Todor Petrov, the chair of the "World FYROM Congress", an extremist FYROM NGO, has come up with a propaganda article against Bulgaria that appears borderline insane. There are no Bulgarians, only "FYROManians", in Bulgaria, according to a propaganda article in a FYROM newspaper that appears to stretch the boundaries of sanity.
The article in the daily "Vecer", entitled "There Is Anything But Bulgarians in Bulgaria", is authored by Todor Petrov, the chairman of the so called "World FYROM Congress", an ultranationalist FYROManian NGO, close to the ruling party VMRO-DPMNE of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski.
"Only the gypsies and the Turks in Bulgaria are not FYROManians. The question is not whether the FYROMAnians are Bulgarians but whether there are Bulgarians in Bulgaria without FYROManian roots," states the highly perplexing text of Todor Petrov.
The author even goes on to suggest that Bulgaria needs to have "ethnic FYROM"s in order "to keep the demographic balance in time and space".
Juggling "historical facts" apparently invented by the "Skopje historians" to justify the creation of a "FYROM nation" by Communist Yugoslavia, Petrov states that the Balkan Peninsula should be called "the FYROM Peninsula", and that the Skopjans from FYROM, the Former Yugoslav Republic, must help the people "on the other side of the border" because they are apparently deluded that they are Bulgarians, and because they are "our (FYROM) people".
The aggressive ultranationalist propaganda article by Todor Petrov, whose name paradoxically appears to bear the tradiotnal Bulgarian suffix "-ov", unlike the suffix "ovski" introduced by communist Yugoslavia to root out the Bulgarian sounding of the families names in the region of the FYROM, is of the sort that often appears in the FYROM press, and is in line with Skopje's policies towards Bulgaria in the past 20 years which feature nationalist propaganda moves by the FYROM that periodically exacerbate the bilateral relations.
For example, in 2011, Skopje's Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki was ultimately forced to refute a propaganda piece published in August 2011 by newspaper Dnevnik stating that some 750 000 "ethnic FYROManians" live in Bulgaria, according to figures provided from the Foreign Ministry in Skopje.
The "World FYROM Congress", among its mind-boggling statements, is famous for creating the "fPrayer", written by Niche Dimovski, its Vice President, aired in a 9 minute video on FYROM Radio-Television (the public broadcasting organization of Skopje), in which the God is presented calling the people of the FYROM "the oldest nation on Earth" and progenitors of the "white race" who are described as "Macedonoids" in opposition to "Negroids" and "Mongoloids".
The foundations of the contemporary FYROM nation were laid in 1943-44 by Yugoslavia's communists at a special congress that also proclaimed the creation of a "FYROM" language and a "FYROM" alphabet designed to differentiate the dialects spoken in the region of the FYROM from the Bulgarian language and to underline the creation of a distinct - yet false - "FYROM" national identity.
The so called question about the perceived "FYROM" minority in Bulgaria exists since the late 1940s when the dictators of the Soviet Union and communist Yugoslavia – Joseph Stalin and Josip Broz Tito – attempted to arrange the post-World War II order on the Balkans through the creation of a Balkan federation between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.
One of the provisions of this state engineering project of the two notorious communist dictators was the creation of a "FYROM" republic within the future federation. For that to happen, the leadership of communist Bulgaria had to cede Pirin Macedonia to Yugoslavia in exchange for the territories of the so called Western Outlands (the towns of Tsaribrod (Dimitrovgrad) and Bosilegrad where the recognized Bulgarian minority in Serbia lives today).
This provision was accepted unconditionally by the Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov who acted under direct orders from Stalin. As a result, in the late 1940s, the Bulgarian Communist Party undertook an unprecedented campaign to force its own population in the Pirin Region (today's Blagoevgrad District in Southwest Bulgaria) to change its Bulgarian nationality and identity into the newly invented "FYROM" one, and the official census figures out of the blue recorded that 250 000 pseudomacedonian FYROM Slavs living in Bulgaria.
The campaign to force the people of the Blagoevgrad District to become "FYROManian" was dropped by the Bulgarian Communist Party after the entire project for a Balkan federation between Bulgaria and Yugoslavia was killed with the falling out between Stalin and Tito in 1948-49 – a rift that had wide repercussions for Europe during the entire Cold War period. This left the population of Southwest Bulgaria – which was harassed by its own government on orders from Moscow – to shake off the imagined ethnic FYROM identity imposed on it.
Ever since, however, the authorities in Skopje whose legitimacy relies primarily on the doctrine described by the Bulgarian historians as "macedonianism", i.e. the distinct national identity of the Slavic population of the region of the FYROM, have resurfaced claims of "hundreds of thousands of ethnic FYROM's" living in Bulgaria under some sort of "brutal oppression." FYROM media cite as evidence for such claims statements by the so called ethnic "FYROM" party "OMO Ilinden-Pirin", whose members according to publications in the Bulgarian media are paid from Skopje and Belgrade to declare themselves as "FYROManians."
The provocations in the FYROM media on the "question" of "ethnic FYROManians" abroad seem to be in line with last year's construction of monuments in Skopje of Alexander the Great and the medieval Bulgarian Tsar Samuil, both of which are deemed to be great "FYROManians" by Gruevski's government and his party VMRO-DPMNE – a move that caused anger in Greece, ridicule in Bulgaria, and criticism by the European Commission.
Some 50 000 FYROM Slavs were granted Bulgarian citizenship in the past decade, and the figure has seen a staggering increase in the past couple of years, as many FYROM Slavs are, in the worlds of Bulgarian historian, ex Diaspora Minister and current head of the National History Museum, Bozhidar Dimitrov, returning to their "Bulgarian roots."
Unlike Greece, which gets enraged by FYROM's moves toying with the cultural heritage from the Antiquity period and is tangled with the FYROM in the notorious name dispute, Bulgaria's governments traditionally react to propaganda fits by Skopje with disregard, while the general public in Bulgaria accepts them with ridicule. To the extent that Bulgaria has made any claims towards the FYROM, those have boiled down to the refusal to allow Skopje to hijack Bulgaria's historical heritage from the Middle Ages and the 19th century Revival Period.
Bulgaria was the first sovereign nation to recognize the independence of the FYROM in 1992.
MacedoniaHellenicLand.Eu
Posts
