While waiting for some kind of progress in the talks conducted under UN auspices, on which it depends whether Macedonia is set a date for launching EU membership negotiations in June, some fifty Macedonian intellectuals, poets, writers and other public figures decided to issue a manifesto calling for an end to, as they say, the pressure on Macedonia. In their declaration entitled “A Macedonian Manifesto to the Home and International Public on the Occasion of the Increased Pressure on the Republic of Macedonia to Change its Constitutional Name,” to be promoted Wednesday, they demand of the Government inter alia not to call a referendum because no one has the right to change the country’s name and to terminate immediately the talks conducted under UN auspices. Writer Eftim Kletnikov, one of the authors of the manifesto, says they decided to launch this initiative now in the light of the dramatic pressure being put on Macedonia in this period, Nova Makedonija reports.

“We are pressurized from all sides and there is this idea of genocide against our identity pushed for by Greece and supported unfortunately by the United States of America and the European Union,” Kletnikov explains.

Asked what the way out is bearing in mind that without a resolved dispute there is no chance of Macedonia making any progress in the European and NATO integration, the poet replies that Macedonia has only one future.

“The only future is keeping the identity, not the EU and NATO,” Kletnikov adds.