THE BALKANS: Toward Warm Water?

Along Greece’s northern frontier, “incidents” were occurring with remarkable regularity at the rate of one every other day. British and Russian occupation troops, facing each other across the restive Greco-Bulgar border, were getting into each other’s sphere of influence and into each other’s hair. The controlled Yugoslav press, taking its cue from Marshal Tito’s blast at Greek “terrorism” (TIME, July 16), screamed insistently about “20,000” Slav refugees from Macedonia. To Salonika from Athens hurried Premier Admiral Petros Voulgaris to make a personal investigation.

What was going on? The Greek Governor General of Macedonia said that no refugees were streaming into Yugoslavia, charged that Slav terrorists were raiding Greek villages. From Rome the Chicago Daily News’s Balkan-wise Leigh White cabled: Marshal Tito had apparently launched his long-planned drive to expand federal Yugoslavia at the expense of Greek Macedonia. From Athens the New York Times’s European Chief Cyrus Sulzberger reported: “There is a pattern behind these events linked to the politically homogeneous Governments of Greece’s three northern neighbors [Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania], who are all ideologically tied to the Soviet Union.” Was Russia, through her Balkan satellites, resuming a historic push toward a warm-water port on the Aegean Sea?

Wanted: Macedonia. Macedonia lies on the northern shore of the Aegean Sea, between Turkish Thrace and the Albanian mountains. Bulgars, Serbs, Greeks have eyed it jealously ever since the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century.

Russian interference in Macedonia dates from Tsarist times. After the Russo-Turkish war (1877-78), the Treaty of San Stefano, imposed by the victorious Russians, gave Macedonia to Bulgaria, practically converted the Balkans into a Russian-dominated great Bulgaria, with an Aegean coast line. Later, at the Congress of Berlin, Britain and Austria forced the Tsar to disgorge most of his Balkan booty. As a sop, they let him keep strategic Kars in Asia Minor (see below).

In 1941, the Germans gave most of Macedonia to Bulgaria. The Greek portion had been Hellenized. Ethnically, it was 90% Greek. The Bulgars proceeded to Slavicize the population (even altering tombstone inscriptions), a process halted last year after Bulgaria’s defeat.

Last August, under Marshal Tito’s eye, 125 Macedonian delegates met at Bitoly in southern Yugoslavia, proclaimed an autonomous Macedonia with federal Yugoslavia. An Allied military mission looked on. A Macedonian Government is now functioning in Skoplje, in Yugoslavia, about 60 miles from the Greek frontier.

Wanted: Epirus. The overwhelming majority of Greeks did not want to lose Macedonia. The dominant Communist element in EAM lost popularity when it came out in favor of a “little Greece” and the cession of Macedonia to a Balkan federation. Last week EAM echoed the Belgrade and Moscow press: it publicly attacked the Voulgaris Government for promoting a “regime of terror.”

In Athens Regent Archbishop Damaskinos met attack with counterattack. For Greece he claimed the Epirus section of southern Albania, where “many of our people are suffering persecution” under Albania’s Premier Enver Hoxha. Hoxha is believed to have somewhat the same relation to Marshal Tito that Tito has to the Kremlin.