History of North Macedonia
In the late 6th century BC, the Achaemenid Persians under Darius the Great conquered the Paeonians, incorporating what is today North Macedonia within their vast territories.
The ancient languages of the local Thraco-Illyrian people had already gone extinct before the arrival of the Slavs, and their cultural influence was highly reduced due to the repeated barbaric invasions on the Balkans during the early Middle Ages, accompanied by persistent hellenization, romanisation and later slavicisation.
Around 680 AD a group, led by a Bulgar named Kuber (who according to some sources belonged to the same Dulo clan as the Danubian Bulgarian Khan Asparukh), settled in the Pelagonian plain, and launched a campaign to the region of Thessaloniki.
In the late 7th century Justinian II organized massive expeditions against the Sklaviniai of the Greek peninsula, in which he reportedly captured over 110,000 Slavs and transferred them to Cappadocia.
Use of the name "Sklavines" as a nation on its own was discontinued in Byzantine records after circa 836 as those Slavs in the Macedonia region became a population in the First Bulgarian Empire.
Saints Cyril and Methodius, Byzantine Greeks born in Thessaloniki, were the creators of the first Slavic Glagolitic alphabet and Old Church Slavonic language.
Evidence also exists that certain Macedonian Slavs, particularly those in the northern regions, considered themselves as Serbs, on the other hand the intention to join Greece predominated in southern Macedonia where it was supported by substantial part of the Slavic-speaking population too.
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.
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.
Alexander's dictatorship effectively ruined parliamentary democracy, and after growing popular resentment against the king's autocratic rule, he was assassinated in 1934 in France by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO).
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.
Following World War II, Yugoslavia was reconstituted as a federal state under the leadership of Tito's Yugoslav Communist Party.
This further angered both Greece and Bulgaria, because of the possible territorial claims of the new states to the Greek and Bulgarian parts of the historic region of Macedonia received after the Balkan Wars.
During the Greek Civil War (1944–1949), many Macedonians (regardless of ethnicity) participated in the ELAS resistance movement organized by the Communist Party of Greece.
ELAS and Yugoslavia were on good terms until 1949, when they split due to Tito's lack of allegiance to Joseph Stalin (cf.
[32] Following the earthquake, Josip Broz Tito, president of SFR Yugoslavia, sent a message of condolences to the Socialist Republic of Macedonia before visiting the city personally later on.
The question of the referendum was formulated as "Would you support independent Macedonia with the right to enter future union of sovereign states of Yugoslavia?"
The sanctions were lifted in September 1995 after Macedonia changed its flag and aspects of its constitution that were perceived as granting it the right to intervene in the affairs of other countries.
The two neighbours immediately went ahead with normalizing their relations, but the state's name remains a source of local and international controversy.
After the state was admitted to the United Nations under the temporary reference "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", other international organisations adopted the same convention.
In end the war, Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević reached an agreement with NATO which allowed refugees to return under UN protection.
After a joint NATO-Serb crackdown on Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo, European Union (EU) officials were able to negotiate a cease-fire in June.
The government would give to the citizens of Albanian descent greater civil rights, and the guerrilla groups would voluntarily relinquish their weapons to NATO monitors.
The results of the official investigation revealed that the cause of the plane accident was procedural mistakes by the crew, committed during the approach to land at Mostar Airport.
In March 2004, the country submitted an application for membership of the European Union, and on 17 December 2005 was listed by the EU Presidency conclusions as an accession candidate (as "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia").
[40][41] In June 2017, Zoran Zaev of Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM) became new Prime Minister six months after early elections.
The new center-left government ended 11 years of conservative VMRO-DPMNE rule led by former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski.
[42] On 9 May 2015 the 2015 Kumanovo clashes were series of shootouts which erupted during a raid between the Macedonian police and an armed group identifying itself as the National Liberation Army (NLA).
[49] Prime Minister Zoran Zaev announced his resignation after his party, the Social Democratic Union, suffered losses in local elections in October 2021.
[50] After internal party leadership elections, Dimitar Kovačevski succeeded him as leader of the SDSM on 12 December 2021,[51] and was sworn in as Prime Minister of North Macedonia on 16 January 2022, securing a 62–46 confidence vote in Parliament for his new SDSM-led coalition cabinet.
