He is the man who has focused on one word for 23 years

When he was 26 years since  Yugoslavia broke into pieces and the republic of Macedonia came into being. In all that time, the new country has lacked an official, internationally agreed name, because of Greece's objections to the name "Macedonia". And for nearly all of that time, explains Alex Marshall, one man has been working to solve the problem.

 Matthew Nimetz wants to make something clear - he has not spent every waking moment of the past 23 years thinking about one word: "Macedonia"

"I have probably thought about it more than anyone else - including in the country," says the 78-year-old US diplomat. "But I have to disappoint anyone that thinks it's my full-time job."

Since 1994, Nimetz has been trying to negotiate an end to arguably the world's strangest international dispute, in which Greece is objecting to Macedonia's name and refusing to let it join either Nato or the EU until it's changed.

Greece says the name "Macedonia" suggests that the country has territorial ambitions over Greece's own Macedonia - a province in the north of the country - and is a blatant attempt to lay claim to Greece's national heritage.

It should be called something like "Skopje" instead, Greece argues - Skopje being Macedonia's capital city.
Macedonia, by contrast, argues that you can trace its people back to the ancient kingdom of Macedon, once ruled by Alexander the Great - and that the name "Macedonia" is therefore the obvious choice.
One upshot is that travellers entering northern Greece from the Republic of Macedonia, and those crossing the border in the opposite direction, are both greeted by roadside signs welcoming them to Macedonia.

 
When Nimetz began his work on the dispute he was serving as US President Bill Clinton's special envoy, but since the end of 1999 he's been the personal envoy of the UN secretary-general - his task to nudge the two sides slowly towards a resolution, for a token salary of $1 per year.

Macedonia got into the UN by agreeing to be called The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) for all official purposes, but this was not intended to be a permanent solution to the problem, and created a new set of difficulties.

"It makes for very awkward sentence construction," Nimetz says, with some understatement.
Ban Ki-moon, the former UN secretary-general, once got muddled and called the country the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Yugoslavia" by accident. "He said to me, 'You've got to solve this problem. It's driving me crazy,'" Nimetz says


Despite the glacial pace of negotiations, he has never seriously thought of quitting.
"Some people think it's me just sitting there thinking of adjectives to put in front of the name Macedonia - like New Macedonia, Upper Macedonia - but this issue has historical importance… importance in terms of nation-building," he says.
"And it is never boring, the cast of characters dealing with it changes all the time. Think of a theatre director who does King Lear or Hamlet, but with different staging and actors. Do they get bored?"
When Nimetz first became Clinton's envoy, back in the 1990s, it looked as though the dispute could spiral out of control.
Greece had been objecting to Macedonia's name since 1991, when Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia. The following year, a million Greeks - a 10th of the population - took to the streets of Thessaloniki to protest.
Those protests helped bring down the country's prime minister, and his replacement, Andreas Papandreou, barred Macedonia's access to Greek ports. Macedonia was a "real and present danger to Greece", he claimed.