Recent Times
Ironically, independence finally came to part of Macedonia in the early 1990s—the part that belonged to Serbia. Serbia was one of the nations that was part of Yugoslavia, a federation of several Slavic countries. Up until the end of World War II, Macedonia remained part of Serbia, but the new Communist post-war leaders of Yugoslavia separated Macedonia from the rest of Serbia and made it a separate state within the Yugoslav Federation. Communist authorities also gave this part of Macedonia, Vardar Macedonia, a new identity. The Slavic people of Vardar Macedonia would no longer be Serbs or even Bulgarian Macedonians. They would now be ethnic Macedonians with their own unique history and language based on the Veles dialect. From then on, their ethnicity and nationality would be one and the same. The purpose of this intervention by Yugoslav Communists was to ensure that our people in Vardar Macedonia remained loyal to Yugoslavia, even if this meant erasing references to the cultural and historic connections between the ethnic Macedonian and Bulgarian Macedonian identities. The problem was in the fact that, to a large extent, this was achieved via propaganda involving misrepresentations of historic facts and creating official historic narratives based on speculations. When Yugoslavia fell after the death of Marshal Tito, Vardar Macedonia finally became free and independent.