Since their creation, both Minority Rights Group - Greece (1992) and Greek Helsinki Monitor (1993) have carried out extensive research on Greece’s minorities, and especially on ethnolinguistic minorities. Moreover, the organizations’ spokesperson, Panayote Elias Dimitras, in 1993-1994, was a member of the Scientific Committee of the Euromosaic research group: the latter was assigned, and financed, by the Commission of the European Communities the preparation of the new report on the some 45 minority linguistic communities in the EU’s twelve (at the time) countries. This is why we were planning to publish an issue devoted to these minorities in the May - June 1994 issue of the Greek Monitor of Human and Minority Rights.

Unfortunately, the work of the Euromosaic team was well below expectations, and this is why no EU report was ever published. In the case of the minorities in Greece, the research centers assigned with their coverage initially ignored the Greek member of the Scientific Committee totally; they proceeded with the selection of ‘language experts’ who were sometimes unknown to the communities themselves, and/or -even worse- hostile to their survival and to their linguistic and cultural rights; in one case, they merely appealed to some emigre, from one such community, living in Germany whose only qualification was his activism.

So, mid-way, the researchers had come up with draft reports on four of the five communities (Arvanites, Vlachs, Pomaks, Macedonians, and Turks) not only of mediocre or even poor quality, but also with errors and judgments that would have totally discredited the work in the eyes of even the well-meaning Greek readership. After some soul-searching, the researchers asked the Greek expert to write the final reports, and availed him of a token budget.

However, while the work was near completion, one of the two researchers refused to provide the Greek expert with the documentation he had collected and withdrew the budget promised. As, unfortunately, the competent office of the Commission did nothing to make this researcher honor his commitment, the Greek expert turned in the necessary reports only on Arvanites, Vlachs and Pomaks, whereas he also provided the necessary data for the map of Greece with the spread of the minority languages. As we said before, because of similar problems in other countries, nothing has come out of this work, which had nevertheless received a lot of money from the EU, i.e. its taxpayers, money that can be considered wasted.

This frustrating experience made it impossible to publish our issue on time; in fact, given other commitments, we had to postpone it through the very end of 1995. The material our organizations had been gathering for years is reflected in these reports, one of which is an updating of the MRG-Greece contribution to an MRG International publication on the Southern Balkans.