The United Macedonian Diaspora in the US failed. There will be no Macedonian American Heritage Month in Illinois or Michigan

The proclamations designating September 2023 as Macedonian American Heritage Month have been revoked by Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Sen. Mike Brown of Indiana introduced a similar resolution in the US Senate, but it was not given any consideration by the Judiciary Committee and failed to pass. These changes are the result of a protest by the Macedonian Bulgarian community in America, which has been battling against all attempts by extremist Macedonianists to take control of its cultural and historical heritage in the New World for years.

The United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD) group, based in the US capital of Washington, initiated Resolution 311 in the US Senate as well as the two proclamations. The organisation, which was founded in 2004, is renowned for its close ties to the VMRO-DMPNE party and to former Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, who was listed on the USA's "Magnitsky" list for corruption. UMD describes itself as "the only Macedonian voice in the world." The announcements made by the governors of Illinois and Michigan, as well as Resolution 311 in the US Senate, were enthusiastically hailed by the UMD and the media in North Macedonia as "a huge recognition of Macedonian history, culture, and identity in America."

The leaders of the Bulgarian community in America disapproved of the UMD's "enormous successes" in exposing the attempts of extreme nationalists from North Macedonia to rewrite the history of the Macedonian Bulgarians who immigrated to the New World at the end of the 19th and the start of the 20th century. The American establishment has easily proven that there are no historical records of ethnic Macedonians living in America before communist Yugoslavia, nor are there any "Macedonian" churches or "Macedonian language" schools. Extreme Macedonianists have even attempted to establish in Illinois that the ethnic Macedonians of today existed 7,000 years ago. The Republic of North Macedonia's constitutional name was avoided everywhere by the UMD at the expense of the already-cancelled in 2018 name - Republic of Macedonia.

The Macedonian Bulgarian community in America wants to remind everyone that the extreme nationalist group UMD rejects both the 2017 Treaty of Friendship, Good-Neighbourliness and Cooperation between North Macedonia and Bulgaria, which suspended claims of a "Macedonian minority" in Bulgaria, and the Ohrid Agreement of 2001, which put an end to the civil war in the former Republic of Macedonia.

Despite the absence of any historical proof, the UMD has consistently attempted over the past two years to subvert US democratic institutions in order to fabricate the historical existence of the current ethnic Macedonians prior to 1945.

A resolution to designate September 2022 as "Macedonian-American Cultural Heritage Month" was submitted to the US Congress in 2021 at the UMD's initiative, but it was rejected after objections from Macedonian Bulgarians living in the US and Canada, including those from the organisation founded by Macedonian Bulgarians in Indiana in 1922 and known as the Macedonian Patriotic Organisation in the USA and Canada.

The UMD once more began a massive effort in 2023 to "protect the Macedonian identity and language" in the US, which necessitated the declaration of September as "Macedonian-American Heritage Month" by the most number of states possible.

Metodija Koloski, the "volunteer president" of the UMD, was a key player in the campaign. He is said to have opposed the construction of what is now the American Embassy in Skopje on the grounds that an old Turkish cemetery is situated beneath it before taking office as the organization's leader in 2004.

Koloski is a US-based lobbyist who has been showing up more frequently in North Macedonia lately. According to reliable sources, he is running for the position of minister of the diaspora. In September, Koloski vowed to the North Macedonian media that US Senate Resolution 311 will be adopted, notwithstanding a potential delay caused by the convoluted US Congress process. In the meantime, Governor Pritzker of Illinois issued a new proclamation on September 28 overturning his earlier action from August 1 of this year, and the UMD proclamation in Michigan was retracted and removed from the governor's official website "due to a mistake" .

There has been no response to the cancelled proclamations of the governors of Michigan and Illinois from the UMD or its president, Metodija Koloski./BGNES