Language and the Denial of Macedonian Ethnic Identity

This paper was presented by Victor Bivell at the International Association of Genocide Scholars 2021 Conference co-organized with Universitat de Barcelona, Spain: Genocide and Its Prevention in the Digital Age: 21st Century Challenges, 19 - 23 July, 2021. Thank you for this opportunity to speak about Language and the Denial of Macedonian Ethnic Identity. There is a long history of governments and particularly the Greek government using language to try to change the identity of Macedonians into something less Macedonian or non-Macedonian. The excellent 1994 Human Rights Watch report, Denying Ethnic Identity: The Macedonians of Greece, includes a vocabulary of denial words that the Greek Government has developed over more than a century to deny Macedonians in Greece their ethnic identity. In this presentation I want to go a step further and look at how the Greek government has introduced and attempted to introduce this vocabulary into other countries and international arenas. This behavior has its roots in the question of what Macedonia would look like after the fall of the Ottomans. Unlike other Balkan regions, Macedonia was denied self-government. Instead, in 1912-13 the neighbouring countries, Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia, invaded. The victors and their allies call this invasion the Balkan Wars. The Macedonians call it the Macedonian Genocide. The brutality of the Wars/ Genocide shocked Europe. The 1914 Carnegie Report said of the Bulgarian and Serbian armies and in particular of the Greek army that "the object of these armed conflicts... always and everywhere the same, was the complete extermination of an alien population." Although the word genocide had not yet been coined, the phrase "the complete extermination of an alien population" is probably still the most accurate description of genocide at its worst. Full speech: http://www.pollitecon.com/html/essays... #MacedonianGenocide #PrespaAgreement #Macedonia