Macedonians in Greece, Part 2

When we speak of the Balkan Wars of 1912, 1913 we often speak of the invasion, occupation and partition of Macedonia with intent of liberating the region from the Ottoman occupier but we seldom speak of the aftermath; the subjugation and oppression of the Macedonian people.

Some may call it liberation but what took place after the Balkan wars the Macedonian people would call genocide and cultural obliteration.

The only thing Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria liberated during the Balkan Wars were Macedonian lands which they quickly occupied and annexed for themselves.

While the world was congratulating Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria for their good deeds of kicking the sick man out of Macedonia, the Macedonian people were facing new horrors never before experienced.

After almost six centuries of Ottoman occupation the Macedonian people, instead of being liberated like their neighbours had promised, were now about to face new and more lethal ordeals more damaging than ever before.

After they failed to free themselves in 1903, the Macedonian people welcomed the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian armies as saviours when they invaded and attacked the Ottomans. The entire Macedonian population, including the armed rebels who fought in the 1903 uprising joined the frenzied fight to get rid of the Ottomans. The vast majority of Macedonians believed their neighbours' propaganda when they were told the armies were here to liberate them. Why shouldn't they have believed them? After all, they were all Christian brothers who had suffered immensely under Ottoman rule. The Macedonians were more than willing to lend a helping hand when Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria were being liberated. Now it was Macedonia's turn and it was only fair that their neighbours return the favour.

"Brothers:-your sufferings and your pains have touched the heart of your kindred. Moved by the sacred duty of fraternal compassion, they come to your aid to free you from the Turkish yoke. In return for their sacrifice they desire nothing but to reestablish peace and order in the land of our birth. Come to meet these brave knights of freedom therefore with triumphal crowns. Cover the way before their feet with flowers and glory. And be magnanimous to those who yesterday were your masters. As true Christians, give them not evil for evil. Long live liberty! Long live the brave army of liberation!" (George F. Kennan. "The Other Balkan Wars" A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, 1993. Page 50).

Unfortunately there were very few people who saw the dangers of this invasion and their voices were drowned out in the chorus of the frenzy. Many leading Macedonians, including Krste Misirkov, warned against such false hopes, but most Macedonians, fed up with their intolerable living conditions could not see the danger. Mesmerized by slick propaganda, they were more than ready to welcome their liberators.

"The notion that our Christian brothers are here to occupy us and turn us into Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians is so ridiculous that it is downright funny. If a horse can be turned into a donkey; or if a sheep can be turned into a goat then we will believe that a Macedonian can be turned into a Greek, a Serbian, or a Bulgarian" were the attitudes of the Macedonian masses as the foreign armies marched into Macedonia unabated.

Then as the so called "war of liberation" ended and the Ottomans were driven out, and the three wolves turned on each other for a bigger share of the carcass, it became apparent to most that what seemed ridiculous less that a year before was now turning into a living nightmare.

The Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians, it seems, had their own way of determining who was a friend and who was a foe after Macedonians were butchered for their alleged sympathies with the "other side" or because they were affiliated with the wrong Christian Orthodox Church.

"Praying to the same God by different tongues can change a man's identity as much as words alone can change one's own blood into someone else's." Well spoken words of wisdom but unfortunately rational thinking and common sense was not the motto of the invaders whose armies were poisoned to see Greeks, Serbians, or Bulgarians in the Macedonians and to massacre everything on sight that was alien to them.

The Greek soldiers in the territories of Macedonia which they occupied saw everyone who could not speak Greek or who was not affiliated with the Greek Patriarchic Christian Orthodox Church as the enemy, be it man, woman, or child of any age.

"The Servian soldier, like the Greek, was firmly persuaded that in Macedonia he would find compatriots, men who could speak his language and address him with jivio or zito. He found men speaking a language different from his, who cried hourrah! He misunderstood or did not understand at all. The theory he had learned from youth of the existence of a Servian Macedonia and a Greek Macedonia naturally suffered; but his patriotic conviction that Macedonia must become Greek or Servian, if not so already, remained unaffected. Doubtless Macedonia had been what he wanted it to become in those times of Douchan the Strong or the Byzantine Emperors. It was only agitators and propagandist Bulgarians who instilled into the population the idea of being Bulgarian. The agitators must be driven out of the country, and it would again become what it had always been, Servian or Greek. Accordingly they acted on this basis. Who were these agitators who had made the people forget the Greek and Servian tongues?

First, they were the priests; then the schoolmasters; lastly the revolutionary elements who, under the ancient regime, had formed an 'organization'; heads of bands and their members, peasants who had supplied them with money or food, -in a word the whole of the male population." (George F. Kennan. "The Other Balkan Wars" A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, 1993. Page 50-51)

In other words, to a Greek, Bulgarian or Serbian soldier, if a person was not of their kind as he had been taught about back home, then this person was the enemy and in Macedonia, the entire Macedonian population was the enemy.

No sooner had the invading armies consolidated their hold on Macedonia, than they arrested and punished all Macedonians regarded as leaders and venerated as heroes by the population, while the dregs, the very men who caused much suffering, were raised to greatness.

Progressive disintegration of social and national life in Macedonia began with the entry of the occupying Greek, Bulgarian and Serbian armies and has not ceased to this day (in Greece and Bulgaria).

As attested by the 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry Commission and the lost mailbag of letters captured from the Greek soldiers from the nineteenth regiment of the Greek seventh division fighting in Macedonia, all three States, Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia committed atrocities against the Macedonian people during the 1912 and 1913 Balkan wars. However, for the purpose of this write-up, the focus of investigation will be on the Greeks about whom more detailed information can be found in the six part series at the following link: http://www.maknews.com/html/articles/stefov/stefov61.html

When war broke out in the Balkans in 1912 and 1913, the Carnegie Endowment dispatched a commission on a fact finding mission. The mission consisted of seven prominent members from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Among them was the distinguished journalist Henry N. Brailsford, author of the book "Macedonia its Races and their Future".

The commission was dispatched from Paris on August 2nd, 1913 shortly before the end of the second Balkan war and returned to Paris nearly eight weeks later, on September 28th. In spite of opposition from the Greek government, the commission arrived in time to witness much of the war's aftermath and record most accounts while they were still fresh in people's minds. The results drawn from this investigation were printed in Washington DC in 1914 under the title "Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Cause and the Conduct of the Balkan Wars". Unfortunately because of the flare-up of World War I, no action was taken and the report itself ended up being shelved.

Still in the midst of excitement, the first Balkan war was accepted by European opinion as a war of Liberation. In the European mind, its conclusion meant the downfall of the Ottoman regime in Europe and the end of all oppression. Unfortunately, European understanding of the Macedonian situation was far from reality as one tyrant was being replaced by three. While the Ottoman regime tolerated the various religions, languages and traditions of all races in their Empire, the new tyrants did not. As soon as they consolidated their hold on Macedonia, they began to act on its population.

First came the evictions and the first ones to be thrown out were the Muslim Macedonians. Even though they spoke the Macedonian language and insisted that they were Macedonians, not Turks, their captors relentlessly cast them out. For no reason other than being Muslim, they were evicted from their homes and forced out from their ancestral lands.

After the Turkish authorities vacated Macedonia, all that was left were civilians. No Turk dared remain behind knowing what awaited him. So the Turkish villages that the Carnegie report was referring to were in fact Macedonian villages inhabited by Muslim Macedonians.

When they were finished with the Turks, the Greek soldiers turned on the Macedonian civilian population and uncontrollably, with the blessing of the Greek State and the Greek King himself, pillaged, tortured, raped and murdered defenseless people. Atrocities committed against the civilian population in Macedonia, including the burning of villages, were simply cold acts of genocide perpetrated to eradicate the Macedonian population in order to make room for Greek colonization.

The Carnegie Relief Commission reported that in Macedonia alone 160 villages were razed leaving 16,000 homeless. Several thousand civilians had been murdered and over 100,000 were forced to emigrate as refugees. (Michael A. Radin. "IMRO and the Macedonian Question". Skopje: Kultura, 1993. Page 149).

Macedonian families known to attend the Exarchate Church were ordered by force to "take with them what they could carry and get out". "This is Greece now and there is no place for Bulgarians here." Those who remained were forced to swear loyalty to the Greek State. Anyone refusing to take the loyalty oath was either executed, as an example of what would happen to those disloyal, or evicted from the country. To explain the mass evacuations, Greek officials claimed that the inhabitants of Macedonia left by choice or became Greek by choice. The truth is no one was given any choice at all.

The triple occupation worsened living conditions in Macedonia but the fighting spirit of the Macedonian people continued to live underground and abroad. Three generations of fighting for liberty, freedom and an independent Macedonia came to a close. The Ilinden generation and the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization were defeated, not by the Ottomans or Muslim oppression but by Christian cruelty and deception.

Soon after the occupation, underground societies sprang up everywhere urging the Macedonian people to refuse their new fate and oppose the partition. Accordingly, many Macedonians did so by refusing to obey the new officialdom and by not participating in the new institutions. This, however, did not stop the military regimes occupying Macedonia from exposing the population to systematic denationalization and violent assimilation.

Macedonians again saw hope after the Great War that maybe while a new world order was being created, the Great Powers would see to it to reverse the dreaded 1913 Treaty of Bucharest that divided their country, but those hopes too were dashed in 1919 at the Versailles conference when the Great Powers ratified the Treaty of Bucharest, making Macedonia's division permanent.

The end of the Great War brought peace to the world but not to the subjugated Macedonian population which, as was done in 1878 when Macedonia was given back to the Ottomans, was again done in 1919 when Macedonia and its people were given back to their tormentors the Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians.

One good thing for the Macedonians that came out of Versailles was Article 51, the League of Nations' code to "protect national minorities". Article 51 of the Treaty of Versailles espouses equality of civil rights, education, language and religion for all national minorities. Unfortunately, article 51 was never implemented by the Balkan States or enforced by the League of Nations which Greece and Bulgaria, to this day, violate and ignore. Why is this? Because to this day, Greece and Bulgaria claim that "the Macedonian identity" does not exist and has never existed.

Greece was immensely rewarded for its participation in the Great War. At the conclusion of the Treaty, Greece got back what it had previously annexed and, additionally, received a large portion of Epirus, western Thrace, Crete and the Aegean Islands. It is important to mention here that when Albania's affirmation for independence was signed, at the London Conference in February 1920, more of Macedonia's territory was partitioned. A narrow strip of land running through Lake Ohrid and southward along Macedonia's western boundary was awarded to Albania.

Soon after arriving victorious in Greece, the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos, in a speech in Solun, announced his plans for the creation of a "Greater Greece", the so called "Megali Idea" which was to bring together all the so called "Greek peoples" under a single Greater Greek State.

Sources:

Chris Stefou. "History of the Macedonian People from Ancient times to the Present". Toronto: Risto Stefov Publications, 2005.

George F. Kennan. "The Other Balkan Wars" A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, 1993.

Michael A. Radin. "IMRO and the Macedonian Question". Skopje: Kultura, 1993.

To be continued...

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You can contact the author at rstefov@hotmail.com