site.btaAssociation of the Descendants of the Refugees and Migrants from the Territory of the Republic of North Macedonia and Friends: Letter to the US Senate

ASSOCIATION DESCENDANTS OF THE REFUGEES AND MIGRANTS FROM THE TERRITORY OF THE REPUBLIC OF NORTH MACEDONIA AND FRIENDS

TO THE INTERIM CHAIRPERSON OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE PATTY MURRAY

TO US SENATE VICE CHAIRPERSON KAMALA HARRIS

TO SENATOR MIKE BROWN, AUTHOR OF DRAFT RESOLUTION S.RES. 311

TO THE US EMBASSY IN SOFIA

A COPY TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF BULGARIA, THE CHAIRPERSON OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE MASS MEDIA

Subject: Inaccuracies about the history of the geographical region of Macedonia in draft resolution S.Res. 311 submitted to the US Congress which threatens the good partnership relations between the United States and Bulgaria.

DEAR MRS. MURRAY,

DEAR MRS. HARRIS,

DEAR MR. BROWN,

DEAR SIRS,

On 26.07.2023, a draft S.Res 311. resolution was submitted to the United States Congress by Senator Mike Brown, proposing that September 2023 be declared "the month of the Macedonian-American heritage" along with a celebration of the language, history and culture of Macedonian Americans and their incredible contribution to the United States.

Such an initiative is being undertaken for the third time because draft resolutions H. RES 741 and S. RES. 758 were tabled on 22 October 2021 and 13 September 2022, which were rejected by the US House of Representatives and the Senate respectively because of their falsifications and manipulations related to the history of the geographical region of Macedonia.

The current version is much shorter than the previous ones and has been purged of a number of false statements. However, in this form it still contains completely provable lies and is an example of another theft of foreign socio-cultural heritage. Draft resolution S.Res.311once again claims that "since the 1880s, tens of thousands of Macedonians have immigrated to the United States in search of civil liberties, human rights, religious freedom, economic opportunity and security in response to the Ilinden Uprising of 1903 against the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, the First and Second World Wars, the Civil War in Greece from 1946 to 1949 and the Communist policy of Yugoslavia." This affects not only to the socio-cultural heritage of Bulgaria, but also of Greece. At the same time, while ostensibly criticizing "Communist Yugoslavia", it supports the propaganda theses developed by it and by Moscow about the centuries-long existence of ethnic Macedonians and the Macedonian language – statements that do not correspond to objective facts.

Our association was created by individuals who originate from the group of over 400,000 Bulgarian citizens, descendants of refugees or migrants from the territory of today's Republic of North Macedonia, who form part of about 1.3 million Bulgarian citizens whose origin is from the geographical area of Macedonia. As an interested organization which directly expresses the interests of part of the population which originates from today's North Macedonia, we would like to draw your attention to the fact that during the period after the 1880s, it would not have been  possible for the United States to have ethnic Macedonians, since the existence of such was not recorded in the geographical area of Macedonia itself. According to the data from the last census in the Ottoman Empire in 1906, which is official, since the Ottomans ruled Macedonia for over 500 years, the total number of Bulgarians therein was 762,754. At the same time, the Bulgarians represented the majority of the population in most of the territory which today forms part of North Macedonia. Prior to 1912, when the Ottoman Empire ruled the geographical region of Macedonia, there were more than 1,300 Bulgarian churches with 73 Bulgarian monasteries, 7 Bulgarian bishops and 1,310 Bulgarian priests, as well as 1,370 Bulgarian schools with 2,266 teachers. At the same time, there were no "Macedonian" schools or churches, and not a single ethnic Macedonian was recorded. During this period, the name "Macedonians" was not an ethnographic, but a geographical concept, such as the Texans in the United States, for example.

It should be emphasized that the "Ilinden Uprising of 1903" described in resolution S.Res.311 as Macedonian covered not only the territory of Macedonia, but also the territory of Adrianople Thrace, where no "Macedonian" has ever lived. The uprising in question was initiated by one organisation – the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO) and had one goal – the introduction of common territorial autonomy in Macedonia and Adrianople Thrace. On the current territory of the Republic of Bulgaria, the uprising completely covered today's Blagoevgrad, Smolyan and Kardzhali districts and parts of Pazardzhik, Plovdiv, Haskovo and Burgas districts. Their total area is approximately the same as the territory of today's North Macedonia, and Bulgaria has every reason to be the main successor of the work of the former IMARO, especially since only in Bulgaria its ideas remained untouched.

The concept of the presence of ethnic Macedonians was developed in Serbia in the second half of the 19th century, in order to serve as a transition stage to the denationalization of Macedonian Bulgarians and their gradual rapprochement to Belgrade. However, this idea began to gain popularity only in the 1930s, when a special resolution of the Comintern was adopted in Moscow in 1934. For the first time in history, the existence of a separate Macedonian nation and a Macedonian language was referred to. In practice, these ideas began to be imposed with force after 1944, when a new written Macedonian language was created in Yugoslavia, on the basis of local Bulgarian dialects, written in a modified Serbian alphabet with the artificial insertion of Serbisms.

The available documents show that prior to 1944, in the immigration registers and in the censuses of the population of the United States, the majority of those born in Macedonia were recorded as Bulgarians whose mother tongue was Bulgarian. The oldest Macedonian organisation that exists in the world today is the Macedonian Patriotic Organization (MPO), founded in Fort Wayne, USA in 1922 by emigrants declaring themselves as Bulgarians. Their newspaper "The Macedonian Tribune" is written in literary Bulgarian and defends the idea of equal rights for all ethnic communities in Macedonia, the most numerous being Bulgarian. In America, the organisation has established a number of Macedonian-Bulgarian churches, where a number of schools provide the study of the literary Bulgarian language.

Prior to 1944, the adherents of the idea of Macedonian nationalism were a negligible minority mainly among Communist circles. This is precisely the nature of the first Macedonian manifestations in the United States. Since at that time there was no Macedonian language, their documents were also written in literary Bulgarian. Their activities were financed by the Soviet, Bulgarian and Yugoslav communists, which is why on December 5, 1947, the US Department of Justice announced a list of 90 organizations that the US government considered anti-state and disloyal to the ideas of freedom and democracy. This list also includes the Macedonian-American People's Union and its publication Narodna Volya (People's Will), the first and only propagandist of Macedonian nationalism at that time. On May 28, 1948, the list of anti-state organisations operating in the United States was supplemented by 32 more. This was the result of a special investigation by the FBI which found that the 122 organizations in question had assisted the Communist dictatorship in Eastern Europe. Thus, the few Macedonian nationalists who had never written in "Macedonian", but in literary Bulgarian, were expelled from the United States. For this reason they did not make any "incredible contribution to the United States", but destroyed American democracy.

By 1960, the number of Canadians and Americans originating from the geographical area of Macedonia was between 50,000 and 75,000, and over 90% of this number consisted of Bulgarians. In the 1980 Harvard Encyclopaedia of Ethnic Groups in America, it is stated that "prior to World War II, almost all of them (immigrants from Macedonia to America) considered themselves Bulgarians and identified themselves as Bulgarians or Macedonian Bulgarians. Lately, however, all that has started to change. However, about 50,000 Macedonians still identify as Bulgarians and Macedonian Bulgarians. "

The first Macedonian nationalist organisation on the American continent was founded only in 1959 in Toronto with the assistance of the dictator J. B. Tito who led Communist Yugoslavia. It later adopted the name United Macedonians. It was a product of Bulgarian state nihilism, imposed by pressure from Moscow and Yugoslav propaganda. At that time, a small group split from the Hristo Botev Bulgarian organisation to join the Macedonian People's Union. The connection with Bulgarian ethnic awareness had not yet been broken and the goal was, as officially stated, to unite the Macedonian-Bulgarian émigré community in Canada on a "progressive-democratic basis" and include it in the struggle of the left-wing forces. Very soon this new organisation came under Yugoslav influence, and the leadership was replaced by newly arrived immigrants from Yugoslavia and Greece. In 1962, it established official ties with the newly proclaimed and non-canonical Macedonian Orthodox Church. Then with Yugoslav funding, the first Macedonian church of St. Kliment Ohridski was built in Toronto. At that time, the members of the "United Macedonians" were few in number, and even in the 1970s their number did not exceed 500 people. However, soon after with the active support of the Matica (Community) of émigrés from Macedonia in Skopje, they began to develop a wide propaganda activity.

The Macedonian liberation movement after 1944 called the official state doctrine of Skopje "Serbo-communism". After 1991, when the independence of today's North Macedonia was formally declared, the communist component in the ideology began to disappear, but dependence on Serbia remained. The referendum asked an ambiguous question about the right of the future state “to enter into a future union of the sovereign states of Yugoslavia". Nowadays, this perspective is expressed in the total imposition of the idea for North Macedonia to be part of the Serbian “Open Balkans”. The sole aim of the project is with the help of China to build a communication infrastructure to the north towards Serbia. As a result, today the political system in Skopje functions in conditions of increasing dependence and total control of Serbia.

When draft resolution S.Res. 311 was submitted, it was unlikely that the facts presented here were taken into account. We believe that Senator Mike Brown's team was misled by the so-called United Macedonian Diaspora. This is Washington-based proxy organization created with the assistance of the authorities in Skopje who have long sought to ignore the contributions of Macedonian Bulgarians who immigrated to America before World War II. They also fall into the group of Macedonian-Americans, but their contribution and that of their American-born descendants not only is not taken into account, but is undermined by declaring it to be non-Bulgarian.

We enclose two documents of the Macedonian Patriotic Organisations which provide information on the repressions and political processes that have taken place since 1944. 

In view of the presented facts, we appeal for draft resolution S.Res.311 to be rejected due to the falsifications and manipulations contained therein. They offend the Bulgarian people and open the way to destabilization of the Central Balkans. We appeal to the international democratic community to support the democratic circles in North Macedonia, to create democratic media independent of Belgrade, in which it is possible to discuss freely and without prejudice issues related to the past, present and future of Skopje, thus interrupting the vicious Yugoslav totalitarian practices inherited from the past, and finally achieve national reconciliation.

CO-CHAIRMAN: Prof. Trendafil Mitev

CO-CHAIRMAN: Assoc. Prof. Spas Tashev

SECRETARY: Dimitar M. Dimitrov
 
Sofia, August 31, 2023

Letter