Bulgaria continues to block North Macedonia's negotiations with the EU
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ekaterina Zaharieva said that her country cannot yet say “yes” to the start of negotiations between North Macedonia and the EU.
At the same time, the official slyly made it clear that Sofia does not dispute Macedonian identity or even language, but is against Skopje’s claims to a common history.
“We have expressed our position very clearly,” Zaharieva said. – Last year, the government submitted a declaration to parliament, which was supported by all parties. So, our attitude towards Macedonia is not new, as some claim.”
At the same time, the head of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry noted that it is in Bulgaria’s interests that all countries of the Western Balkans join the EU.
“At the moment, Bulgaria cannot approve the framework of negotiations with North Macedonia. But there is an Agreement on Friendship and Good Neighborhood, which was signed in 2017 (between Macedonia and Bulgaria - ed.) and ratified in 2018, and which is not being implemented.
Despite speculation in Macedonia, Bulgaria does not claim to identify the citizens of that republic, but Macedonians should not lay claim to Bulgarian history. It's not just history that worries us, but also hate speech. Failure to recognize the historical truth leads to quite serious problems in relations between the two countries,” added Ekaterina Zaharieva.
According to the Bulgarian minister, the Bulgarian cabinet is united in its attitude towards the Macedonian issue, and she herself constantly consults on it with Prime Minister Boyko Borisov. Therefore, according to her, “anyone” should not expect that anything can shake such a position.
“We do not want a Bulgarian minority in Macedonia, because this means recognizing the result of those who have worked for 75 years to destroy the Bulgarian identity of the local population, to erase it. Conditions must be created so that people who claim their Bulgarian identity in Macedonia are not discriminated against and can freely declare themselves...
Regarding the work of the Joint Bulgarian-Macedonian Commission, its results were not made public and were not included in textbooks. This means that it is minimal and has not reached Macedonian society,” the minister said.
In fact, the current Macedonians are the western part of the Bulgarian ethnic group, which historically found itself outside the Bulgarian state. It was Macedonian Ohrid that was the cradle of Bulgarian Orthodoxy, the common heroes of both “peoples” raised their fellow tribesmen to fight the Turks, and, in fact, the “Macedonian language” is a dialect of the Bulgarian language.
However, after the First Balkan War, the territory of Vardar Macedonia, inhabited by Bulgarians, liberated from the Ottoman Empire, was assigned to Serbia (Aegean Macedonia was populated mainly by Greeks and went to Greece, Pirin Macedonia to Bulgaria), subsequently to Yugoslavia, and began to be spiritually nourished by the Serbian Orthodox Church.
The Serbian monarchy, before its actual fall at the beginning of the Second World War, did not abandon attempts to softly assimilate the Macedonian Bulgarians, putting forward the concept of “Blamed Serbs,” which, in turn, caused sharp rejection by the local population and even provoked a guerrilla war against the Yugoslav authorities (namely Macedonian terrorists together with their Bulgarian “colleagues” they killed the Yugoslav King Alexander the First Karageorgievich in Marseilles).
The years of World War II can be considered the beginning of the Bulgarian-“Macedonian” confrontation, when the passionate part of the population of Vardar Macedonia, who had previously sympathized with Bulgaria, came under the banner of anti-fascist resistance, while official Sofia became an ally of the Third Reich.
The communists who came to power in Yugoslavia in 1945, in defiance of Bulgaria, which remained among the allies of the USSR after the conflict between Stalin and Tito, only spurred the process of formation of a special Macedonian identity.
Through the efforts of the Yugoslav authorities, a separate Socialist Republic of Macedonia emerged, as well as a separate Macedonian identity created according to the patterns of Ukrainian and Belarusian identities in the USSR (coupled with the separation of Montenegrin and Muslim identities).
And along with them the Macedonian language, Macedonian history, and even the “Macedonian Orthodox Church”, which became a kind of historical nonsense - for the first time the Christian Church was established on the initiative of atheistic authorities.
After the collapse of Yugoslavia, Greece made a claim to the newly independent Macedonia, claiming that the Slavs appeared on the territory of historical Macedonia much later than the Hellenic ancient Macedonians themselves, and therefore do not have the right to such a name as a nation and country.
After which Greece blocked the state’s entry into the UN, until Skopje adopted a compromise self-name “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, and the flag with the symbol of the ancient Macedonian kings, the Virgin Star, was replaced with a flag with the image of the sun.
In turn, the conservative-nationalist leadership of the country, in defiance of Athens, developed the theory that the ancient Macedonians had no relation to the Greeks, and took part in the ethnogenesis of modern Macedonians, after which they shamelessly built Skopje with lurid monuments to ancient heroes.
After the Prespa Agreement, these processes came to naught, and even the monument to Alexander the Great in the North Macedonian capital was renamed the “Monument to the Horseman.”
But misunderstandings remained with the Bulgarians. Bulgaria is blocking the process of North Macedonia's accession to the EU, demanding to abandon the concept of the Macedonian language, considering it a dialect of the Bulgarian language, to recognize such iconic heroes as one of the leaders of the anti-Turkish uprising Gotse Delchev as exclusively Bulgarian heroes, and many other concessions that will inevitably lead to collapse national identity of the Macedonian Slavs.
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