Paskal Mitrevski

Paskal Mitrevski (; 1912 – February 11, 1978), also known as Paskal Mitrovski or Paschalis Mitropoulos, was a Macedonian communist partisan and a president of the Macedonian National Liberation Front, founded in Greece by the Slavic Macedonian minority after the Second World War.

Life

Early life and participation in anti-Axis resistance Mitrevski was born in 1912 in the Kastorian village of Čuka (Chuka), then in the Ottoman Empire, today Archangelos, Greece. He completed his primary education in Rupishta and went to high school in Kostur (Kastoria). Mitrevski graduated from the Faculty of Law in the University of Thessaloniki. He became a communist while he was a law student, but was expelled from the local communist youth organisation for allegedly mismanaging party funds and having secret contacts with the authorities. Mitrevski was not allowed to be in the local Communist Party of Greece (KKE) organisation until March 1943, when he and other male inhabitants of Argos Orestiko left to join the resistance against the Axis occupation, inspired by KKE members active there. Shortly after, a Bulgarophile associate in nearby Maniakoi mediated for his safe return to Argos Orestiko. He stayed in the town until July 1943, when the local KKE organisation invited him to join the Greek resistance movement - ELAS.

A rift occurred between Mitrevski and Mihajlo Keramitčiev, and other leaders of NOF. This was in turn over the dismissal of NOF leaders such as Vangel Ajanovski-Oče and Lambro Colakov from the Executive Council by General Ioannidis and their replacement with KKE loyalists, with Mitrevski being the only NOF leader to support the changes. Other NOF leaders regarded Mitrevski as an able and clever person, as well as an arrogant, vain, opportunistic, and ambitious careerist. In turn, the matter was taken to the Politburo of the party on February 20–21, 1948, where Mitrevski and the leader of AFŽ, Vera Nikolova, publicly criticised each other. Nikolova accused Mitrevski of being selfish, ambitious, distrusting the other NOF leaders and monopolising the leadership. In response, Mitrevski accused Nikolova and his other opponents of holding anti-party views and creating an anti-party faction. In a meeting, to settle disputes, of the Executive Committee of the NOF, on March 27, 1948, Mitrevski proposed Kotsopoulos as the leader of the party's cell rather than Mihajlo Keramitčiev, who had the support of his opponents, but Kotsopoulos ended up becoming the secretary. In an appeal to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in April 1948, other NOF leaders claimed that Mitrevski was "motivated solely by his own personal ambitions", "universally distrusted by NOF cadres", and they also called for his dismissal for being "harmful to the whole organization and a stumbling block to the improvement of relations between us and the Greeks." He attended the general meeting of the Politburo on July 10, which adopted a motion denouncing NOF and indirectly the Slavic Macedonian contribution to the war effort. The rifts which had occurred between him and Keramitčiev were seen as potentially fatal to the party and he was removed as leader of NOF on August 8, 1948. Stavros Kotsopoulos officially became president while Vangel Kojčev was made secretary. By December, however, it had been decided by Nikos Zachariadis that the membership of the secretariat should be expanded and Mitrevski was reinstated. After the Greek Civil War, on October 3, Mitrevski was arrested by the KKE on the accusation that he was agent of Tito in Burrel, Albania, and transferred to the Soviet Union. In 1955, he returned to the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He died on February 11, 1978, in Skopje, SFR Yugoslavia.