PM Nikola Gruevski said in an interview with Italian national TV station RAI that Macedonia has met all standards for the country's NATO accession, and about 75 percent of the eight European Union benchmarks, whereas their completion is expected by the beginning of October.
Pertaining to the name row, Gruevski stated that Greece makes an unprincipled blockage by asking that Macedonia changes its name, but also to determine its new name.
"Greece had already imposed such blockage in June, during the EU Presidency of Slovenia's, which assured the support of all Union member-states on the start of accession talks by the year-end, while Greece asked that the content of the report is not submitted to the European Council.
This means that Greece already blocked Macedonia once, so it will probably do this again, abusing its position in the European Union, devaluing the possibility and necessity for consensus among member-states when passing decisions", underlined PM Gruevski in the interview with RAI, adding it is a matter of time when would the EU stop tolerating this behavior by Greece.
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Greek argumentation against "Skopje"
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Greece shaken up over UN and newly announced ECHR Visit
The UN Minorities Expert Gay McDougall is in Greece. According to the Macedonians in Greece, the Government in Athens will try in every way to show the visit as non important, although, they say, Greek Media has been following the story with great interest. Namely, for the past two days, the UN representative is in Thrace speaking to the Turkish minority which is been referred by Athens as the “Muslim speaking" population - According to the Greek Government, “Muslim” is a language.
The Turks are a majority in Thrace and have decades old complaints of not being allowed to identify themselves as ethnic Turks.
The Greek Government does accept a ’muslim’ minority, without specifying their ethnicity.
The Turks and Pomaks are seeking autonomy for their region. McDougall also visited the Roma population.
Today, McDougall is meeting with Macedonians in Voden. She is also scheduled to meet Macedonians in Solun, Kostur, Lerin, Kukus and the villages gravitating around those cities.
The UN representative visiting the area insisting to be accompanied by representatives of the Macedonians in Greece even though this request drew a strong response from the Greek Government.
Instead, Mina finds, the Greek Government had planned for McDougall to avoid the regions where Macedonians lived, and instead take her to the municipality of Kutlesh, to show the Vlach minority.
According to Greek daily Eleftheros Typos, in its article “Minority Games”, Greece is one of the three countries that McDougall will visit this year. The other two where minority abuse is recorded are Ethiopia and Hungary.
Typos says official Athens is not commenting much on the visit, though Diplomats have confirmed this visit is a problem for Greece. The Daily further explains there's been great interest by the Americans to show the “Turkish Identity” of the Muslims in Thrace. Parallel to this, the axis Ankara - Skopje which developed after the Bucharest Summit grows stronger with the aim to create minority problems for Greece, concludes the Greek daily. Yesterday afternoon, the Greek Government received a note from the European Commission of Human Rights which announced their visit at the beginning of next month._____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
