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Metodija Andonov-Čento

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Metodija Andonov-Čento (Macedonian: Методија Андонов-Ченто; Bulgarian: Методи Андонов-Ченто; 17 August 1902 – 24 July 1957) was a Macedonian revolutionary, partisan, statesman, the first president of the Anti-Fascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia and of the People's Republic of Macedonia in the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia after the Second World War. In the Bulgarian historiography he is often considered a Bulgarian.[1][2][3] The name of Čento was a taboo in Yugoslav Macedonia, but he was rehabilitated during the 1990s, after the country gained its independence.[4]

Metodija Andonov-Čento
Методија Андонов-Ченто
Born(1902-08-17)17 August 1902
Prilep, Manastir Vilayet, Ottoman Empire (present-day North Macedonia)
Died24 July 1957(1957-07-24) (aged 54)
Prilep, PR Macedonia, FPR Yugoslavia (present day North Macedonia)
NationalityOttoman/Bulgarian/Yugoslav
Organization(s)Yugoslav Partisans (People's Liberation Army of Macedonia); Anti-fascist Assembly for the National Liberation of Macedonia

Biography

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Early life

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Metodi Andonov was born in Prilep, which was then part of the Manastir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire. His father was from Pletvar, while his mother was from Lenište. After the Balkan Wars in 1913 the area was ceded to Serbia.[5] During the World War I Bulgarian occupation the authorities consisted of local activists and thus were popular enough there.[6] After the war the area was ceded to the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). As a child, he worked in opium poppy fields and harvested tobacco. During his adolescence, he was considered to be an excellent gymnast. He graduated from trade school in Prilep and in 1926 he opened a grocery store and provided himself with a decent living. On March 25, 1930, in Novi Sad, he entered into a civil marriage with Vasilka Spirova Pop-Atanasova. In the interwar period the young local intelligentsia attempted at a separate Macedonian way of national development, as a reaction of the controversial domestic policy of serbianization.[7] Čento underwent such a transformation from pro-Bulgarian to an ethnic Macedonian.[8]

 
Young Čento with his parents.

In 1926 he opened a shop and was engaged in retail trade and politics. On 25 March 1930 he married Vasilka Spirova Pop Atanasova in Novi Sad and fathered four children. At that time Čento headed a group of young Macedonian nationalists, who took up decidedly an anti-Serbian position. In fact the politicians in Belgrade actually helped to strengthen the developing Macedonian identity by promoting forcible Serbianization. He was a sympathizer of Vladko Macek's idea on the creation of a separate Banovina of Croatia and after its realization in 1939 proclaimed the thesis on the foundation of a separate Banovina of Macedonia. At the 1938 Yugoslav elections, he was elected deputy from the Croatian Peasant Party, but didn't become a Member of Parliament because of a manipulation with the electoral system. In 1939, he was imprisoned at Velika Kikinda for co-organizing the anti-Serbian Ilinden Demonstrations in Prilep. The following year, he imposed the use of the Macedonian language in school lectures and was therefore imprisoned at Bajina Bašta and sentenced to death by the government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for advocating the use of a language other than Serbo-Croatian. On 15 April 1941 he was presented to a firing squad, but was pardoned just prior to being shot, due to the public pressure on the background of the Blitzkrieg conducted by the Axis Powers during their invasion of Yugoslavia.

During World War II

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Čento during his internment in a labour camp in Bulgaria.

After the capitulation of Yugoslavia, Čento was set free from prison and came in contact with the right-wing Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) activists and pro-Bulgarian political forces.[9] The Macedonian communists also fell in the sphere of influence of the Bulgarian Communist Party under Metodi Shatorov's leadership, with whom Čento was also in close contact. Although he received at that time an invitation to collaborate with the new Bulgarian authorities Čento refused, considering that idea unpromising and insisting on independence. In 1942 Čento began to sympathize with the resistance and his store was used as a front for the Macedonian Partisans, which prompted Bulgarian authorities to arrest him. By the end of 1942 he was interned in the inland of the country and later sent to a labor camp.

 
Čento with his family.

Upon his release in the fall of 1943, Čento met Kuzman Josifovski, a member of the General Staff of the Partisan units of Macedonia, who convinced him to join them. As result Čento went to the German occupation zone of Vardar Macedonia, then part of Albania, where he became a member of the General Staff of the resistance. In December 1943, Čento was elected chairman of the Initiative committee for the organization of the Antifascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia (ASNOM). In June, Čento along with Emanuel Čučkov and Kiril Petrušev met with Josip Broz Tito on the island of Vis for consultations due to their activity. The meeting was held on June 24, with the Macedonian delegation raising the issue of United Macedonia after the German retreat. In August 1944, he was elected as President of Anti-Fascist Assembly of the National Liberation of Macedonia. At his initiative, at its first meeting were invited former IMRO activists, related to the Bulgarian Action Committees, who he wanted to associate to the administration of the future state.

Čento's goal was to create a fully independent United Macedonian state, but after by mid-November 1944 the Partisans had established military and administrative control of the region, it became clear that Macedonia should be constituent republic within the new SFR Yugoslavia. Čento saw this as a second period of Serbian dominance in Macedonia and insisted on independence for the republic from the federal Yugoslav authorities. In this way, he clashed with Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo, Josip Broz Tito's envoy to Macedonia and Lazar Koliševski, the leader of the ruling Communist Party of Macedonia.

After World War II

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Čento as a prisoner in Idrizovo.

The new communist authorities started a policy fully implementing the pro-Yugoslav line and took hard measures against the opposition. Čento publicly condemned the killings carried out by the authorities in parliament and sent a protest to the Macedonian Supreme Court. He supported the Skopje soldiers' rebellion when officers from the Gotse Delchev Brigade, mutinied in the garrison stationed in Skopje Fortress, but were suppressed by an armed intervention.[10] Čento opposed the sending of Macedonian Partisans to the Syrmian Front. Čento wanted to send it to Thessaloniki, then abandoned by the Germans, for the purpose of creating a United Macedonia. He also opposed the planned return of Serbian colonists, expelled by the Bulgarians. By the voting of Art. 1 of the new constitution of the SFRY, which lacked the ability of the constituent republics to leave the federation, he defiantly left the parliament in Belgrade. After disagreements with the policies of the new authorities, Čento resigned.[11]

In 1946, he went back to Prilep, where he established contacts with illegal anti-Yugoslav group, with ideas close to these of the banned Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, which insisted on Independent Macedonia.[12][13] Čento openly called for Macedonia to secede from Yugoslavia and decided to go incognito at the Paris Peace Conference and to advocate for Macedonia's independence. He was arrested in the summer of 1946, after being caught reportedly crossing illegal the border with Greece in order to visit Paris.[14] In November 1946 Čento was brought before the Macedonian tribunal.[15] The court included high ranking communist-politicians as Lazar Mojsov and Kole Čašule. The fabricated charges against him were of being a Western spy, working against the SR Macedonia as part of SFR Yugoslavia, and being in contact with IMRO terrorist, who supported a pro-Bulgarian Independent Macedonia as envisaged by Ivan Mihailov.[16][17][18] He was sentenced to eleven years in prison under forced labor.[19] He spent more than 9 years in the Idrizovo prison, but as a result of the conditions there, Čento became seriously ill and was released before the end of his sentence. In his hometown, he worked digging holes for telegraph poles to save his four children from starvation. He died at home on 24 July 1957 after sickness from torture in prison.

Legacy

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Monument of Metodija Andonov-Čento on Macedonia Square in Skopje

Metodija Andonov-Čento was rehabilitated in 1991 with a decision of the Supreme Court of Macedonia in which it annulled the verdict against Čento from 1946.[20] In 1992, his family and followers established a Čento Foundation, which initiated a lawsuit for damages against the Government of Macedonia. Before Čento was rehabilitated in 1991 in Macedonia he was often described by the Bulgarian communist historiography as a Bulgarian.[21] He is still considered as such by some Bulgarian historians.[22][23] A similar view has been expressed by Hugh Poulton and therefore criticized by Victor Friedman,[24] though this view still exists in the specialized literature.[25]

Čento had a son, Ilija, and a daughter, Marija.[26] Ilija authored a book My Father Metodija Andovo-Čento in 1999. In it, he states that his father identified as a Macedonian and fought for Macedonian unity.[27]

VMRO-DPMNE commemorated him as a martyr for the Macedonian national cause and in their second term, he began to be regarded as the most important Macedonian statesman in modern Macedonian history. In 2010, a five-meter-tall marble statue was erected in his honor in Skopje, depicting him in civilian clothes.[20]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Rankovich himself opposes Cento's thesis of brotherhood with the Bulgarian people with an address to Pavel Shatev, already Minister of Justice, at a reception with Tito after the first session of the Chamber of Nations: "What are you looking for here, Bulgarian dog?" Cento witnessed this outburst. Returning from Belgrade, he declared to his friends: "Brothers, we are deceived! You know, we are Bulgarians and we thought like Macedonians to cross the bridge. Alas! There is no life with the Serbs". Коста Църнушанов, "Македонизмът и съпротивата на Македония срещу него", София, 1992 година, Унив. издателство "Св. Климент Охридски, стр 275-282.
  2. ^ "New Macedonia" under the heading "Against Cento's theses" writes: "We must fight against the Great Bulgarians, who today cannot openly say that Macedonia is a Bulgarian country and that Macedonians are Macedonian Bulgarians"... The most cruel provocation against the political understandings of Metodi Cento, which the YKP qualifies as Bulgarian, was carried out with the killing of 54 prominent Bulgarians in Veles. Славе Гоцев, Борби на българското население в Македония срещу чуждите аспирации и пропаганда 1878-1945, София, 1991 година, Унив. издателство "Св. Климент Охридски, стр. 183-187.
  3. ^ "After 45 years in the Republic of Macedonia, voices were heard for the rehabilitation of the first Speaker of the National Assembly, Metodi Andonov-Cento, but no longer as a Bulgarian, but as a "Macedonian"... Here are the reasons for the massacre of Metodi Andonov-Cento, one of the most - the bright personalities in the post-war development of Vardar Macedonia, allowed herself in those dark times of the Tito-Kolishev genocide against Bulgaria to express a different from the YKP, essentially Bulgarian-phile position. This is actually what the cational seal in Skopje is trying to hide, making timid attempts to his rehabilitation, but hiding the truth of why he was actually sentenced in such an unscrupulous manner to 11 years in prison." Веселин Ангелов, Премълчани истини: лица, събития и факти от българскарта история 1941-1989, библиотека Сите Българи заедно, Анико, 2005, стр. 42-44.
  4. ^ Stefan Troebst, “Historical Politics and Historical 'Masterpieces' in Macedonia before and after 1991”, New Balkan Politics, 6 (2000/1). "The historians gave up the ideological premises of Tito’s and post-Tito’s time relatively quickly. Thus, in those parts of the “masterpiece”, whose content consisted of those Macedonian political organisations from the time before 1944 and their fight against the forces that wanted to divide Macedonia, they introduced currents and persons who were until then taboos because of the ideology of the Communist Party. This refers to people such as Boris Sarafov, one of the main actors of the Ilinden Uprising in 1903, who was until then excluded from the national pantheon under the suspicion that he was a “Bugarophil”; to Todor Aleksandrov, who from 1919 until his murder in 1924 was president of the Central Committee of VMRO and who brought it onto a pro-world course; to Aleksandrov’s anti-communist successor Ivan Mihajlov from 1924 to 1934, and who then became leader of the right wing of VMRO; to the anti-communist leader of the partisans Metodija Antonov – Cento; the national communist dissident Panko Brasnarov; the Bulgarian party official Metodija Shatorov – Sharlo, positioned in Skopje, a city that was then under Bulgarian occupation; and it also referred to the Macedonian national revolutionary Pavel Shatev."
  5. ^ Contested Ethnic Identity: The Case of Macedonian Immigrants in Toronto, 1900–1996, Chris Kostov, Peter Lang, 2010, ISBN 3034301960, p. 65.
  6. ^ Ivo Banac, "The National Question in Yugoslavia. Origins, History, Politics", Cornell University Press, 1984, ISBN 0801494931, p. 318.
  7. ^ Karen Dawisha et al. Politics, power, and the struggle for democracy in South-East Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-521-59733-3, p. 229.
  8. ^ Коста Църнушанов. Обществено-политическата дейност на Методи Андонов—Ченто (непубликувана статия); сп. Македонски преглед, бр. 3, 2002 г. стр.101-113.
  9. ^ Corina Dobos and Marius Stan as ed., History of Communism in Europe vol. 1, Zeta Books, 2010, ISBN 9731997857, p. 200.
  10. ^ Stefan Troebst, Das makedonische Jahrhundert: von den Anfängen der nationalrevolutionären Bewegung zum Abkommen von Ohrid 1893-2001; Oldenbourg, 2007, ISBN 3486580507, p. 247.
  11. ^ Блаже Ристовски, Ченто и македонската државност, зборник на трудовите од научниот собир по повод 100-годишнината од раѓањето на Методија Андонов-Ченто, одржан во Скопје на 16 и 17 декември 2002 година, Македонска акедемиjа на науките и уметностите, 2004 година, стр. 17.
  12. ^ Michael Palairet, Macedonia: A Voyage through History (Vol. 2, From the Fifteenth Century to the Present), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, ISBN 1443888494, p. 294.
  13. ^ Dimitar Bechev, Historical Dictionary of North Macedonia, Historical Dictionaries of Europe, Edition 2, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, ISBN 1538119625, p. 148.
  14. ^ Hugh Poulton, Who are the Macedonians? C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2000, ISBN 1850655340, p. 103.
  15. ^ The Law for the Protection of Macedonian National Honour was passed in 1945. The act allowed the sentencing of citizens for collaboration, pro-Bulgarian sympathies, and contesting Macedonia’s status within Yugoslavia. The latter charge was used to sentence Metodij Andonov-Čento who opposed the authorities’ decision to join the federation without reserving the right to a secession and criticised it for not putting enough emphasis on Macedonian culture. For more see: Communist dictatorship in Macedonia. The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1992). Communist crimes. Estonian Institute of Historical Memory.
  16. ^ Paul Preston, Michael Partridge, Denis Smyth, British Documents on Foreign Affairs reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print: Bulgaria, Greece, Roumania, Yugoslavia and Albania, 1948; Europe 1946-1950; University Publications of America, 2002; ISBN 1556557698, p. 50.
  17. ^ Indiana Slavic Studies, Volume 10; Volume 48; Indiana University publications: Slavic and East European series. Russian and East European series, 1999, p. 75.
  18. ^ Ivo Banac, With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism, Cornell University Press, 1988, ISBN 0801421861, p. 203.
  19. ^ L. Benson, Yugoslavia: A Concise History, Edition 2, Springer, 2003, ISBN 1403997209, p. 89.
  20. ^ a b Corina Dobos, Marius Stan, History of Communism in Europe vol. 1 / 2010: Politics of Memory in Post-communist Europe, Zeta Books, 2010, ISBN 9789731997858, p. 200.
  21. ^ БКП, Коминтернът и македонският въпрос (1917-1946). Колектив, том 2, 1999, Гл. управление на архивите. Сборник. стр. 1246-1247.
  22. ^ Добрин Мичев, Македонският въпрос в Българо-югославските отношения (1944-1949). Университетско издателство "Св. Климент Охридски", 1994 г. стр. 77-86.
  23. ^ Цанко Серафимов, Енциклопедичен речник за Македония и македонските работи, Орбел, 2004, ISBN 9544960708, стр. 184.
  24. ^ He is so eager to accept Bulgarian claims that he uncritically reproduces Bulgarian allegations without any indication of their context or veracity ("Who are the Macedonians?", Hugh Poulton 1995: 118 – 119). He even implies that Metodija Andonov - Čento, the first president of the Macedonian republic was a Bulgarophile rather than a Macedonian nationalist . For more see: "Macedonian Historiography, Language, and Identity, in the Context of the Yugoslav Wars of Succession", in Indiana Slavic Studies, Том 10; Том 48, Indiana University publications: Slavic and East European series Russian and East European series, Bloomington. p. 75.
  25. ^ Bernard A. Cook, Andrej Alimov, Europe Since 1945: An Encyclopedia, Vol. 2; Taylor & Francis, 2001, ISBN 0815340583, Macedonia, p. 808.
  26. ^ "Изложба за Ченто во Прилепскиот музеј" [Exhibition for Čento in the Prilep museum]. Sitel. 20 July 2017.
  27. ^ "Окупација 1941". Мојот татко Методија Андонов-Ченто. Skopje. 1999. p. 106. Категорично кажав дека не се чуствувам Бугарин, ами Македонец и дека не сум се борел за обединување со Бугарија, туку за обединување на Македонија и за националните права на Македонците.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
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