Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

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Maybe it is the best agreement ever signed… Maybe by applying it, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, will enter an era of great friendship and enormous prosperity…

Maybe… The only small detail is the majority of the deputies of the Greek Parliament do not know the agreement is so good. Their parties declared they are opposing the agreement and they won’t ratify it. Even the An.Ell. party, which is the junior partner of SYRIZA in the government, does not know how profitable is this agreement. They said they would vote No to the agreement when introduced in the Parliament. The population does not know it also. 70% of those asked in the polls, including 50% of the SYRIZA voters, answered they are against the agreement.

The opposition asked the Government to have a vote in the Parliament on the agreement Tsipras and Kotzias wanted to sign before it is signed. The government refused the request and refused also the calls for a referendum from various corners and personalities, including from Mikis Theodorakis, the legendary symbol of the International Leftist movement. No, Tsipras and Kotzias know better what is good for the people than the people itself.

Given the official opposition of the parties commanding the majority of deputies of the Parliament, the clear opposition of the people and other circumstances we will try to elucidate, the signing today of the agreement between Tsipras and the FYROM PM Zaev was nothing less than a political, if not a legal stricto senso, coup d’ etat against Greek constitutional order and the principles of Popular and National Sovereignty, with the sole aim of opening the way of FYROM to NATO and the EU, and that irrespective of the opinion one may hold of the agreement itself.

As we said everybody can have an opinion about this agreement (*) But there is a much larger and probably far more important question than how to solve the dispute between Greece and FYROM. And this question is: Who rules Greece and FYROM? Their citizens and elected Parliaments, or US, Germany, NATO and the EU?

Kotzias and Tsipras (image on the right) had technically the right to sign this agreement, but they did not have any legitimacy to do it, as Greek political parties commanding a majority of deputies in the Greek Parliament have expressed their disagreement with it in the most official way.

By the way, a closer look at the agreement will persuade you than in fact, instead of solving, it is recognizing and eternalizing the existing differences between Greeks and Macedonian Slavs. The main aim of the agreement is to open the way of NATO to FYROM and then, the differences of the two nations will be used to provide Americans with a permanent tool to use the one nation against the other. The agreement was conceived to facilitate US-NATO advanced strategic planning for controlling Balkans, encircling, containing and threatening Russia.

The agreement has also the potential of destabilizing and provoking much greater instability, chaos and conflicts in the region, including in Greece itself. (By the way there are also doubts if Mr. Zaev, the PM of FYROM, who came into power in 2016, as a result of a color revolution, greatly helped by US Secret Services, has also sufficient legitimization to sign this agreement.)

Only by a series of legal coup d’ etats and flagrant violations of the most elementary democratic and parliamentarian rules, we will expose in detail, Tsipras and Kotzias were able to sign today this agreement. Of course, all massive violations of democratic rule and legitimacy in a member of the EU are not representing any obstacle for Federica Mogherini, the EU Representative on Foreign and Security Policy, the EU Commissioner on Enlargement Johannes Hahn, Rosemary DiCarlo, Deputy General Secretary of the UN and Mathew Nimetz, UN special Envoy who were present and celebrated the signing of the agreement in lake Prespes, an agreement representing the will of the Empire, not the will of the two nations.

The agreement is also strongly supported by US President Trump, the German government, NATO and the EU. All of them are wishing to include FYROM to NATO as soon as possible in order for this organization to control the whole of the Balkans. FYROM is located on the very center of the peninsula, between Albania and Bulgaria and between Greece and Serbia. To control it means to control the whole peninsula. In FYROM the US have established since many years enormous military installations and the country has become the center of CIA activities covering all Balkans. (**)

The only reason Tsipras and Kotzias proceeded to the signing of this agreement, circumventing the essence of the Greek Constitutional Order, with the help of the EU Commission, always willing to attack democratic principles in any member state of the EU, is exactly their wish to satisfy everything NATO and the US are asking from them, something they do also (***) in all spheres of Foreign and Defense Policy.

The signature of this agreement, in opposition to the will of the Parliament and the people, is the second so grave violation of the very foundations of the democratic regime in Greece and of the principles of Popular and National Sovereignty, since the disregarding of the clear verdict of the 2015 Referendum. In fact it is the continuation of the previous, 2015 coup, but without even the shadow of a justification. Tsipras claimed, back in 2015, that he could not do anything else. Now there is no other reason to sign this agreement than to satisfy the American desiderata. By signing such an agreement and paying a huge corresponding, this government proves that is controlled directly by foreign powers in a way no Greek government was controlled after the military junta. The fact that the centers of Western Imperialism were able to control the leadership of the Greek Left, one of the most radical and strong in any European country after WWII is a tremendous triumph for the Empire,  for many reasons (****).

The main difference between now and 2015 is that the main role is played now by US and NATO. The European Union is relegated to a back stage supporting role, the opposite of what happened in 2015. Of course, we should remember that already in 2015 American diplomacy did also play an important back stage role in the signing of the Greek capitulation and the Greek vice-Prime Minister Dragasakis has even gone on record to thank the US Administration for its vital contribution to the … surrender of his own government! The supposed “radical left” (SYRIZA) and supposed “radical right” (An.Ell.) were unable to capitulate by themselves, they needed outside help even for that!

We said that this new coup is the continuation of the previous one, because both are included in a project of destroying the Greek nation and democracy, by turning the Greek state into a Western protectorate in all fields, including foreign and defense policies and status. The Tsipras – Zaev agreement is not representing but the transition from the economic to the geopolitical methods of colonization of Greece.

Why this is a coup d’ Etat

As we already said, one problem is how Greece and FYROM want to regulate their relations. Another one is who holds and how he exercises power in both nations.

In the Greek case, it is clear that the Troika, Germany and the EU are making the law as far as economy and society is concerned, US, NATO and their allies as far as Geopolitics are concerned.

But up to now, this was happening through a formal respect of parliamentary forms. Now, we have a clear violation even of those forms and rules.

This is why we said the signing of this agreement is a coup d’ etat, probably not in a strict legal sense, but at least in a political sense.

A government has of course the right to sign international agreements, which subsequently have to be ratified by the National Parliament.

But there are some limits to this possibility. The agreements should not be in clear violation of people’s will or of the expressed will of the majority of the Parliament!

For example, Mr. Tsipras, before going to Brussels to negotiate his surrender after the 2015 referendum, he felt the need to go to the Greek Parliament asking for an authorization to negotiate and sign an agreement.

Now, not only he has not any authorization of the Parliament to sign the agreement he is signing, the majority of the Greek political parties commanding a majority of deputies in the Greek Parliament are publicly opposing the agreement he is signing. This fact is putting into obvious and serious doubt his right to sign the agreement, as it would happen in any other law-ruled country of the world.

There is worse. SYRIZA has refused to put the agreement to the preliminary approval of the Parliament and to satisfy a demand of the opposition for a vote on it.

Maybe you will ask how a government commanding a majority in the Parliament, has not a majority on that  particular issue. This is happening because SYRIZA has a parliamentary majority only by adding An.Ell. deputies and An.Ell. is included in the parties opposing the agreement.

There is even more. It is maybe the first time in the international history of parliamentarianism and of international relations that a Foreign Minister is signing an international agreement against not only the will of the majority of his own Parliament, but one which his own government is not fully supporting! One of the two governing parties in Greece, the smaller partner of SYRIZA, An.Ell., disagrees also with the agreement. This is why Mr. Tsipras and Mr. Kotzias did not ask even for an authorization from their own Council of Ministers before signing!

Except SYRIZA, who was voted by less than 20% of the Greek electorate back in September 2015, there is only another small party, Potami, with four deputies supporting the agreement. All other political parties, from the Communist Party of the Far Left to Golden Dawn of the Far Right are opposing the agreement Tsipras+ and Kotzias are signing.

Speaking about the institutional order, the only Greek state institution which has debated and decided ever about the FYROM issue has been the Council of Heads of Political Parties, which has met under the President of the Greek Republic, back in 1992. Then all the heads of the Greek Political Parties represented in the Parliament, the President of SYN (the predecessor of SYRIZA) included, with the exception of the Communist Party, decided that Greece does not accept for FYROM any name in which the term Macedonia or its derivatives would be included.

It is true that this is not any more the opinion of most Greek political parties, but nobody bothered to change that decision. If SYRIZA respected in an elementary way the institutions of the Greek State and Democracy, the minimum it had to do was to ask for convening again this Council, or, alternatively, convening the Parliament to ask for changing this decision and for authorization to negotiate on a different basis.

The Referendum question

The agreement is not only signed against the will of the Parliament, it is also signed against the will of the people.

Hundreds of thousands of people, probably more than a million, have demonstrated in Athens and Salonica against SYRIZA’s policy on this question. Those demonstrations were by far the biggest in the country since many years.

The polls show since last February that a constant absolute majority of Greek citizens are against the policy of the government on that issue, including half of the SYRIZA voters themselves. According to the latest poll, taken after the agreement was known, 70% of Greeks reject the agreement. The influence of SYRIZA in all Northern Greece is collapsing.

All that puts in even bigger doubt the political legitimacy of a government signing an agreement like the one signed today, but it is also putting a huge question on the reasons it is doing it. It seems as one more clear indication, which is also verified by a lot of different indications, that the two governing parties of Greece are following strictly the agenda of the United States, of NATO and of their allies.

Given the importance citizens in all countries pay to national questions, affecting their idea of their own Nation, the divisions in Greek society are very deep, especially in the context of a country under attack. The internal atmosphere in the country is aggravated by the extremely authoritarian way SYRIZA and Tsipras himself are behaving towards everybody in disagreement with them.

Mr. Tsipras himself, who spend all his life in street demonstrations or organizing the occupation of public buildings went live to treat half to one million peaceful demonstrators in Athens as Mob. But the polls made among demostrators proved that a clear majority of them have voted No in the 2015 referendum.

Those who demonstrate against the “Macedonia” policy of SYRIZA represent the same, deep social revolt of Greeks to save themselves and their nation, which brought this party to power, not because, but in spite of its ideas and leading cadres, because the country was in an emergency situation, facing existential threats and because Tsipras was intelligent enough to adopt revolutionary slogans and ideas from outside his party, which he betrayed consequently.

By the way, it is rather ridiculous if not immoral to treat like that the demonstrators who went to the Constitution Square to hear Mikis Theodorakis, the legendary symbol of the Greek and international Left, or Professor Kasimatis, the leading authority in Constitutional Law in Greece, ex-advisor of PM Andreas Papandrou and an ardent critique of the neocolonial Loan agreements imposed to Greece. SYRIZA, in a classic Stalinist methodology, is portraying all people disagreeing with its policies as primitive, far right nationalists, “forgetting” that among themselves there is a number of real Leftist intellectuals and politicians, like the legendary veteran of the Greek Left Manolis Glezos, nine times condemned to death because of his political ideas and saved from execution because of the mobilization of European personalities, including Charles De Gaulle, who called his the “first Resistant in Europe”.

By attacking all those people as “nationalists”, “extremists”, “far right people”, “populists” etc. SYRIZA is not only committing political suicide, it creates gradually the conditions for a kind of low intensity civil-war in the country and of a real rise of the Far Right, if it will stay the only major force able to use the Greek national feeling. SYRIZA leaders, except those among them who are serving directly foreign interests, maybe they hope that they will develop far-right to cut the percentages of the conventional right, but in fact they play with fire, completely detached from reality and any kind of principles.

In fact, SYRIZA itself has come to power expressing and then betraying a deep feeling of social and national revolt. But even right wing Greek nationalism, even when it is adopting primitive forms, is essentially a defensive nationalism, no Greek claiming any territory outside the frontiers of Greece. The reaction on the Macedonian question is out of the huge fears of Greeks that after the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the dismemberment of Greece will follow. And in a way it did happen. The Greek state and society were not bombed by NATO as Yugoslavia, but they were destroyed and kidnapped by economic warfare by the same forces which destroyed Yugolsavia.

The potential of this question to provoke serious internal strife in Greece was is one more reason, various Greek personalities have called for a Referendum to be held about the agreement with FYROM, including Mikis Theodorakis, a proposal which can protect democratic decision making and also civil peace in the country.

Of course the proposal was rejected by SYRIZA, for decades an advocate of referendums.

SYRIZA not only does not want a referendum in Greece, he does not want it also in FYROM. The FM Kotzias has even suggested publicly to the FYROM authorities not to do it, in alliance with the pro-American and pro-NATO leaders of the Albanian community in this country.

A strong supporter of everything Soviets and East Germans were doing, including interventions in Eastern Europe, a stalinist ideologue who never permitted any doubt to himself about the regimes he was serving and a virulent critique of Western Imperialism once, Mr. Nikos Kotzias left the Greek CP in 1990. Some years afterwards he seemed to enjoy full confidence of this same “Western imperialism”, if we judge from the fact he has worked as an advisor and a kind of theoretician of Greek FM G. Papandreou, himself one of the most pro-American ever Foreign Ministers of Greece. He had also served as President of the PASOK think tank during its “modernization”, right wing turn. After not being appointed as Foreign Minister when Georges Papandreou became Prime Minister, Kotzias gradually begun to criticize his policies. He is one of the people who commanded huge influence to the shaping of Tsipras’ideas, especially as Tsipras had a very low level of education, in particular as far as it concerned foreign and international policy. We assume he has contributed a lot to the pro-western behind the scenes orientation Mr. Tsipras and SYRIZA have taken. Something which was facilitated by the fact SYRIZA has never functioned as a collective, not even to speak of a democratic political entity. All decisions were taken by Tsipras himself and a group of close friends of him, something which made eventually mush easier the manipulation of this party by various foreign centers.

The Imperial Strategy is probably to use SYRIZA in a first stage to get from Greece all concesiions they want in Cyprus, the Balkans, in the Aegean and concerning relations with Turkey and use of the Greek territory as a gigantic US military base. This is the Plan A which will have as a result the birth of the plan B. The destruction not only of the SYRIZA leadership, because of the policy it is implementing, but also a huge blow to the underlying, now more and more orphan, strong social current of a Greek national, popular and antiimperialist Left, which has shaped Greek politics since the time of the huge Resistance to Nazi Occupation.

Undermining Democracy and States: τhe Legal Tricks of the Agreement concerning NATO and its Ratification

The Agreement as signed is constructed in such a way as

1. To produce as quickly as possible and before the text is ratified by the Greek Parliament a maximum of results as far as FYROM’s integration into NATO is concerned.
2. To create enormous political difficulties to the Greek Parliament in order to make near to impossible to it to refuse to ratify it.

All that is done by reversing the usual chronology for the implementation of an international agreement.

In the first phase the agreement will be submitted to the FYROM parliament for ratification, but not to the Greek one! If the FYROM parliament will ratify it, Athens will revoke its veto to the inclusion of FYROM into NATO and EU and the Alliance will issue an invitation to FYROM  to join it. All that before the agreement is submitted to the Greek parliamentarians.

That means the political and military integration of FYROM into NATO will begin, with Americans taking care to make as much as possible a sheer formality the final act of inclusion of FYROM, which has to be ratified by all parliaments of the Members of NATO.

If things are going as planned and FYROM takes all the necessary steps it has to take changing its constitution and adopting all that in a referendum, then and only then the Greek parliament will examine the agreement and decide if it wants it and if it wants FYROM inside NATO.

In theory, Greek deputies have the possibility to cancel all that. But how logical is for FYROM to have begun accession negotiations with NATO and EU, to have satisfied all conditions put by the Greek government and then suddenly for the Greek deputies to say “Just a moment, all that was a mistake”. If they do it enormous pressures will be exercised on Greece and it will be accused of fraude.

We repeat, one can agree or disagree with the content of this agreement and with this or that solution of the dispute between Greece and FYROM. But nobody has the right to impose his views organizing coup d’ etats and circumventing the Constitutional Order and Democracy itself. The fact that this is accepted and even supported by the European Commission in one of the members of the European Union (which also happens to be the birth place of Democracy!) constitutes one more serious proof how far the EU has gone into its transformation to a totalitarian structure, acting on behalf of International Finance and NATO.

Notes

*As it happens with all agreements, there are those who like them and those who do not like them. In Greece there are those who believe that Athens should not recognize any state whose name includes the term Macedonia or its derivatives. There are also people who say that FYROM can have the name it wishes to have. In the middle there are people who say Greece cannot deny to Slav Macedonians altogether the use of the term Macedonia, but in such a form which will make clear they represent a part, but not the whole of Macedonia, as Slav Macedonian nationalism claims.  Equally conflicting views exist in FYROM. This dispute did not create any problem in the relations between two countries and nobody was remembering it until recently, when Washington asked the Tsipras and Zaev governments to solve it quickly, in order for FYROM to be invited to NATO next July and to be given pre-acession status to the EU.

**We remind our readers that this region of SE Europe, of critical importance in any war with Russia, has been transformed into a chain of small, socially and economically ruined and plundered and closely controlled western protectorates. Germany and other European countries are looting them systematically, but it is NATO and the US which make the Law, as far as geopolitics is concerned. There are only some “details” for the control of the whole region to be completed, like incorporating all Western Balkan states into NATO and its corollary, the EU and organizing regime change in Serbia.

***Look http://www.defenddemocracy.press/mikis-theodorakis-blasts-greek-governments-foreign-policy/

****First, they are able to use the SYRIZA-An.Ell.government in Athens to get concessions from Greece in foreign and military policy no other government would be able to deliver to them.

Second, they use this policy to destroy the social basis of the Greek left, to put the SYRIZA leaders into open clash with both their social base and the national feeling of Greeks. They want to finish with one of the deepest social, national and antiimperialist currents, shaping Greek policies and social ideology since the Nazi occupation, the strongest and the deepest in any European country.

Third, they want to create if possible a current of primitive nationalist Far Rigth, as a result of a series of betrayals by SYRIZA.

Such a current may be useful in the next stage of the Greek, European and Middle Eastern Crisis. A low intensity civil war or an open dictatorship, a war with Turkey or in the Balkans cannot be excluded.

Originally published on 2018-06-17

Author: Dimitris Konstantakopoulos

Source: Defend Democracy Press

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