Those murdered lie in mass graves, monuments are erected to the murderers. This is not about Belarus, much less a distant African dictatorship.
In the Balkans, freedom is very expensive, and Macedonia pays the highest price.
BGNES News Agency's documentary ''Dictate: The Murders of the Serbian Regime in Macedonia'' tells the story.
"Kill the enemy!" is what the new government in Skopje forcibly imposed in late 1944. It declared its own people the enemy. Hundreds died in the January 1945 terror known as the "Macedonian Bloody Christmas". First the disobedient were massacred, and then a creed was imposed: Love the enslaver, hate your ancestors!
"Let us not forget that these people were never brought to justice. They are killed in the most heinous way possible because someone then decided so. We have been listening to a mythology for 70 years," says Prof. Georgi Trendafilov in the documentary.
Yugoslav dictator Tito gave the task to some of his most loyal thugs - Svetozar Vukmanovic - Tempo and Milovan Djilas. Lists of the doomed were prepared by the Macedonian communist and Lazar Kolishev(ski). His father was a Bulgarian resistance fighter, and Lazar himself wrote a letter to Tsar Boris III in 1941 in which he identified himself as a Bulgarian. Lazar asks that the death sentence imposed for his communist activities be revoked. The King of the Bulgarians granted the request, and Kolishevski spent a short time in a Bulgarian prison.
His victims lie near Skopje, Veles, Shtip, Prilep, Bitola and dozens of other towns and villages in Macedonia, in mass graves, of which only one has been fully uncovered to this day.
There can be no "versions" of the truth, and no "different point of view" on the bones of the murdered, because lies have a time limit.
Kolishevski directed the massacre under the umbrella of the Unit for the Protection of the People, or OZNA, Belgrade's secret police, later known as the UDBA. Thousands of innocents died at its hand through trumped-up charges. Teachers, priests, doctors, and mayors were rounded up on Tempo's orders. Ordinary people were declared "enemies of the people", "traitors" or "collaborators of the occupiers". OZNA was the only (pseudo)law and court. Tens of thousands were sent to concentration camps.
People who today remember the horrific crimes could be counted on one hand. Descendants of those killed in Macedonia do not know the fate of their grandfathers, fathers, brothers or cousins. Victims in Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia have found peace because they are remembered. Here, however, the haunting nostalgia of a slavery washes away the ancestral blood.
"There were periods when we tried to be independent. Unfortunately, today we are again under the dictatorship of our northern neighbour Serbia," says Ljupcho Kurtelov from Ohrid.
UDBA's files have not yet been opened, its archives are inaccessible.
No one talks about the ethnic cleansing against the Bulgarians and the forced Macedonization carried out on Tito's orders. But the fate of those sacrifices that Macedonia gave to the real occupier is not forgotten by all...
"It can not always be so. I want more courage, for them to say who their fathers and grandfathers were, not to be afraid anymore! The more afraid they are, the longer those here will rule," Hristo Mihailov from Prilep urges. | BGNES
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Dimitar Ruskov, BGNES News Agency
