CBC: Greece is for sale, and the questions that raises for Aegean Macedonia

http://www.cbc.ca/news/interactives/greece-selloff-infographic/index.html

So, I have to wonder, who will benefit from the selling off all of these assets in Greece? Could it possibly be some of the exact same people that got Greece into this mess in the first place? The same corrupt Greek politicians and businessmen in Athens, and their corrupt friends in New York, London and Berlin?
For Macedonians, another question is: How will this national “yard sale” in Greece affect our oppressed brothers and sisters in Aegean Macedonia?

For 100 years, the Aegean Macedonian region in Greece has been underdeveloped economically, due to a series of bloody wars, and due to the state-sanctioned genocide and forced exile of the Macedonian people who are indigenous to the region, starting from before 1913. This was followed by their replacement with Turkish-speaking Christian refugees from Asia Minor, starting after 1922.

Like other parts of Macedonia carved out of the Ottoman Empire by foreign powers Serbia and Bulgaria, the region of Aegean Macedonia has always served as the agricultural breadbasket of Greece, which is one reason why Greeks today are so sensitive about the possibility of losing their country’s relatively new acquisition of land.

For many decades, the land in Aegean Macedonia has been allowed to remain in an under-industrialized state, with the focus always on agriculture, to feed the large southern areas of Greece proper that suffer from poor soil and water conditions. Even today, northern Greece has one of the lowest population densities in all of Europe; a lower population has always made the region easier for Greece to control, from the invasion period, to the fascism period, to the Euro-colonial period of today.

In 1991, the Republic of Macedonia declared its full independence from Belgrade, and slowly began developing an economy of its own. This included the manufacturing of value-added products, not just the cheap export of raw materials to factories in Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, as had taken place under the Yugoslav regime. But in Greece and Bulgaria today, the Aegean and Pirin regions of Macedonia remain economically oppressed in each country, much in the same way that the ethnic Macedonian communities are politically oppressed in those same regions.

With the sell-off of state assets in 2011, one wonders how this will affect the political sphere in northern Greece. The Athens government has always used a carrot-and-stick approach to keep Aegean Macedonians “in line” on issues of national identity and emancipation. One such carrot was the promise of a government job at a state institution, as long as you kept your Macedonian culture behind closed doors.

But now, the new German or Austrian owners of those operations will not consider how outwardly “pseudo-Hellenic” a worker has been, before deciding to hire him or her. They will hopefully make hiring decisions based on merit, which will be a fundamental cultural shift for the many peoples of modern Greece.

Thus, while Mr. Panandreou continues to have tense meetings with his American and European superiors, the system of control in modern Greece loses a valuable tool. It can no longer offer those same state employment jobs to ethnic Macedonians, as part of their efforts to manipulate the poverty-stricken in that community.

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