MANAPO


The Macedonian National Movement was a leftist movement started in 1936 among the progressive Macedonian students in the Belgrade and Zagreb universities in the period between the World Wars.
MANAPO's aims were to help bring about democracy in Yugoslavia and to fight for the right to self-determination of the Bulgarians in Vardar Macedonia. The official historiography in post-1945 Yugoslavia and present-day North Macedonia plays down the Bulgarian nature of this organization and claims that MANAPO's platform was based on the awaking of the Macedonian national conscience among the Macedonian Slavic-speaking population, the affirmation of the Macedonian language as well as fight against the Serbian hegemony and fascism.
When MANAPO was dissolved in the beginning of the Second World War, with some of its members entering the ranks of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, while others felt the aims of the organization had been established with the "liberation" of Vardar Macedonia by Bulgaria in 1941.