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Dossiers are still beeing made in this country!

Eftim GASHEV, A Macedonian and a former persecuted

Forum

http://www.forum.com.mk/Arhiva/Forum61/megaintervju/megaintervju.htm

- What do you think should be done today to those people, from the other side (those who persecuted you, V.K.)? Many of them have died, but some are still alive? 

- GASHEV: Among them, somebody must bear the responsibility before the history. In our history there are big gaps regarding the solution of the Macedonian question. We must read what Tempo (Tempo: Tito's henchman sent to Macedonia in 1943 to "stir the antifascist struggle" against Bulgaria, V.K.) wrote in his memoirs - he says that when he arrived in February 1943 here (in Macedonia, V.K.) there was nothing (nothing yet organised, V.K.). Nor partisans, nor party (Communist Party, V.K.). He asked then whether there were some main headquarters of the resistance movement? He was told "yes" and that Apostolski is the leader. Well, asked Tempo, in which mountain are the headquarters of Apostolski? Well, he is not in any mountain, Tempo was told, he is here in Skopje, working as a Bulgarian bureaucrat. (Mihajlo Apostolski, a big boss and a "hero" in post-WWII Yugoslav Macedonia. Before the he war was a major in the General Staff of the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and during the war - a major in the Bulgarian army in Macedonia. V.K.) Tempo found Apostolski and asked him whether he, as a well- educated officer would liked to go in the mountains and to fight against the occupiers? Apostolski told him: "No, I don't want to go in the mountains! I have graduated in the [Yugoslav] General Staff Academy, so that when the resistance movement in Macedonia startedto be organised, then I could come to lead it"...

That is, Tempo himself says that NOB in Macedonia ("NOB, Narodno-Osvoboditelna Borba"

 - "People's Liberation Struggle" of the Yugo-Macedonian partisans, V.K.), that at that time in Macedonia there were only isolated groups of people who were hiding from the [Bulgarian] occupier as illegals. They did not wage a struggle against the occupiers, to fight they. They were shooting against them only when they have been detected.

- You risk to be accused that you undermine the "holy foundations" of the Macedonian statehood, the NOB, etc. - GASHEV: These foundations for me are not holy. You see, I regard highly one part of this story. But there are also lies inside it. Tempo came to Macedonia and created the Communist party of Macedonia as part of Yugoslavia. (The original pre-war communist organisations in Macedonia immediately in 1941 joined the Bulgarian Communist Party and refused to have anything to do with Yugoslavia and Tito. This made Tito send Tempo to Macedonia and to organise an internal communist coup. V.K.) I don't underestimate these people (the Yugo-oriented Mac-communists, V.K.), but they were three people without two! Why only in Macedonia there were special delegates of the Central Committee of Yugoslavia - Shiljo, Radosavshevich, Kolishevski?...

That is, we celebrate 18th August 1943 as the day of the Macedonian Army - at that day there was created the first more substantial military formation in Macedonia, the battalion "Mirche Acev" consisting of one hundred people, to whom I am ready to show my respect! This is 18th August 1943 (i.e. just one year before the end of the Bulgarian rule, V.K.), one or two hundred people, and nowadays they say that we finished the war with one hundred thousand people!? They lie! With a complete mobilisation in Macedonia we could reach only around 80,000 people. Kiro Gligorov (the former Yugo-Communist President of RoM, V.K.) and the people around him claim that 25,000 people died in the NOB (National Liberation Struggle against the Bulgarians, V.K.) - They are lying! Give us the records to check! The highest casualties were on the Srem front, around 2,500 people (the Srem front, in northern Serbia, where the Mac-partisans were transferred by Tito to fight the Germans after September 1944, V.K.), and why did we go to that front?

- Why do we talk about these things, 50 years old as they are? Why do you insist on this? My generation (the generation of the interviewer, V.K.) grew up in one country (Yugoslavia, V.K.), and now we lived up to live in a second country... 

- GASHEV: Not a second country - this is the first one! - Excuse me, but why do you want to take away the youth years of our generation? We didn't live bad in this Yugoslavia - on contrary. You spent your youth in the prisons, but didn't have a bad life in Yugoslavia, and we do not fell less Macedonian then you. 

- GASHEV: I do not scheme to take away the youth years of your generation. But, as our new president (Boris Trajkovski, V.K.) said: "Enough with the history, let's us look to the future" - if we have no history, if this history is not defined, then where are we heading to?