. I didn't realise tensions were so bad, so the article's very enlightening, but feck.

What I can't stand is how Albanians seem to be treated by just about every other European nation (yes, I include my own). I've seen alarming xenophobia against them by Greeks in the Ionian islands in particular, but WTH Macedonia! I hope the killers of those young men are brought to justice and this whole thing doesn't kick off yet more unrest.

On the name thing - I wish Greece would STFU about that. Blocking EU membership because they don't like the name?

13chapters April 21 2012, 07:07:39 UTC

Not only is Greece being ridiculous, they're actually violating an earlier agreement that they would stop blocking Macedonia from entering into international organizations. The International Court of Justice ruled recently that Greece's continual blocking of Macedonia from organizations is a violation of international law. Unfortunately for Macedonia, there's not a lot anyone can do to make Greece knock it off.

rebness April 21 2012, 07:11:43 UTC

It's kind of ironic when Greece is complaining about Turkey blocking them with regard to Cyprus.

I admit that I don't understand why Greece has this antipathy towards Macedonia (although it seems to dislike an awful lot of Balkan countries). I need to read up on this more.

Thanks for the article! It's a real eye-opener.

13chapters April 21 2012, 07:37:21 UTC

TBH I find Greece's stance pretty annoying and incomprehensible myself so I might not have this 100% correct, but to the best of my knowledge, it goes like this: the historical region of Macedonia doesn't match any modern nations. It's partially in Greece (which has a province called Macedonia), partially in Bulgaria (where it's called Pirin Macedonia), and part of it used to be in Yugoslavia, where it was the Republic of Macedonia. (All of the modern nations that were part of Yugoslavia were republics with a certain amount of autonomy, except Kosovo, which was an autonomous region within the Republic of Serbia.) Greece considers the concept of Macedonia to be inherently Greek because they were an ancient Greek culture - Alexander the Great was a Macedonian, and he was Greek. Greece didn't care about other nations calling subnational regions Macedonia, but when the Republic of Macedonia declared independence, they were all NUH UH YOU CANNOT BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT GREEKS, YOU ARE SLAVS ( ... )