Historian Dragi Gjorgiev, chairman of the Macedonian team in the joint Macedonian-Bulgarian Commission for Historical and Educational Affairs, believes that Prime Minister Zoran Zaev’s statement on deleting the adjective “Bulgarian” from the fascist occupier of monuments and textbooks is a message to Bulgaria that reconciliation between the two peoples should be discussed.
According to Gjorgiev, the real words are “forgiving, but not forgetting”.
– When it comes to the so-called policies of remembering a nation for its past then for making decisions about that policy, a memory that usually comes down to what is written on the monuments and how the public perceives that past, seen through the eyes of politics, then many debates, conversations are needed, consensus is needed in the public to make a certain decision in which way a certain event or person from the past will be presented. I do not see this statement of our Prime Minister as a statement that will be implemented immediately and which will immediately go to the field from tomorrow to delete some adjectives from what has been established so far. Rather, I see that statement as an attempt, a message to the other side that in terms of historical reconciliation between the Macedonian and Bulgarian people should be discussed, all painful issues that exist between us and them should be discussed and that this is the solution to come to reconciliation,” said Gjorgiev in an interview with Sitel TV.
