Macedonian Patriotic Organization

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Macedonian Patriotic Organization (MPO) is a political organization, founded in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1922 as Macedonian Political Organization by immigrants from Aegean Macedonia (today's northern Greece). From 1926 onward it publishes the newspaper Makedonska Tribuna. The group changed its name to Macedonian Patriotic Organization in 1952.

[edit] Controversy

Some members of MPO were against Tito's policy towards Macedonia and many have never accepted the codified version of the Macedonian language (MPO uses the Bulgarian alphabet in official documents). The MPO sought the enlightement and political and social awakening of Macedonian immigrants and Macedonian autonomy. In 1927, the sixth Congress of the MPO argued that the preservation of national culture, language, and origin was their primary goal. It sent a memorandum to the United Nations in 1946 in defense of human rights of Ethnic Macedonians of Greece. In 1949, it demanded amnesty for all Slavs from Macedonia imprisoned in Greece for declaring themselves something other than Greeks and assurance of use of Macedonian for everyday purposes.

By the 1970s however, MPO's attitude towards Macedonian autonomy changed drastically. Many members rejected the goal of their ancestors for an independent Macedonia and have proclaimed that MPO should aim at the union of Macedonia with Bulgaria. In 1972 MPO protested to the United Nations with regard to the imprisonment in Yugoslav Macedonia of students in Skopje who had declared themselves as Bulgarian. They also rejected the Macedonian Orthodox Church and fought to preserve the Bulgarian Church in Macedonia.

[edit] References

Sojourners and Settlers: The Macedonian Community in Toronto to 1940[1]By Lillian Petroff
Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples [2] By Paul R. Magocsi
The Bulgarian-Americans - Page 71 by Nikolay G. Altankov
The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World [3]- Page 87 by Loring M. Danfort
http://www.everyculture.com/multi/Bu-Dr/Bulgarian-Americans.html
An American Macedonian , George Lebamoff http://www.promacedonia.org/en/gl/index.html