A rally dubbed "Macedonia is Greece," organized to protest the agreement on renaming the former Yugoslav Republic, is planned to be held on September 8 in the Greek city of Thessaloniki and expected to gather hundreds of thousands of people, a representative of the coordinating committee of the rally told RIA Novosti on Friday.
ATHENS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th September, 2018) A rally dubbed "Macedonia is Greece," organized to protest the agreement on renaming the former Yugoslav Republic, is planned to be held on September 8 in the Greek city of Thessaloniki and expected to gather hundreds of thousands of people, a representative of the coordinating committee of the rally told RIA Novosti on Friday.
According to the organizers, a similar rally in January gathered between 300,000 and 500,000 people. Earlier information from the organizers suggested that over 800,000 took to the streets during that demonstration.
"The rally will be held on September 8. Police did not ban it [for security reasons], but are taking steps to ensure security. cars are forbidden to stop and park there, so one has to walk. In Thessaloniki, there is now a lot of police ... We expect hundreds of thousands, as in January. We hope that now it will be as big, if the people are not afraid of the government's measures to limit the rally," Mihalis Patsikas said.
He added that people from the whole of northern Greece and Athens were expected to come. The rally is timed to the opening of the Thessaloniki International Fair on Saturday, where the United States is set to be the Honorary Country.
Patsikas also refuted the claims that the rally was allegedly financed by Moscow.
On July 23, Greece's Kontra news said, citing an unnamed source, that a group of street hooligans, allegedly sponsored by Moscow, was preparing rallies to sabotage the Thessaloniki International Fair. The media claimed that the protests were financed by "Russian agents in Greece" to compromise the Macedonian name deal. There were also publications that the rallies related to the name deal were also allegedly sponsored by Moscow.
"This is nonsense, with which they want to create tensions between us and our Russian friends and have already created some by expelling two diplomats. We never had any contacts with the Russians. We were not paid by Russians or Americans. The money for the organization is our own ... We had no financial assistance except from Greek patriots," Patsikas stressed.
Patsikas considers the publication by Kontra News a hit piece, as the media is "a weapon and a pen of the government."
On June 17, Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias and his Macedonian counterpart Nikola Dimitrov signed an agreement on a new name of the former Yugoslav Republic, agreeing to rename the country to the Republic of North Macedonia. The deal resolved the decades-long dispute between Athens and Skopje over the use of "Macedonia," which is also the name of a region in Greece.
