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                                                                                AMERICA ABROAD, Page 64

Greece's Defense Seems Just Silly


By Strobe Talbott


    Greece is reminding the world that it too is a Balkan
country, the inhabitant of a region where history often induces
hysteria. In his policy toward the disaster zone that used to
be Yugoslavia, Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis is
well on his way to deepening and widening the war there.

    When Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina declared
independence and appealed for international recognition last
year, Macedonia had no choice but to follow suit. Otherwise it
would have been swallowed up by Serbia.

    A commission of the European Community established
criteria for recognition, stressing respect for the rights of
ethnic minorities. Macedonia passed the test. Its population is
a mixture of nearly a dozen nationalities, but its political
system is democratic and pluralistic.

    The E.C. was 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 us."

    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.

    Papaconstantinou denies this charge "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."

    Another recent visitor to Washington -- Jane Miljovski, a
minister in the Macedonian government -- offers a persuasive
rebuttal: "As citizens of a newborn, almost defenseless nation,
we are afraid that if we can be bullied into changing our name,
we will next come under pressure to change our borders."

    Privately, most Western officials acknowledge that
Miljovski is right. Yet publicly the E.C. and the U.S. have, in
effect, sided with Athens on the ground that there are other,
overriding interests at stake.

    As a member of NATO, which is undergoing a post-cold war
identity crisis, and the E.C., which is trying to keep the
Maastricht treaty from unraveling, Greece has extra leverage
these days on both sides of the Atlantic. In the U.S. it has the
additional help of the powerful Greek-American lobby.

    To his credit, Mitsotakis is working to resolve the
long-simmering dispute over Cyprus and reach a rapprochement
with Turkey. He keeps hinting that if he budges on the
Macedonian question, extreme nationalists in the Greek
Parliament -- where he has only a two-vote majority -- will
bring down his government and replace it with one that will undo
his welcome diplomatic initiatives.

    Meanwhile, under the pretext of complying with
international sanctions against Serbia, Greece is blockading
fuel shipments to Macedonia. As a result, factories there have
had to shut down; crops are rotting in the fields; ambulances
are sitting useless in hospital parking lots. "It's murder
without bullets," says Miljovski.

    Economic strangulation will soon lead to social unrest,
which in turn could ignite an ethnic conflagration worse than
the one in Bosnia. Because Macedonia has large Muslim
minorities, civil war within that republic is more likely than
anywhere else to escalate into a religious and regional war that
could end up pitting Greece against any number of its neighbors,
including Turkey. Where will the overriding interests of the
U.S., the E.C. and NATO be then?

    Having heard out the Greek Foreign Minister, I'm prepared
to give him and Mitsotakis the benefit of the doubt on their
motivation: they're not guilty of irredentism -- a desire to
recover lands lost long ago -- but merely of paranoia and
myopia. The situation has all the makings of tragedy, which
Aristotle, another great Macedonian who was Alexander's teacher,
defined as the result not of wickedness but of foolish pride.