Getting Chummy Over Chameria (Northern Epirus - Southern Albania)

by Dean Kalimniou
Australian Macedonian Advisory Council
January 16, 2009

"It does not seem to be a good year for Greece. Greece seems to be losing ground on the Macedonian issue, it seems to have lost any sort of edge it ever may have had over Turkey and sits idly by as the Ecumenical Patriarchate is threatened by the Grey Wolves, with the tacit approval of the powers that be. Now Albania is repeating its irredentist claims and insulting the highest officer of Greece".

When the Greek Consul-General was asked why he has never deigned to respond to the invitation of the Panepirotic Federation of Australia's invitation to him to attend the annual doxology celebrating the liberation of Ioannina and the declaration of the autonomy of Northern Epirus in 1914, he smugly retorted: "Well, what do you want me to do? Invade Albania and kill all the Albanians so that you can all go and live there?" On another occasioned, he warned darkly: "Stop referring to Northern Epirus and then we will talk."Indeed, right up until the end of the Cold War.

Greeks who dared to voice concern over human rights abuses against Greeks in Albania were generally referred to as hyper-nationalistic, ultra-right wing radicals by certain sections of the Greek community and the press. Even after the fall of Communism, when it was apparent to all that the 'paradise' that Hoxha's Stalinist regime was supposed to be, was nothing more than hell on earth, those persons who had built their reputation and pride upon the maintenance of their particular ideology, found it hard to sympathise with the hapless Northern Epirots who have been persecuted for well on a hundred years now.

In scenes reminiscent of 1923, when Asia Minor refugees fled genocide to re-settle in Greece and were called Turks, the Northern Epirots who fled poverty and persecution to settled in Greece after 1992, were called Albanians and treated as objects of derision. Further, despite the fact that the various Epirot organizations that exist throughout the world have consistently striven to showcase human rights abuses in Albania, their task is Herculean. For they do not have to convince world opinion alone.

Firstly, they have to convince a doubting or contemptuous Greek world that is totally ignorant of what lies beyond its front fence and which, in its smug bourgeois comfort, still persists in labeling people who are only interested in the human rights of the Greek minority in Albania as fascists, that a sizeable minority just to the north of them is being harried out of its ancestral home and that further, its persecutors are making demands on Greek territory.

more see analyse: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/88045