Greek ambassador refutes ‘Macedonian minority’ claim in BBC report
Greece's Ambassador to the UK, Dimitris Karamitsos-Tziras, send a letter of complaint to the BBC on Monday, following a report which spoke of the existence of a “Macedonian minority” in the country.
Karamitsos-Tziras said the report contains “important historical inaccuracies and distortions against Greece” and “does not do justice” to the Prespes agreement by attempting to raise a “non-existent issue.”
The article, titled “Greece's invisible minority – the Macedonian Slavs,” argued that, by ratifying the Prespes accord with the renamed North Macedonia, “Greece has implicitly recognised the existence of a Macedonian language and ethnicity.”
The agreement, signed between Athens and Skopje to resolve the 27-year-old name dispute, does not recognize an ethnicity, but a nationality, the ambassador said, adding that while Greece recognizes equality before the law, the country recognizes only one minority – the Muslim.
“Greece maintains the right to refer to the people who belong to the majority ethnic group residing in the neighboring country as it has done to date, while the citizens of that ethnicity retain the right to self-determination,” he said in the letter.
