LETTERS . . . et dona ferentes
Sir: Patrick Leigh Fermor's article CA clean sheet for Paeonia', 12 September) was like an elaborate version of the many abusive letters I have received during the last cou- ple of weeks from Greece, full of fanciful observations on my character and motives (even, absurdly, on my conversational style), but not disproving anything I wrote.
`There is no pretence of objectivity in Mr Malcolm's approach,' he says. He is wrong. What I wrote was, I believe, an objectively true account of the nature of modern Greek nationalism in public life and gov- ernment policy. I took great care to check my facts — unlike Mr Fermor, who describes the early Bulgars as Slays, and repeats a feeble Greek government lie about the design on the new Macedonian banknotes. But whatever facts I present, Mr Fermor seems uninterested in them. When I offer specific details, he dismisses them as things too 'small' to be worth mentioning. (I took care to present representative facts, or — in the case of the nationalist newspa- per — to state how typical or untypical the evidence was. The theory about the Vlachs which Mr Fermor regards as too absurd to be worth summarising is in fact the ortho- dox view among modern Greek writers.) When I cite statistics, he suggests that statistics are not to be taken seriously. And when I draw any interpretative conclusions, he dismisses them as 'prejudices'.
I do not think he strengthens his argu- ment by concentrating so heavily on vilify- ing my motives. I made the commonplace observation that Turkey has grown in strategic importance after the fall of the communist bloc; he calls this 'fawning on muscular Turkey'. (No doubt if I stated that Paris is the capital of France, he would accuse me of cringing sycophancy towards the Parisians.) I reported, factually, what I had been told by Greek Slays who have lost their jobs after complaining of human rights abuses; instead of considering their Plight, Mr Fermor fantasises about the tones of 'silky bedside condolence' in which I spoke to my 'proteges'. This would be offensive were it not so patently silly.
What errors, in the end, does Mr Fermor find in my article? He finds fault with my English; apparently he cannot understand that if a campaign is described as unani- mous, it is the campaigners who are said to
be of one mind, not their audience. He thinks he has caught me out on Tacitus's Germania; but this was a reductio ad absur- durn, and he has fallen into the absurdity. What Tacitus meant by Germania included
large parts of modern Switzerland, Hol- land, Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria. If Mr Fermor seriously thinks
that modern political geography must be determined by ancient history, then he
should start campaigning for the German annexation of those areas.
He writes that the Macedonians of ex- Yugoslavia are guilty of 'the misappropria- tion of the name of "Macedonia" as a sin- gle entity'. Here, at the very nub of the issue, he has got things back-to-front. The ex-Yugoslav republic is not trying to pre- vent the Greeks from calling their part of geographical Macedonia 'Macedonia' too. It is the Greeks who are insisting that their part is the only part that can bear the name of the whole.
When I wrote that the ex-Yugoslav Macedonians called their country Macedo- nia because they had no other name, I meant (as I made quite clear) that this was the only name most of them had used throughout their lives to describe their land, their language and their own identity. I did not mean that it would be impossible to dredge up some fancy name from ancient history and foist it upon them. It is of course an amusing scholarly game for Mr Fermor to pore over atlases of ancient history and pick out nice-sounding names that might fit the same area. But he seems not to realise that what he is dealing with so casually here is the sense of selfhood of more than a million adult human beings.
They are not children, to be given a pretty new name like a toy and told to run along and play with it.
As for the abuses suffered by the Slav and Turkish minorities in Greece, Mr Fer- mor brushes these aside as 'provincial mis- deeds' and 'vexations'. Those are weasel- words with which to describe the total sup- pression of a language and a culture, the arbitrary stripping of citizenship from hun- dreds of people, and the confiscation of land on a huge scale. Mr Fermor did at least describe the ethnic Turks of Greece as 'Turks'. For that, he could be sentenced under Greek law to 18 months' imprison- ment. If he were imprisoned, would he sit there contentedly, consoling us with the observation that he was not living in 'leafy Bucks'? Would he think it 'hoggish' of me to draw attention to his plight? Or does it only become hoggish to complain when the victims are themselves ethnic Turks Greek citizens who, he thinks, one can rea- sonably expect to be punished for the actions of a foreign government in Istanbul and Cyprus?
Noel Malcolm
56 Doughty Street, London WCI
`And now a jingle in A minor . .
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