Report: Name Dispute Threatens to Partition Macedonia

World | September 28, 2010, Tuesday // 20:01|  views

Picured: Macedonian PM Nikola Gruevski. Photo by BGNES

The failure to resolve its name dispute with Greece, could be potentially lethal for Macedonia, according to a report by an US think-tank.

Even though the Orhid Accords that settled the rights of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia made Macedonia more functional than Bosnia and Herzegovina, the situation in not stable, according to a report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, as cited by the BGNES news agency.

The CSIS report concludes that the wide-ranging rights granted to the Albanian minority in Macedonia has created a trends towards a bi-national state.

The factor that can bring about this development is considered to be Macedonia's decade-long name dispute with Greece.

The CSIS document says that the EU countries either back Greece or are neutral in the dispute, while the US President Barack Obama is unlikely to pressure Greece into resolving it.

Thus, Greece is said to have a diminishing desire to compromise with Macedonia especially after the Macedonian government undertook some provocative actions such as the naming of an airport in Skopje after Alexander the Great.

The CSIS report warns about the possibility of radicalization of Macedonia's ethnic Albanian population that can lead to demands for decentralization, confederation, or even partition of Macedonia.

To avoid such a scenario, the CSIS advises the US government to pressure Macedonia into accepting the solution to the name dispute offered by special UN Envoy Matthew Nimetz.

The notorious name dispute between Macedonia and Greece has pushed the latter to block Macedonia's accession to NATO and the EU. Greece is uneasy about its northern neighbor using the name "Republic of Macedonia" because much of Northern Greece is an administrative region called Macedonia after the historic and geographic region where it is located.

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Tags: macedonia, FYROM, greece, Matthew Nimetz, greece, name dispute, Skopje, Center for Strategic and International Studies

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