Let's hope that this obscure,poisonous Balkan "ethnic" conflict doesn't spread to Australia, as others have in the past.

Before Alexander the Great, the ancient Greeks regarded the Macedonian people as barbarians--everybody loves a winnner!

I was beginning to think that maybe there was some history here that I was not aware of. . . . then I got to the end of the article. What a dissapointment, just another piece of trash that I must now discard completely.

This is based on MY KNOWLEDGE (AND I STRESS KNOWLEDGE), that there are thousands of Macedonian refugees that were forced out of Greece, and unable to claim their family property. This article dismisses this part of history, and now I must assume the rest is also TRASH. Like I say, ... a disappointment.

perhaps one way to stop people thinking it's just the name is to stop whining about the name.

Young Aristide,

Your assertions about WWII history are wrong.... You imply that Macedonians colloborated with the Nazis...

My grandfather sepnt two years in a German labour camp as a forced labourer before joining the Macedonian resistence. I find your comments deeply offensive.

You seem to forget that the Macedonian Partizans, independent of Tito's Yugoslav Partizans, existed and in 1944 under communist pressure where forcibly merged with Tito's movement.

The figures given are 85,000 Macedonian partizans. You also fail to mention the large number of ethnic Macedonians who fought in the Democratic Army of Greece (DAG) as conscripts. Many later joined the Greek communist resistance not out of ideology but a promise of national rights, which Greece still denies.

In today's Macedonia any mention of changing of borders or grandiose empires is seen as a relic of the past.

see my article:

http://www.maknews.com/html/articles/uzunov/uzunov_srem.html

regards
Sasha Uzunov
journalist / ex Australian soldier

The 2 correspondents to this article are pretty poor.

'Mac' decides to turn this into an "UNAUSTRALIAN" argument but then can't help but expose himself as a Slav-Macedonian with his Anti-Greek comments regarding Alexander the Great.

And the second writer has the temerity to trash the article when the previous article on this site by a member of the Slav-Macedonians of Australia wrote an article that implied that the Ancient Macedonians spoke Slavic!

In the end, the editors of ONO have again proven to be poor in managing the type of articles that appear here.

The Macedonian issue is not a matter of having 2 sides of the story written (and old Neo-Right trick to criticise the so-called leftist bias in the media). They should have sought some unbiased and academic sources to write their articles.

Savvas Tzionis,

Wrong,mate, I'm not any sort of hyphenated Australian and I have no Balkan DNA as far as I know. I'm sure In the long history of the area there are atrocities and injustices all round and OZ is a free country with free speech, however, my earlier comments stand. In other words, "no violence please, we're Australians".
My comments in regard to Macedonians and the classical Greek attitude towards them, are neither pro- nor anti- Greek but drawn from history.