After a public outcry over a BBC story referring to a Macedonian minority in Greece and a Macedonian language, the British broadcaster added a section to the report on Saturday outlining Greece’s position, Kathimerini reported.
The section says that the Greek government officially recognizes only one minority – the Muslims in Thrace – and that it has historically regarded the Macedonian Slavs of Greece’s Macedonia region as a linguistic rather than a national group.
It went on to add that the Prespes agreement says that the nationality of the people of North Macedonia is “Macedonian/citizen of the Republic of North Macedonia” and makes no presumption about the existence of a Macedonian ethnicity.
The BBC report said that by ratifying the agreement with the newly renamed Republic of North Macedonia, Greece has implicitly recognised the existence of a Macedonian language and ethnicity.
The use of the name “Macedonia” by the neighbouring nation state implicitly acknowledges that Macedonians are a people in their own right, and opens the door to hard questions about the history of Greece’s own Macedonian minority, BBC wrote.
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