History of The Republic of Macedonia - 1912-1944

1912-1944

The region was captured by Serbia during First Balkan War of 1912 and was subsequently annexed to Serbia in the post-war peace treaties. It had no administrative autonomy and was called Južna Srbija ("Southern Serbia") or Stara Srbija ("Old Serbia"). After the First World War, the Kingdom of Serbia joined the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929, the kingdom was officially renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and was divided into provinces called banovinas. The territory of Vardar Banovina had Skopje as its capital and it included what eventually became the modern Republic of Macedonia.

After World War I (1914–1918) the Slavs in Serbian (Vardar) Macedonia were regarded as southern Serbs and the language they spoke a southern Serbian dialect. The Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian schools were closed, the Bulgarian priests and all non-Serbian teachers were expelled. The policy of Serbianization in the 1920s and 1930s clashed with pro-Bulgarian sentiment stirred by Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) detachments infiltrating from Bulgaria, whereas local communists favoured the path of self-determination.

In 1925, D.J. Footman, the British vice consul at Skopje, addressed a lengthy report for the Foreign Office. He wrote that "the majority of the inhabitants of Southern Serbia are Orthodox Christian Macedonians, ethnologically more akin to the Bulgarians than to the Serbs. He also pointed to the existence of the tendency to seek an independent Macedonia with Salonica as its capital. During World War II, the Vardar Banovina was occupied between 1941 and 1944 by Italian-ruled Albania, which annexed the Albanian-populated western regions, and pro-German Bulgaria, which occupied the remainder. The occupying powers persecuted those inhabitants of the province who opposed the regime; this prompted some of them to join the Communist resistance movement of Josip Broz Tito. However, the Bulgarian army was partially recruited from the local population, which formed as much as 40% to 60% of the soldiers in certain battalions.