Word: macedonia
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...quick to recognize the other breakaway republics, including Croatia, whose regime discriminates against local Serbs. But the Community stiff-armed Macedonia. Why? Because Greece objects to the name and exercised a veto in the councils of the E.C. Macedonia is the birthplace of Alexander the Great and the name of Greece's northern province. Therefore Athens thinks it has a 2,400-year-old trademark on the word...
Last week the Greek Foreign Minister Michalis Papaconstantinou was in Washington, and I had a chance to ask him about this whole business. He maintains that for Macedonia to "adopt a Greek name" is a "provocation" that "implies territorial claims against...
Never mind that Macedonia's constitution explicitly disavows any such claim. Or that its army consists of about 6,000 ragtag troops armed with pistols and rifles, while Greece's is more than 25 times larger and is equipped with tanks, heavy artillery and jet fighters. Or that there is neither precedent nor justification in international law for one country to tell another what it can call itself...
Partly because the Greek position is so preposterous, the suspicion persists that the complaint about the name camouflages a revival of Greece's own age- old expansionistic ambitions. Several European governments have relayed to Washington reports that Mitsotakis has secretly discussed the partition of Macedonia with Serbia and perhaps with Albania and Bulgaria as well...
...categorically: I have never seen any document or heard anything of this sort. We want them ((the Macedonians)) to exist ((as a separate state)); we want them as a buffer zone" between Greece and Serbia. "The authorities in Skopje ((the Macedonian capital)) can change their name to anything except Macedonia," and that will remove "a point of friction in the Balkans...