By Christopher Deliso
The tense ordeal of four Macedonian journalists detained by police in a northern Greek village on Monday is gaining wider attention, and has caused an international outcry against the perceived heavy-handedness of Greek authorities- and what their apparent contempt for the free press may be covering for.
For their part, the Greeks are claiming that the Macedonian government is trying to stir up trouble; Greek Foreign Ministry Spokesman Giorgos Koumoutsakos accused Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski of engaging in “a provocative effort to blatantly distort the truth,” reported Kathimerini. By daring to speak out against the crackdown, the Macedonian leader is, according to Koumoutsakos, making “a new, unacceptable attempt to intervene in Greek domestic affairs.”
However, the Greek version of ‘the truth,’ which states that the journalists were somehow blocking military movements, and in the end left Greece of their own free will, is wildly at variance with what the journalists themselves experienced, as we will see below. It also ignores what local witnesses claim is a recent legacy of violence against civilians, and broken promises by the army in this normally quiet border region.
The journalists, from A1 Television and the Nova Makedonija newspaper, were detained by police near the Florina-area village of Lofi (Za’brdeni in Macedonian) and interrogated, after they had sought to interview ethnically Macedonian villagers involved with protests against a Greek Army military operation in the region (a newspaper report cites the villagers as being opposed to the operation because “the army’s use of live ammunition interferes with their farming.”
The journalists, who were consistently barked at in Greek by police despite not knowing the language particularly well, were threatened with having their equipment confiscated and ordered to leave the country. It is uncertain as to whether they will ever be allowed to return.
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