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One Last Hurrah for Bosnia’s International Rulers

By Dr. Darragh Farrell*
By the beginning of next month it should be known who the next High Representative to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) will be. It is probably safe to assume that the next High Representative will also be the last, despite the fact that the previous two holders of the post, Christian [...]

Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Continuing Political Evolution

By Apostolis Karabairis*
Internal correlations and trends in Bosnia and Herzegovina have changed considerably over the past few years. However, contrary to the early post-war years, academic and press analysis has covered much less the recent developments in the country, following the interest and policy shift from Clinton’s democratization doctrine of the 1990s to Bush’s counter-terrorism [...]

Snow Descends on the Balkans, to the Relief of Ski Resorts

The first New Year’s gift of 2009 to the citizens of many Balkan countries has come in the form of the season’s first significant snowfall, blanketing large areas in Macedonia, northern Greece, Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria and Albania.
In the Macedonian capital of Skopje, some 16cm of snow has accumulated in the past three days- posing a [...]

The Karadzic Capture and Serbia’s Return to Power

The dramatic arrest of former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, hiding as a bushy-bearded spiritual guru in Novi Beograd, will no doubt inspire a Hollywood film in the not-too-distant future. And it has already inspired a lot of pathos and hyperbole, with one foot similarly in the door of fiction (Madeleine Albright accusing Karadzic of [...]

Report from Bosnia

Nicky Gardner, editor of hidden europe magazine (www.hiddeneurope.co.uk) reports from Pocitelj in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The photo, this week’s Photo of the Week (‘Geometries’, Pocitelj, Bosnia) is the work of Susanne Kries.
The international community has always looked for good news from Bosnia and Herzegovina. Like Bush beleaguered in Iraq, ever-looking for any glimmer of [...]

Balkanalysis.com Announces New 2006 Archive Uploads

Balkanalysis.com would like to announce that nine months’ worth of archived articles, many previously unavailable on the website, have now been uploaded to our page at the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL.com).

The articles in question number more than 50, and cover the months March-December 2006. They will be of interest to researchers of contemporary Balkan history. They complete the current archive of Balkanalysis.com articles, covering the period 2001-2006. These articles specifically include articles on Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo.

Over 220 instititutions from 21 countries currently offer access to articles in the Library. If you would like to access these articles, but your institution is not yet a member of the CEEOL.com program, please have your institution’s acquisitions or reference librarian contact CEEOL.com directly.

Sincerely,

Balkanalysis.com team

2007 Balkan Year in Review: Key Underreported Trends for the Future

The year 2007 was an eventful one in the Balkans, though several major trends remained underreported or were simply ignored. The Western media utilized most of its limited capacity to the political dimensions of the future status of Kosovo, choosing to tell and retell a tired story of good vs. bad (i.e., the West vs. Russia and Serbia), barely scratching the surface of what is if not necessarily the most important, at least the most hyped issue in the region.

Kosovo is however intimately tied to specific events and factors that, on the larger level, indicate an emerging strategic balance of power in the region, one that may not quite be what had been planned by the West, and thus which will likely leave a complicit media scrambling to find explanations for years to come. In this special retrospective report, Balkanalysis.com discusses a few of the major trends that have been identified in 2007 and which will likely help shape the Balkans in 2008.

The first major event has to be the growing power of Russia in the region and the future way in which this power, even if lessened, will be exerted. Less than a decade ago, the chief successor state to the USSR was grasping for economic stability and political respect on the global stage, with the nadir being reached in March 1999, when it proved powerless to stop NATO’s air war on Yugoslavia over Kosovo. This national humiliation was aggravated when the West failed to grant Russia equal partner status in keeping the peace in post-war Kosovo. Russia could only watch helplessly as half of Kosovo’s Serbian Orthodox population was driven out of the province by Albanian ethnic cleansers, with tacit Western approval.

From the ashes of this defeat arose Vladimir Putin, the ex-KGB officer determined to not let the national interest be trampled on again. In fact, Putin’s opportunity was created by the West in its reckless game in 1999. Until the question of changing Kosovo’s political status arose, Russia had not had a point of strategic leverage in the Balkans. For Putin, simply fomenting stubborn diplomatic opposition while an increasingly frantic West tries to appease the independence-minded Albanians has proven a very cost-effective and powerful strategy to contest Western ambitions and reassert his country’s role as a major power.

Nevertheless, the Western media has more often than not chosen to simply condemn these tactics rather than provide objective analysis, thus betraying their own sympathies with Western governments. Although there is little to be learned from boring invective, it would prove embarrassing to the powers that bombed Kosovo in 1999 for journalists to ask whether the intervention itself provided an opportunity for Russia to expand its sphere of influence, and precisely an opportunity that had simply not existed before. True, the US got its enormous military base in the heart of the Balkans with Camp Bondsteel – now more than a liability than anything else – but Russia has made major inroads on Balkan energy acquisitions, as well as buying considerable valuable seaside real estate in Montenegro, that former partner republic with Serbia whose independence, myopic and partisan Western diplomats still today maintain, is yet another well deserved punishment for the Serbs.

Reporting on the changing Russian role in the Balkans becomes even scantier in terms of its relation to the year’s second key trend, and perhaps the most astonishing- the diplomatic triumphs of Greece. A member of both the EU and NATO, Greece is a thoroughly Western country which has however sought to maintain its diverse relationships in nurturing national interests- in the process perhaps becoming guilty of wanting to have its cake and eat it too. While Greece’s major new alliance, with Russia, is more a harmonious convergence of certain interests than a deliberate planned partnership, it has been amply displayed and was singled out in a ‘power audit’ by the new interventionist think-tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations, some of whose members are famous for their roles in the Kosovo war and peace.

Greece’s convergence of interests with Russia owes primarily to two things; wariness over national security, vis-à-vis perennial enemy Turkey, and its ambition to be a regional player in the energy sector. As with the Russian bear’s awakening over Kosovo, Greece determined these interests in the late 1990’s, in response to Turkey’s enhanced position globally. The first Greek concerns were registered with the Clinton administration’s determination to use the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan for the terminus of a new oil pipeline (the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, or BTC pipeline) that would bring Caspian oil to the West and bypass Russia in the process. Under such a scenario, it was only natural that both affronted parties would reach out to one another in the energy sector, as has been the case with both LUKoil’s acquisitions in Hellenic Petroleum and in the major efforts to hammer out a deal on the anticipated Burgas-Alexandroupoli Pipeline bringing Russian oil to the Aegean via Bulgaria.

Greece’s second point of panic, though a far less reported one, came with the deepening alliance in the late 1990’s between Turkey and Israel. This first of all involved the transfer of lobbying know-how from the latter to the former in Washington, and soon developed into full-fledged intelligence cooperation, with one jarring result being the Turkish MIT’s kidnapping of Kurdish guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan, supposedly under Greek protection, in Nairobi. The Israelis had participated in gathering intelligence. It was a major embarrassment for Athens and a wild success for the Turkish government, by which it effectively ended the Kurdish insurrection, at least for a few years. Israeli-Turkish cooperation would strengthen and, with the victory of George W. Bush in 2000, catapult the neoconservatives, closely affiliated to both Israeli and Turkish lobby groups, into power in Washington.

Greece, like Russia a historic ally of Serbia, had also been less than thrilled about the NATO intervention of 1999, and chose not to participate in NATO air strikes; pivotally, however, it also chose not to veto the operation as Serbia had hoped. Alienated and insulted on all sides, Greece began to develop a parallel security infrastructure to that of NATO, turning to Russian expertise, most significantly in the advanced S-300 and TOR M-1 mobile anti-aircraft system which by virtue of its provenance was not supposed to be acquired by a NATO member. Intense interest in Greece’s air defense capacities from the Turks led, in May 2006, to a brief skirmish between Turkish and Greek fighter jets near the island of Karpathos, leading to the accidental death of a Greek pilot.

Aside from the defense sector, Greece’s budding partnership with Russia has also comprised energy diplomacy- the factor that will raise Greece’s political and economic stature as a transit corridor for oil, at a time of fierce competition between European countries desiring such a role. The expected Burgas-Alexandroupoli pipeline, in which Russia’s stake will be larger than either of the two countries through which the pipeline will actually go, is also seen by Athens as a defensive precaution against Turkey: it will hug the militarized eastern border in Evros, a tangible investment deterring any Turkish invasion. This factor was dramatically enhanced with the Greek Cypriot government’s decision, against Turkish protests, to drill for oil off of the island’s coast. Should multinational oil companies be active in Cypriot oil projects, the logic goes, Turkey will have to take a less bellicose stance towards Nicosia and, by extension, Athens.

The larger implications of Greece’s diplomatic success in 2004 in lobbying for Cyprus’ unconditional entry into the EU – that is, with its membership not being contingent on the passage of the ‘Annan Plan’ for unification – have indeed registered this year, with the EU’s second Greek state ready to uphold Athens’ policies within the bloc, particularly on the Kosovo issue, thus relieving Greece of having to take the strongest stance possible against Kosovo independence. So long as Cyprus can be counted on to conduct an identical policy, Greece can desist and so appear more ‘accommodating’ to Western interests- something that also buys it more political capital to expend on issues which are (erroneously, perhaps) equated with the national interest, such as trying to force the Republic of Macedonia to change its constitutional name. Despite increasing world sympathy for the Macedonian side, Greece has continued to prevent major EU powers from recognizing the country’s name, allegedly due to economic threats. At the same time, Greece is happy to let Turkey remain bogged down on its eastern front, embroiled in a war against Kurdish guerrillas that has now unwisely led it into northern Iraq.

That said, the major point of inquiry for journalists in 2008 has got to be the question of finding the source of Greek power. A NATO member that uses Russian military technology, opposes Kosovo independence, and that has threatened to torpedo NATO plans by vetoing Macedonian accession in April, Greece nevertheless continues to have its way with the West. Despite all of these apparent red flags, there has never been a detailed media investigation into precisely how Greece wields its economic and diplomatic clout to extract results that diverge wildly from those of its allies.

This brings us to the third major issue in the Balkans this year, though before considering it we must acknowledge that for the Greeks, success may be coming at a price: the massive summer fires, which blazed along fronts of up to 70km in width and which reached urban Athens, while decimating large stretches of the Peloponnese, can be considered the greatest threat to national security, and we expect that they will be happen again this coming summer.

While some fires occurred due to natural causes amidst parched, hot natural conditions, the majority occurred due to human involvement. Everyone from arsonists to property developers to Kosovo Albanians have been blamed, all with different alleged motives. While the last of these propositions has been derided as conspiracy-theorizing, it is clear that for irredentists with no chance of undertaking military action against much stronger state forces, the only other possibility for pressuring Greek policy is by causing widespread material destruction through fires or other terrorist acts. However, the Western press by and large chose not to look at the situation from this strategic aspect.

The third major underreported issue of the year in the Balkans has been the intrinsic connections and future possibilities of the major international bodies’ self-created problems in the region. The issue of Kosovo, Western governments have continuously maintained, is one that cannot be considered a precedent for any other of the numerous self-determination struggles across the globe- even as the representatives of these independence movements continue to remind that no, in fact Kosovo is being perceived as a precedent for them.

The possibility that Kosovo could be partitioned, anathema to the West as potentially having the capacity to set off a chain reaction in the Balkans, has ironically been given precedent due to the admission of a divided Cyprus into the EU in 2004. In that case, both the UN and EU were unable, or unwilling, to force Greek and Turkish Cypriots to settle their differences and enter as one nation, thus exacerbating the existing political animosities between Greece and Turkey. Whatever the reason for Cyprus entering the EU divided may have been, it is clear now that the whole thing has proven an embarrassment for the credibility of the supranational world bodies.

Since the UN could not force the non-warring Greeks and Turks of Cyprus to come together in 2004, it should be no surprise that the UN is now saying it can’t do anything more to solve the Kosovo conundrum, and will hand it off to the EU to figure out. This is another blow to the credibility of the alleged global peacekeeper, and will be perceived by potential secessionists around the world as evidence that the UN has no ability to curtail their future ambitions.

For its part, the EU has enough of a headache dealing with embarrassments more recent than the Cyprus fiasco. The two countries that made headlines on Jan 1 by joining the bloc, Bulgaria and Romania, did so on condition of implementing further reforms in the future. European diplomats state that by the end of 2006, the whole train of EU enlargement had built up such momentum that it could not be stopped; and, had everything gone according to plan with the Romanians and Bulgarians, the EU might be more confident now of its future enlargement. However, the complacency that has been shown by the new members – disinterested in finishing reforms, safe in knowing that they are finally in the club – is making Brussels much more circumspect about further Balkan enlargement. While the value of Croatia’s tourism industry and its relatively homogenous Christian society could indeed keep it on track for membership, Macedonia, Bosnia, Albania and Serbia could find themselves out in the cold, stymied both by the cancerous presence of Kosovo in the middle and the recent legacy of less-than-honest candidate countries.

For 2008 at least, therefore, events in the Balkans should continue to outstrip the control of supranational institutions, and perhaps at an accelerated pace. While this is not necessarily a recipe for war, it does mean that the demonstrated trends in the region towards the bold and unpredictable unilateralism of the pre-WWII alliance systems will intensify. To paraphrase the friendly Chinese curse, we are indeed living in interesting times.

Finally, another emerging trend in the Balkans to watch during 2008 will be the activities of Islamic extremist groups in the region. Although their activities in 2007 were reported mostly in the local medias, the international press took interest as well when Serbian police in March broke up a Wahhabi training camp in the mountains of Novi Pazar, in the southwest Sandzak region; recently, from the other side of the border, Montenegro’s intelligence chief attested that the fundamentalists inhabited camps in Montenegrin Sandzak, while also masquerading their activities in NGOs and youth groups. Also in 2007 Macedonian special police carried out an action against an Albanian irredentist group near the Kosovo border, killing at least one known Islamic extremist in the process. And failed jihadi plots against the US Embassy in Vienna and Ft. Dix in New Jersey both had clear connections with the Balkans. These are only a few of the stories that emerged this year, indicating activity that we believe will increase in the year ahead. The fact that certain Western countries and Israel are starting to take a closer look at the phenomenon of Islamic extremism in the Balkans provides further indications that it remains one of the major, if more underreported, issues affecting regional security.

News from Balkanalysis.com: Summer Recess, New Books, Essential Articles

Balkanalysis.com would like to inform its readers that the site will be on summer recess through September. Look for new articles and photos to be posted then. Until we’re back, readers may like to check out two new books from Balkanalysis.com director Christopher Deliso, and to peruse the archive- as well as new hand-picked essential background articles presented for you below.

The first new book, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical Islam to Europe and the West, published by Praeger Security International, details in depth the sordid story of how Western interventions in the Balkans during the 1990’s directly allowed foreign Islamic terrorist groups to set up shop- and how Western policy since has created a climate in which extremist groups can thrive, boding ill for regional security.

A work of unprecedented depth, The Coming Balkan Caliphate analyzes the situation on a country-by-country basis, and will be useful for general-interest ‘beginners’ to Balkan issues and experienced professionals alike. Relying on five years of field research and dozens of interviews with ranking security officials from several Western and regional countries, The Coming Balkan Caliphate dispels myths and enhances our knowledge of the emerging extremist threat coming from the Balkans.

The second new book, Hidden Macedonia: The Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa, is a travelogue out now from London’s Haus Publishing, which details the author’s circular journey around Lakes Prespa and Ohrid, through Greece, Albania and the Republic of Macedonia. Along the way, the history, culture and contemporary life of the great Macedonian lakes are intertwined with a little adventure, camaraderie and good food and drink. Hidden Macedonia will appeal to travelers looking forward to visiting the region, or those who are content to imagine the Macedonian lakes from afar.

Finally, here is a list of twelve original and essential articles (in no particular order). All are among those published over the last year, and will enhance readers’ knowledge and help tide you over until we return from summer recess.

Thanks for your understanding and continued reading.

-Balkanalysis.com

The Strategic Significance of Greek Thrace: Current Dynamics and Emerging Factors (Ioannis Michaletos & Christopher Deliso)

Turkey: Why a Coup, Soft or Hard is Unlikely in 2007 (Mehmet Kalyoncu, December 2, 2006)

Estimating Yugoslavia, (David Binder, December 22, 2006)

In Macedonia, New Concerns over Rural Fundamentalism (Christopher Deliso, October 2, 2006)

Bulgaria To Finally Open Secret Files (Jan Buruma, May 15, 2007)

A Brief Travelers’ Guide to Sarajevo’s Local Traditions, (Lidija Jularić, November 17, 2006)

Exclusive: How the US Ordered Increased Activity against Macedonia’s Islamists after the Fort Dix Arrests (Balkanalysis.com, June 22, 2007)

Turkey: Europe’s Emerging Energy Corridor for Central Eurasian, Caucasian and Caspian Oil and Gas (Mehmet Efe Biresselioglu, January 20, 2007)

Varieties of Religious Experience in a Macedonian Village (Christopher Deliso, September 27, 2006)

The Hijacking of a Nation (Sibel Edmonds, November 29, 2006)

Wahhabis in Labunista Antagonize Locals, as New Details Emerge about Italian Arrests, (Balkanalysis.com, January 5, 2007)

Greece, Turkey and Balkan Security: Interview with John M. Nomikos (Balkanalysis.com, December 12, 2006)

Sarajevo Announces Revocation of Citizenships, but Bosnia’s ex-Mujahedin Have Vanished

By Christopher Deliso
A lengthy and controversial administrative review carried out by Bosnian Muslim authorities has concluded, with the announcement that the citizenships of almost 400 foreigners, most of them former mujahedin, will be revoked and that those involved will be deported. However, the announcement appears to be a merely symbolic measure, as the ex-jihadis have [...]

Estimating Yugoslavia

By David Binder
That was a strange assembly on the fifth floor of Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center on Dec. 7: about 70 aging intelligence agents, diplomats, academics and the odd journalist – mostly male – brought together by that now arcane topic: Yugoslavia.
The group was convened by the Government’s National Intelligence Council and the Wilson Center [...]

A Brief Travelers’ Guide to Sarajevo’s Local Traditions

By Lidija Jularić*
Sometimes it seems that in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia & Herzegovina, everyone knows everything about everyone. The position of Sarajevo itself in some way implies that this is a city in which social control is very strong. It lies in a long narrow valley surrounded by wonderful little hills that are [...]

The EU Has No ‘Plan B’ for the Balkans, or, Welcome to the Reservation

By Christopher Deliso
EU policy towards the West Balkan states has sought to keep the various antagonistic nations and ethnicities from one another’s throats, by promising eventual membership in NATO and the European Union to each country. This was to be the magic solution. The premise was that the collective advantages of membership in these [...]

Balkanalysis.com: the New and Improved Version

We at Balkanalysis.com are proud to welcome our readers to the new and improved version of the website. With a different look, improved functionality, enhanced features and more, we are sure that you will enjoy the site more than ever.

Here’s what’s different:

-Excellent search capabilities; articles are also cross-posted in up to 12 different categories.

-Photo of the week: every week, a beautiful new photo from the Balkans to capture your attention.

-Security & Intelligence Briefs: An exciting new feature that provides readers with vital information on the most important security trends in the region. We anticipate that this will be one of the most popular aspects of the site, and intend to therefore provide unique information not available elsewhere.

-A large and growing collection of interesting and useful Balkan links categorized by country.

Readers should note that since we are just finishing the programming and design, there are bound to be some bugs for the first few days, most notably in terms of symbols and letters that do not appear correctly. We are working on this and all will be fixed within a few days.

We are very happy to hear your feedback regarding the new look of the website. Performing the makeover was a long and arduous effort which could not have been done without the excellent work of Mike Ewens at Betanaught.com Hosting and Design.

Finally we should note that readers can show their appreciation for our efforts to make a better Balkanalysis.com by donating today.

Best wishes from the Balkanalysis.com Team.

For Some Bosnian Muslims in Serbia, Ethno-music is Simply Satanic

An indication of what lies ahead for the Balkans occurred recently in Novi Pazar, when Wahhabi fanatics successfully destroyed a concert held by a renowned Balkan ethno-music orchestra that appeals to people from many countries and ethnicities.
The violence was brazen and highly alarming, according to Belgrade’s B-92 which described the occurrence thus:
“ten [...]

What Mr. Lyon Didn’t Say

By Christopher Deliso
James Lyon’s April 10 article on political developments in Serbia, published in the Baltimore Sun, darkly predicts “serious repercussions” for the Balkan country, in terms of its “relations with the European Union and the United States, Montenegro’s independence referendum, the future status of Kosovo and cooperation with The [...]

The Young Turk Revolution and the 1908 Annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina

By Dejan Stjepanović*
Editor’s note: Readers wishing to understand the deeper background of the following article should also read our recent 10-part series, International Intervention in Macedonia, 1903-1909: The Murzsteg Reforms.
Introduction
The relation between the Young Turk Revolution and the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1908) is particularly interesting in light of [...]

The Indictment of a People

By Robert Leifels*
The politicians and intellectuals have missed the boat regarding the death of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt and label their Wall Street Opening Bell-like screaming as a rush to judgment. It is quite natural for them to worship [...]

Massacres and Machinations Continue: 1905 through to the Bitter End

The last in a 10-part series by Carl Savich and Christopher Deliso.

This depressing outlook was shared by other international observers. A couple months after Captain Nandrup’s final report was issued, the atrocities were still occurring. One was cited by Henry Noel Brailsford, the leader of the British aid mission to Macedonia, and a foreign correspondent for The Manchester Guardian and other publications. He had spent time on assignment in the Balkans in the 1890’s. His 1905 book Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future recounts his experiences in Macedonia during the insurgency and the implementation of the reforms. Brailsford described the Ottoman Turkish attack on Kuklish in 1905 thus:

“a typical outrage occurred in February, 1905, at the Bulgarian village of Kuklish, where, according to the report of a Russian gendarmerie captain, 64 houses out of 105 were burned, 38 unarmed peasants killed, including two women and a baby, five persons wounded, and eleven women violated. The whole place was pillaged, and the officers made no attempt to check the savagery of their men. It is worthy of note that the “reformed’ gendarmes who were present behaved exactly like the unregenerate soldiery.” Zervi, Mogila, Konopnitsa, and other Macedonian towns were similarly attacked during the spring and summer of 1905 by the “reformed” gendarmerie.

A Macedonian woman stands in the desolation of Djupanishta (photo: Methuen and Company)

On May 23, 1905, the arrest of Romanian or Vlach school inspectors by the Turks and the assault on the Romanian consulate on the orders of the vali of Ioannina provoked a diplomatic crisis. This led to the creation of a separate Vlach nationality or “millet” in Macedonia, with its own official language schools and churches. Ottoman Turkey was divided into millets, or communities based on religious affiliation who were autonomous with their own religious leaders and own laws and customs and language. The Turkish government supported this splintering of groups in Macedonia because it divided the Christian populations even further and pitted the Christians against each other.

Brailsford again gave the following on-the-spot, eyewitness evaluation of the reforms:

“the Mürzsteg programme aimed at something more than the improvement of the Turkish administrative machinery. It has done a very little in this direction, and when it is complete it may do more. Its chief aim, however, was to bring some measure of appeasement, to restore order, to re-establish confidence, to repair devastation, and, in a word, to remove the motives for rebellion. Here it has failed, and the failure is so conspicuous that it has actually aggravated the normal anarchy.

The Macedonians were encouraged to hope; the loss of their hope has deepened their despair and increased their recklessness. The reforms left the Turks supreme in all administrative matters. They used their liberty to resort to all the old devices of repression and provocation. They still seemed to contemplate an eventual war with Bulgaria, and to make a pretext, they tried to drive the Bulgarians to desperate courses. They were for ever mobilising their troops, calling out the reserves, and accumulating armaments. The troops lived on the peasants and drained the exchequer. Mutinies were frequent and discipline was lax. Under the plea of searching for arms they harried the villages and carried on their perquisitions, with the usual accompaniments of rapine and brutality.”

The bottom line, for the British observer, was that life for Macedonian civilians had not been qualitatively improved after two years of reforms:

“as in 1903, the migratory Macedonian labourers who annually visit Constantinople in search of work were confined to their villages and forbidden to travel. A curfew ordinance was enforced, which renders any peasant abroad after sundown liable to be summarily shot. Half the refugees from the Adrianople region have been unable to return, and their lands were occupied by Moslem ’squatters.’”

Austria-Hungary Moves on Kosovo

After objecting to other powers’ actions further south, Austria sought to extend its own sphere of influence northwards in 1906 by sending its officers to the northern cazas of Gnjilane in Kosovo and to the Presevo Valley in southern Serbia. In March 1907, Austria received permission from Hilmi Pasha to send an Austrian officer, Captain Franz Schmidt to Presevo. But the Serbian and Albanian civilian populations opposed the deployment of Schmidt. The Turks sent Shemsi Pasha, the commander of the Turkish 18th division to Kosovska Mitrovica to establish order. On April 18, Schmidt was recalled to Skopje. By the end of the year, however, these two cazas would be attached to the Austrian sector.

Meanwhile, the effect of excluding Kosovo from the reforms was bearing fruit, as the province’s beleaguered Serbian population came under the combined fire of Turkish and Albanian Muslims. Because of the exclusion, the latter could act with impunity. As in Macedonia, a cheta militia movement had sprang up among the Christians to provide some form of self-defense.

However, by summer 1907, tensions had significantly increased and Serbian traveling companies were frequently being waylaid. “The discovery of komitadjis [among the Serbian population] vexed the ethnic Albanians who feared the expansion of chetnik action and the inclusion of Kosovo and Metohia in the reform action,” writes Serbian historian Dusan Batakovic. “Feuding Albanian tribes immediately expressed solidarity… An assembly was held in the large mosque of Prizren; the ethnic Albanians of Ljuma demanded the extermination of Serbs. [Vice-consul] Milan Rakic discovered the demands of the people in Ljuma: “[…] for the assembly to determine the day when all ethnic Albanians would rise in arms and carry out a general massacre of Serbs. The reason stated by the people of Ljuma for the extermination of Serbs was that peace among the ethnic Albanians was impossible as long as there were Serbs in these regions, since the Serbs were always complaining to foreigners, bringing about bidats – reforms – with their complaints, and recently, they had started to infiltrate companies from Serbia.’”

However, the Serbs were not able to attract the same attention to their captivity as had the Macedonians, though this was not through a lack of effort. Rather, all entreaties and official complaints fell on the deaf ears of the Austro-Hungarians, who sought to suppress any potential challenge from Serbia.

Albanian irregulars in the Ottoman Turkish forces helped repress the Christian uprisings (photo: Alfred A. Knopf; copyright unknown)

Today, long after the demise of the Hapsburg dynasty and its grandiose dreams, the failure to include Kosovo in the reform scheme has shown itself to have had a retarding influence on development in the area. Events do not emerge from a vacuum, after all. The problems that the Great Powers did not want to face in 1906 simmered until finally exploding almost a century later. Now, in 2006, the diplomatic descendants of the Great Powers are being overwhelmed by the results of their ancestors’ selective inattention.

Swallowed Up by Larger Events, the Mürzsteg Programme Fizzles Out

By early 1908, it was clear that the reforms programme was not working as had been planned. This resulted in a sea change in, among others, British foreign policy towards Macedonia. In March of that year the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, proposed autonomy for Macedonia as a way to resolve the crisis.

On June 9-10, 1908, two weeks after the Ottomans put down a Greek revolt on the island of Samos, Edward VII and Russian Tsar Nicholas II met “cordially” at Reval/Tallin to discuss plans for installing a mostly European administration in Macedonia under an Ottoman governor to be approved by the Great Powers. Germany and the dissident Ottoman Young Turk movement, the Committee for Unity and Progress (CUP) rejected the proposal.

The Young Turk movement was fed both by pro-Western, pro-reforming inclinations, but paradoxically also by resentment of Western interventionism in Ottoman lands, specifically Crete and Macedonia. While the British and Russians were contemplating the idea of an independent Macedonia, however, the Young Turks were making urgent plans for an armed revolt that would render the sultan powerless to give away the territory. CUP agitators relocated from Paris to Thessaloniki, allied with disillusioned military officers and indigenous propagandists, especially Turks and Albanians.

Any dreams of an independent Macedonia were abruptly vanquished, however, early the next month, when the Young Turk revolution began. The Great Powers had found a way out of the quagmire, without having to do another thing. Not surprisingly, this revolt too emerged from Macedonia, among disaffected soldiers in the Ottoman 3rd Army Corps stationed in Resen, west of Bitola.

On July 3, Young Turk sympathizers in the army under command of Major Ahmed Niyazi decamped from Resen, “leaving behind a demand for the restoration of the constitution. The sultan’s attempt to suppress this uprising failed, and rebellion spread rapidly.”

A forgotten mosque in the once-turbulent southeast of Macedonia attests to the Ottoman occupation (photo: Christopher Deliso)

The reformists issued a proclamation which spelled out their liberalizing goals. Like Nikola Karev five years before, they promised equality and freedom to all citizens, regardless of nationality or religion. The strong sense of an Ottoman identity which the Young Turks called for, however, ran counter to the prevailing trend towards nationalism among the different groups. The rule of theocratic oppression was coming to an end, but a new and even more volatile age was beginning.

From Thessaloniki, CUP President Enver Bey declared the restoration of the 1876 constitution, and “the second and third army corps threatened to march on Constantinople if the sultan refused to obey the proclamation. On the 24th the sultan yielded, and issued an irade, restoring the constitution of 1876, and ordering the election of a chamber of deputies.” A limited purge followed, with some of the “more unpopular” Hamidian officials assassinated, like former spy chief Fehim Pasha. On August 6, 1908, Young Turk sympathizer Kiamil Pasha was appointed grand vizier to the sultan.

The Great Powers tried to accommodate themselves to the new situation. On July 27, they withdrew their peacekeeping force from Crete, the other European “project” at the time. They had failed to resolve the situation there as well. The provisional government of the island, which was autonomous but not yet free, soon swore allegiance to the Greek king and thus raised tensions with the Ottomans, who sought to keep it from uniting with Greece.

The Dual Monarchy Raises the Stakes

The victory of the Young Turks meant the end for all intents and purposes of the status quo that the Great Powers had with such frantic inaction sought to maintain throughout their weak intervention in Macedonia. The new Turkish regime was, after all, calling for much of the same reforms that the Europeans had, and more seriously for the Powers, could they pacify the population and keep the empire united, the Young Turks might pose a renewed threat to European hegemonic ambitions. The potential threat seemed most serious to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

On October 7, 1908, the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph thereby took the step of annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was not a surprise; Russian and other diplomats had been expecting it since the summer. According to Vienna, the Young Turk revolution had made the annexation “necessary.” It was allegedly justified by the fateful 1878 Treaty of Berlin. The Austrians were in fact pushing a reckless “back to the future” strategy. The immediate result was a damaging trade boycott in protest from Constantinople and a dramatic increase of tensions with Serbia, which prepared to defend itself from the ambitious Austrians.

At the same time Bulgaria, liberated in fact but not by law with the Berlin treaty, took the opportunity to declare its own full independence. While the Ottomans protested, they were in no position to take military action and instead decided to sue for compensation in both cases.

Thus on April 6, 1909, the Ottoman parliament approved of the Austrian offer to buy Bosnia for 2,200,000 pounds, as well as to pull out of the sandzak of Novi Pazar. Thirteen days later, the Turks recognized the independence of Bulgaria in exchange for more fiscal compensation. The following month a summer-long revolt against the Turks, the most serious yet, erupted in Albania.

Outgunned and outnumbered, the heroic insurgents nevertheless took on the impossible task of defeating the Ottomans (photo: Methuen and Company)

The political drama unfolding in Constantinople and its side effects left the Great Powers gaping. The fate of sorry Macedonia remained in suspended animation as events began to speed up. The Young Turk revolution, plagued by intrigue, assassinations, leadership shake-ups and counter-revolts, raised fears that the new government would be more volatile than the last and its fire, more random. It was an unsettling thought. Russia, confronted with the Austrian provocation in Bosnia, lost its nerve to stand up for the Serbs, when Germany warned that it would back Austria in any war that would ensue from the disagreement. The Great War was arriving fast, and almost a decade of shared intervention in the Balkans had sped it up.

On September 1, 1909, the ambassadors of the Great Powers decided unanimously to recall the Civil Agents from Macedonia and to abrogate the financial commission set up after the naval intervention of December 1904. On the 13^th of the month, the international commission of finance held its final meeting. The Mürzsteg Reform Programme in Macedonia was over.

In a fitting irony, “its members were reappointed to a higher finance board for the whole empire, under the presidency of [Ottoman Finance Minister] Djavid Bey.” Other staff from the French, British, and Italian contingents were also rehired under private contracts to reorganize the gendarmerie in all of Ottoman Turkey. This cynical move showed the utter absurdity of the reforms.

Conclusion: The Failure of the Mürzsteg Plan to Stabilize Macedonia

The Mürzsteg Reforms achieved very little in Macedonia. They were stalling tactics that only made the Balkan powder keg more volatile and explosive. The international intervention only made matters worse, demonstrating the abject and tragic failure of international intervention. The Balkans Wars would follow in 1912-1913 and World War I, the Great War, would follow in 1914.

According to historian Arthur May, the Mürzsteg Reforms “remained a dead letter.” There was no judicial reform in Macedonia. While the Mürzsteg plan granted a measure of local autonomy to Monastir, Skopje, and Salonika, Macedonian Christians continued to be denied even basic civil and human rights in the Turkish courts. Turkey refused to allow international monitors or officials to participate in the judiciary in Macedonia. Turkey was supported in this by foreign chancelleries. Rival comitadji guerrillas continued to infiltrate and to gain control and to seize territory in Macedonia

According to May, “not very much, in a word, was accomplished in bettering the wretched lot of the Macedonians.” In 1907, the British foreign office sought to coerce Turkey to make significant reforms in Macedonia and to break the deadlock. Austria and Russia, however, opposed the new reform initiative, stating that the time was “singularly inopportune for advancing fresh proposals.” Austria considered the possibility of sending in an international force into Macedonia that would exclude Britain but ultimately rejected it. May argued: “Only force, as a matter of fact, could compel the Turk to rectify evils in Macedonia, and that the powers were unwilling to apply.” Pro-Ottoman Germany argued that applying force in Macedonia would result in instability and would encourage insurgencies in the other parts of Ottoman Turkey.

The enactment of the reforms did not bring any positive change to Macedonia. The reforms did not “receive practically any real application.” The only parts of the reforms that were applied were those for the reorganization of the gendarmerie. According to French military attache Dupont in Constantinople, this was done only because the Turks wanted above all to avoid direct Great Power intervention in Macedonia.

The main problem of the reforms, therefore, was that there were no enforcement mechanisms to compel the Turks to act. French representatives recommended that “urgent measures” be taken but Turkish Inspector Hilmi Pasha ignored them. And while the enforcement was feeble in areas covered by the reform plan, it was utterly non-existent in the Albanian-populated areas kept off-limits thanks to the patronage of Vienna. And so at best, the Turks would receive a gentle chiding over atrocities committed in the former areas, while those carried out in the latter areas were not considered.

But by no means do these failings mean that the endemic problems of the region were the fault of the would-be reformers. Turkish cunning created a policy in Macedonia that pitted the different Christian national and ethnic groups against each other. Extending favors and promises to a corrupt Christian leadership, primarily the religious one, at the Porte helped ensure that significant interested parties would support the outdated regime.

Brailsford analyzed this divisive policy as follows:

“with the evident intention of fomenting the feud between Greeks and Bulgarians, Hilmi Pasha has handed over a large number of Bulgarian village churches to the Greek faction. But the worst feature of all is the complicated racial strife, a sort of furtive civil war, which devastates the country. The Turks watch this internecine contest, not merely with tolerance, but with satisfaction. The rayahs are at war among themselves, and the master may fold his arms. But the real responsibility lies with the Government, which connives at the vendetta and seeks to profit by it. The Turks, despite their vast armaments, have proved once more their total incapacity to maintain even an outward semblance of order.”

Brailsford further adduced that the reason for the failure of the Mürzsteg reforms was “largely because it attempted to reform Macedonia without reckoning with the Macedonians.” According to this observer, the reform scheme “was an advertisement to all the world that the Near Eastern Question was open at last. It bore on its surface the marks of transition.”

Many Macedonian villages, like this one near Strumica, look no different than they did 100 years ago (photo: Christopher Deliso)

In a sentence that seems uncannily similar to that facing the Balkans today in Kosovo, the English writer eulogized Mürzsteg as follows:

“no one could imagine it to be final, and no one could suppose that, having recognised the impossibility of Turkish rule, the Powers would ultimately shrink from drawing the logical conclusion. It announced to every race in the Balkans that the end was approaching, and inevitably it accentuated their latent rivalries and hostilities.”

The Mürzsteg Reform Programme failed because it was not so much concerned about the people in Macedonia as it was about advancing the national self-interests and geo-political and geo-strategic agendas of the Great Powers who carried it out. As has remained the case today, the peoples of Macedonia were merely pawns in a greater game.

Moreover, the Great Powers were never able to resolve the inherent contradiction and conflict between international intervention and sovereignty. One precluded the other.

In the end, the international intervention in Macedonia from 1902-1909 was essentially a stalling tactic, a smokescreen, a harmful ruse that revealed the absurdity and futility of all interventions. For history has shown that every intervention addresses the superficial symptoms, and not the inherent causes, of conflict. The Mürzsteg reforms only put off and delayed a final resolution of the conflict, making Macedonia more unstable and volatile, and ensuring that the conflict, when it did come, would be cataclysmic.

Now, one hundred years on, today’s Great Powers seem to think that they have survived the worst of it, and that their innovations in intervention will lead to unending peace and prosperity for the Balkans. But in light of the maxim that those who don’t learn from their historical mistakes are bound to repeat them, it is deeply concerning that the institutional memory regarding intervention in the Balkans seems limited to the last 15 years.

For while no one today talks about or even remembers the tremendous pain, suffering and chaos experienced in the Macedonia of a century ago, many of today’s most vexing unresolved issues lead directly back to the decisions made by Western interventionists at that time. Their descendents would be well served by studying their mistakes, rather than compounding them.

Partial Bibliography

Booth, John. Troubles in the Balkans. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905.

Brailsford, Henry Noel. Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future. London: Methuen & Co., 1906.

Curtis, William Eleroy. The Turk and His Lost Provinces. Chicago: Fleming Revell Co., 1903.

Fraser, John Foster. Pictures from the Balkans. London: Cassell and Company, 1906.

Lange-Akhund, Nadine. The Macedonian Question, 1893-1908: From Western Sources. NY: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Macartney, Carlile Aylmer. The Habsburg Empire, 1790-1918. NY: Macmillan, 1969.

Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

May, Arthur J. The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914. NY: W.W. Norton, 1951.

Sakellariou, M.B., ed. Macedonia. Athens: Ekdotike Athenon S.A., 1983.

Shea, John. Macedonia and Greece: The Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997.

Sonnichsen, Albert. Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit: A Californian in the Balkan Wars. NY: Duffield & Co., 1909.

Simmering Discontent, Evasive Actions: the Mürzsteg Programme through 1904

Part nine in a 10-part series by Carl Savich and Christopher Deliso.

For all of its intrinsic weaknesses, the Mürzsteg Programme’s Civil Agents did try to make a difference, and they did achieve some results. They obtained 30,930 Turkish pounds in aid money for the thousands of Macedonian refugees and for reconstructing their homes and villages. Hilmi Pasha used 10,630 pounds from the total to reconstruct destroyed homes. On April 4, 1904, 11,648 refugees were registered at the border posts into Macedonia. Hilmi Pasha claimed that 5,000 homes had been reconstructed since February. But this information could not be verified.

French consul Louis Steeg reported that in the Monastir vilayet, the most devastated region, Christians were living in temporary shelters and that the destroyed villages remained in ruins. The villages around Ohrid and Kastoria were in a state of “extreme misery.” Entire villages had been burned and looted and destroyed. Famine and a typhoid epidemic threatened the region. The British and French sent religious missions, the Lazaristes and the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul, to distribute flour.

Meanwhile, the sundry bands of brigands and Macedonian insurgents were not completely disarmed. They kept some of their weapons, secreting them away in mountain strongholds and biding their time. Experience had shown them that the European powers could not be trusted to deliver a safe living environment. Skirmishes and battles between insurgents and Turkish forces continued after the arrival of the international forces, as it was clear to all that the international peacekeepers would not be able to protect the Christians from any Turkish attacks.

Achievements and Obstacles for Mürzsteg’s Civil Agents

Among their other achievements, the Civil Agents were able to obtain one-year tax exemptions for 135 Christian and Muslim villages that were damaged during the insurgency. They also were able to obtain a general amnesty in March 1904. The Agents received delegations of Christians who made oral and written requests for action. On February 17, the Austrian one, Müller von Roghoj, claimed that over a hundred requests had been solved. Using Article 9 of the Mürzsteg Reforms, they also persuaded Hilmi Pasha to pledge to transfer away the ilaves, the Ottoman 2nd class reservists, who were accused of committing atrocities. But Hilmi Pasha denied that the other marauders, the Bashi-bazouk irregulars, were in the Turkish army at all.

The Mürzsteg monitors also tried to reform the bekchi or rural militias, as had initially been proposed under the Vienna Plan of February 1903. The notorious bekchi were armed and used their position to intimidate, plunder and terrorize Christian villages. In March 1904, the French consul to Monastir introduced a reform whereby Christian bekchi would be elected in the villages that had a Christian majority. By 1906, of a total of 6,840 bekchi groups, 3,259 were Christians while slightly more (3,581) were Muslims.The Muslim militias were especially active in the vilayet of Kosovo, where Albanian bekchi existed to deprive Serbian Christians of their civil rights, human rights and very lives. But thanks to self-serving Austrian pressure, the Kosovo Albanians were protected from the reforms.

The Dual Monarchy’s machinations were further displayed by the empire’s desire to destroy the Macedonian revolutionary committees such as the IMRO, and thus the Macedonian nationalist movement. Müller von Roghoj saw the insurgents as “terrorists” and the insurgency as an example of terrorism against a legitimate power, the Ottoman Empire. He wanted to “remove the terrorism of the revolutionaries.”

A woman and little boy survey the ruins of Zagorichani following the Turkish vengeance of 1903 (photo: Methuen and Company)

Along with the Russian Civil Agent, Müller von Roghoj wanted Turkey to institute “a decisive repression” over the revolutionary and nationalist movements. The rival Great Powers saw the insurgency in a common light, as a threat to the reform programme. This by necessity led to vicious contradictions and confusion in the mission, since both warring parties blamed the other for fuelling the fire and both sought to deny responsibility for the civilian carnage that followed. This was the quagmire into which the Western powers had halfheartedly jumped.

Affronts and Sluggish Reforms

Another threat was the resistance and bad will of the Turkish government in the implementation of the reforms. Hazim Bey, the vali of Monastir refused the report of the Civil Agents regarding administrative abuses, acts of violence, and judicial irregularities. Hilmi Pasha refused to act. The embarrassing affair had to be settled by negotiations between the Russian and Austrian governments and the Turkish government.

The Agents could only give advice and make suggestions to Hilmi Pasha. They could not make decisions. Hilmi Pasha had the ultimate discretion on whether to act on the reports of grievances. One real affront to the Macedonians was the appointment of Turkish General Baktiar Pasha – the architect of the slaughter in Krusevo the summer before – as commander in Monastir. However, even though the Agents objected, they were powerless to block the appointment. In the end, they had to settle for exercising a certain moral authority, forcing the Turkish officials to account for their actions and hopefully show restraint- at least theoretically.

British journalist Henry Noel Brailsford, who headed the British relief mission to Macedonia in 1903, assessed the initial impact of the Mürzsteg Programme as both a disappointment in practical terms, yet as a promising work-in-progress which was showing a new and more multi-lateral approach to international intervention. Change a few proper nouns, and his words could have been uttered in our times:

“six months of procrastination followed, and it was not until April, 1904, that it came fully into operation in Macedonia. Its results have been as disappointing as those of the first essay in amelioration. The state of Macedonia is if anything worse than it was in 1902. Something, however, has been gained. A further blow has been struck at the direct sovereignty of the Turks; and though the principle of an exclusive Austro-Russian control remains intact, some place has been found in the new scheme for the other Powers. It makes an advance towards the ideal of an international protectorate.”

A key part of the Mürzsteg Reforms was the readjusting of administrative divisions of Macedonia along more nationalist or ethnic lines. However, this objective conflicted with the Russian and Austro-Hungarian policy to preserve the status quo in Macedonia. As a result, very little was actually achieved in restructuring the administrative division of Macedonia along national or ethnic bases.

The Ottomans Stonewall on Finance Reforms, the Powers Take an Island

On May 8, 1904, an international commission was established to oversee Macedonian finance reforms but its efforts were thwarted by the Ottoman Turkish officials. Austria and Russia requested the addition of 23 officers, but the Turks refused. The officers were sent to Macedonia anyway, thus challenging Turkey to recognize the fait accompli. If the Ottomans refused, Goluchowski told them, they that they would recognize the autonomy of the three Macedonian vilayets. The French military attache reported “how highly unpleasant it was to the imperial government to see Russian officers walk in their uniform in the middle of the Orthodox populations in regions so deeply agitated.”

However, the Turks would not budge and it took a display of European naval might elsewhere to force the Turks to accept the reform in Macedonia. On November 11, 1904, the Great Powers staged a naval demonstration off of the Straits. Then, on November 26, they sent five warships to seize the port city of Mytilini on the island of Lesvos.

With little action from the Turkish side, on December 5, 1904, a European naval squadron seized the customs house on the island of Limnos, which was seen as strategically vital to the defense of Constantinople. Limnos sits roughly equidistant between the north Aegean coast of Macedonia and the northeastern coast of Asia Minor; from its location, all maritime traffic heading to or from the Dardanelles can be intercepted.

The blunt warning from the Great Powers jolted the Turks into action, and the Ottoman regime soon agreed to reform Macedonian finances. On December 16, the Turks accepted an international plan, and the Great Powers then evacuated Limnos. The Turkish government finally agreed to accept the 23 officers when Britain, France, Italy, Austria, and Russia made the demand in the form of an ultimatum, with Germany abstaining. To preempt and to sabotage the mission, however, Sultan Abdul Hamid enacted his own reorganization scheme for the gendarmerie in Macedonia.

Reflections on a Failure: the Situation in December 1904

This was abetted in some respects by the Austrians, who for their own interests sought to keep the members of the international mission out of Albanian areas. The Austrians jealously accused General Degiorgis of trying to expand the Italian zone of influence to the Albanian areas, through the person of Norwegian Captain Karl Ingvar Nandrup, who had been installed alongside the Turkish authorities and was tasked with writing reports on the progress of the Mürzsteg Programme for his king, Oscar II.

Therefore, whenever any actions occurred against insurgents, the Turkish authorities would inform Nandrup, who was then sent to make an inspection. In Skopje, Nandrup met General Degiorgis during one such tour of the vilayet. Nandrup was, unlike other monitors, trusted by the Ottomans. General Degiorgis was also satisfied with his performance. Yet others considered him and the reform team in general to be incompetent.

General Degiorgis had received Hilmi Pasha’s permission to send Nandrup to Pristina and his comrade, Major Viktor Axel Unander, to Koritza west of the Italian sector. But after the Austrian complaints, Degiorgis backed down and the decision was made to keep to keep Unander subordinate to the orders of Hilmi Pasha, and to keep Captain Karl Ingvar Nandrup in Skopje.

The Norwegian finished out his term in the full awareness that the Mürzsteg Reform Programme was failing, and that the representatives of the Great Powers were trying their best to keep that fact from the Western public. Captain Nandrup’s intimate final report, written on December 30, 1904 and entitled “Note by the hand of an archivist,’ is a sobering corrective to the positive propaganda being disseminated in the official reports of the Civil Agents. It was translated into English by Swedish Prof. Dr Orjan Lindberger, and excerpted in a 1989 paper by historian Blagoj Stoicovski.

The report would be the last that Nandrup would submit before wrapping up his one-year term in Macedonia. In this report, Nandrup detailed Great Powers aspirations, especially the policy of Austria-Hungary, along with their vision for the future of Macedonia.

As always with multi-national intervening projects, damage control was key for the Great Powers in Macedonia. European newspapers published the report by the Civil Agents, in which the implementation, the progress, and the results of the reforms were depicted as satisfactory and successful. The reports were self-congratulatory and subjective, released to assure public opinion in Europe, to justify and rationalize the international intervention. The report was meant to counter the sensationalistic reports in daily newspapers and journals which had been feeding Western audiences a steady diet of Macedonian murders, outrages, atrocities and massacres.

The December 1904 report of Karl Ingvar Nandrup, however, shows that the results of the Mürzsteg Programme were pitifully meager. He charged that a Potemkin village of sort was being created by the Civil Agents, in order to conceal the deplorable and desperate situation prevailing in Macedonia since the beginning of the Mürzsteg intervention:

“I am sorry to say that we who are in close touch with the events are unable to see the slightest sign of an amelioration; on the contrary, I must assert that the actual state is worse than it has been. In my opinion, the report of the civil agents aims to deceive Europe and cover the deplorable failure of the Mürzsteg program and the pitiable comedy played by the Powers on the Balkan Peninsula.”

The sunnier report of the Civil Agents had concluded that the majority of the refugees had been returned to their homes and that most of the villages and towns destroyed and burned during the insurgency had been repaired and reconstructed. In 1903, according to Stoicovski, 198 Christian villages had been destroyed and 12,241 houses burned. There were 70,000 displaced and there were 30,000 refugees, while 1,500 were imprisoned. Of the refugees, 6,000, or 20%, were estimated to have returned. Food and housing shortages remained.

However, according to critics like Captain Nandrup, the funds allocated by the Turkish government for the reconstruction and relief effort were insufficient to feed and house the refugees and displaced during the winter. The Macedonian population faced famine conditions, and most of the destroyed and burned houses had not in fact been rebuilt.

Public security in Macedonia had deteriorated to a point where it was worse than it had been before the arrival of Nandrup and the other Western reformers. Very little had actually changed on the ground. Murders, assaults, and robberies continued. The Turkish officials were able to do nothing against this, but sometimes got to participate.

Many Macedonian villages such as this one near Ohrid in 1904 were not rebuilt, despite the Turkish obligations under Mürzsteg (photo: Methuen and Company)

Further, very little had been achieved by way of judicial reforms. An unfair system of taxation remained in Macedonia for Christians. The planned financial reorganization had not proven effective, even though the Ottoman military force in Macedonia had been reduced. Nandrup calculated that the budget of the three Macedonian vilayets should have produced a surplus of at least 15 million francs a year. But the officers in the army and the public officials did not receive their salaries regularly. Observers noted that the two Civil Agents were placed in a helpless and awkward position.

Nandrup emphasized four factors which impeded the reforms as explained by the Civil Agents: 1) the resistance and obstruction of the Turkish authorities, 2) the poor economy, 3) the revolutionary propaganda, and, 4) the hostilities between the Christian groups.

Of course, it was not all the fault of the Turks and the Westerners. Nandrup noted how Bulgarian and Greek “propaganda” played a role in the conflict. He noted how Bulgarian Committees agitated in Macedonia and how Greeks sought to “Hellenize” parts of Macedonia. There were obvious tensions between Greeks and Bulgarians and their respective agendas.

Nandrup reported that there were twelve massacres in the region during his year-long stay in Skopje. He criticized political leaders for not acting decisively and forcefully. But he also noted a lack of energy on the part of the officers who were charged by the Great Powers to lead the police reorganization in Macedonia. In his final thoughts, the Norwegian questioned whether the whole mission had not really been a foolish mistake:

“when you have abandoned a position in your own country, hoping to be able to use your capacity in helping a suffering people, and you see yourself reduced to playing the part of a fool in a pitiable comedy, then you cannot feel at ease, and I am longing for the day when I can return home.”

Partial Bibliography

Booth, John. Troubles in the Balkans. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905.

Brailsford, Henry Noel. Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future. London: Methuen & Co., 1906.

Curtis, William Eleroy. The Turk and His Lost Provinces. Chicago: Fleming Revell Co., 1903.

Fraser, John Foster. Pictures from the Balkans. London: Cassell and Company, 1906.

Lange-Akhund, Nadine. The Macedonian Question, 1893-1908: From Western Sources. NY: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Macartney, Carlile Aylmer. The Habsburg Empire, 1790-1918. NY: Macmillan, 1969.

Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

May, Arthur J. The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914. NY: W.W. Norton, 1951.

Sakellariou, M.B., ed. Macedonia. Athens: Ekdotike Athenon S.A., 1983.

Shea, John. Macedonia and Greece: The Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997.

Sonnichsen, Albert. Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit: A Californian in the Balkan Wars. NY: Duffield & Co., 1909.

Intrigue, Diplomacy and Rivalry: Macedonia Divided by the Great Powers

Part eight in a 10-part series by Carl Savich and Christopher Deliso.

On February 1, 1904, Italian Lieutenant General Emilio Degiorgis arrived in Constantinople as the head of the military commission charged with reforming or reorganizing the Turkish gendarmerie. Enrico Albera and Major Rodolfo Ridolfi were also part of the Italian mission. Ridolfi directed the Salonika school for chiefs of station. The first meeting of the military commission took place on February 8, 1904.

Each Great Power sent a military delegate, referred to as “military deputies.” Six military attaches from the embassies also were part of the commission. Two more attaches were added to the commission, one for Degiorgis and another for the Russian officer on the commission, making a total of 15. The military commission met on a daily basis from February 8-April 9, 1904. Brigadier General Osman Nizami Pasha and Colonel Zia Bey of the Turkish General Staff also attended the meetings, which were conducted in French.

Mürzsteg and its “Opportunities” for the Great Powers

Each of the six European Great Powers used the reforms to strengthen its own position in Macedonia, ideally at the expense of the others. They were all jockeying for dominance, something which could be manifested in terms of various diplomatic or trade outcomes and zones of strategic control.

Germany sent a military deputy to Macedonia but did not commit itself to a larger presence, wishing to preserve its relations with Turkey. Austria-Hungary and Russia, who had sponsored the reforms, were the most active but the latter, preoccupied with an emerging conflict in the Far East with Japan, was unable or unwilling to maintain the crucial balancing role it had sought. This left Austria-Hungary as the dominant player in Macedonia, and the one most determined to implement the Mürzsteg reforms.

The Dual Monarchy sought to advance its interests in the Balkans. Its objective was to exclude the Macedonian districts which had Albanian populations from the purview of the Mürzsteg reforms, and it also sought to prevent Monastir from being assigned to its rival, Italy. Both powers had designs on the Adriatic coastline, and especially the Albanian Adriatic ports.

For its part, Britain wanted to reduce Austrian influence in the Balkans. To counter the Austrian and Russian bloc, Britain sought to form a bloc with France and Italy. Britain opposed the “encroachment” of Austria and Russia into “European Turkey” as Macedonia was sometimes called. Britain also opposed an Italian presence on the Adriatic coast and, in the larger picture, in Tripolitania (western Libya), because it wanted above all to safeguard the Mediterranean sea lanes to India.

After becoming king of Italy in 1900, Victor Emmanuel III pursued a more aggressive policy towards the Balkans. He married Princess Helen of Montenegro and sought to exert greater Italian influence on the Adriatic coast, Albania, and in parts of Macedonia. Since the Italians opposed an Austrian presence in Salonika, another source of conflict and tension thus emerged between the Italian and Austrian members of the commission.

General Degiorgis proved hostile to Austrian initiatives and proposals. The lack of consensus and divisions between the powers only helped the Turkish government in scuttling or diminishing the effectiveness of the reforms. France supported the Austrian and Russian position because it wanted to maintain the status quo in Macedonia. The Ilinden Uprising of the previous August had a galvanizing effect, however, and all of the powers began to realize a lot more was at stake than an oppressed bunch of Christian peasants.

However, the crucial factor was that, all good intentions aside, in 1904 no European power was willing to risk war with Ottoman Turkey by intervening militarily to help the Christian populations of Macedonia. It was not because they would have been defeated by the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Rather, it was because the balance of power among themselves was too finely calibrated to risk upsetting. Balkan military intervention could realistically lead to an all-out, continent-wide war.

This indeed eventually came to pass, after one of the powers – Austria-Hungary – grew too confident in the influence it had gained in the region, partially as a result of the Mürzsteg meddling and especially after the 1908 annexation of Bosnia. But this hubris would be decisively rewarded in 1918, in the aftermath of the Great War, when the glorious empire of the Hapsburgs was dismantled once and for all.

Nevertheless, 14 years earlier it had seemed to the imperialists that fortune indeed favored the bold. The immediate victims of Austro-Hungarian ambitions were the peoples of Macedonia.

Carving Up Macedonia: Strategic Objectives of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire

On February 13, 1904, talks were initiated on the division of the three Macedonian vilayets into five sectors. Colonel Wladimir von Giesl, the Austro-Hungarian military attache and future ambassador to Serbia, requested the Skopje sector, which was attached to Kosovo. The Russian military attache, General Kalnine, requested Salonika. As the most interested parties, Austria-Hungary and Russia naturally sought, and felt themselves entitled to, the most strategic positions in Macedonia: the Skopje-Salonika north-south axis, a vital corridor hugging the River Vardar which connected Central Europe with the Aegean Sea.

The Kosovo vilayet was vital to the Austrian geopolitical strategy in the Balkans. It was an area that abutted the sandzak of Novi Pazar, which Austria had administered and occupied since the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. Moreover, Skopje was important because this territorial unit was one where there was a Serbian majority that had to be kept down if Austro-Hungarian ambitions were to be achieved.

Austria wanted to prevent Serbian expansion and infiltration south into the major urban and transit center along an east-west axis, Kumanovo and Skopje. Whoever controlled these territories not only would enjoy the economic, communicative and other benefits of urban life, but also would control the major route eastwards to Sofia, Bulgaria and to Tetovo in western Macedonia. Skopje was the central location where the east-west and north-south axes met – in modern parlance, they are European Corridor 8 and Corridor 10 respectively – and thus of central importance for any aspiring military power.

But the ambitions of the Hapsburgs were greater still. Their colonial occupation of the Novi Pazar sandzak was undertaken in order to prevent Serbia from connecting with Montenegro and thus winning an outlet to the Adriatic Sea. Austria-Hungary could thereby prevent the emergence of a strong and unified Serbia that would be capable of endangering its drive for power in the Balkans.

The results of the Austro-Hungarian deal-making also meant that foreign officers were to be effectively excluded from the sandzaks of Pec and Pristina in Kosovo, which had a mixed population of Serbians and Albanians. Russia allowed Austrian forces to occupy the southern part of the Kosovo vilayet, in Skopje. But Wladimir von Giesl, the Austrian military attache, was able to exclude the Albanian-populated areas from international scrutiny- thus ensuring that the killing of Christians would go on unchecked and that Austria-Hungary would remain on good terms with its Albanian lackeys. They ensured that there would only be international control in the areas inhabited by “the Bulgarians,” as they referred to the Slavic population in Macedonia.

The French commander Dupont wrote that the Dual Monarchy was guided by an ulterior motive to occupy the Skopje region. He too suspected that the Austrians sought merely to increase their influence and to advance their interests in the region. Skopje was far away from the main hotbeds of unrest where encounters with the Ottomans, and the subsequent imperative to hold them accountable for atrocities, would by necessity occur more frequently. By comparison, Skopje was a relatively “easy” mission. And it coincided perfectly with Hapsburgian imperialist goals.

During the Austro-Hungarian inspection tours, the French military attache accused, their agents were merely trying to establish contacts with the Albanian leaders. According to the French, the Austrians were spying and reconnoitering the area.

Skopje, or Üsküb in Turkish, capital of the Kosovo vilayet (photo: Herbert Vivian)

The Austrians did not plan to occupy the Kosovo vilayet, but they did strengthen their position in Skopje to prevent Serbian claims on Kosovo. The Austrian-Hungarian mission chief, Lt. Colonel Johann Graf von Salis-Seewis, born in Karlovac in Croatia-Slavonia, “showed a careful attention to the Serbs, and deplored their openly malevolent attitude with regard to the Austrian mission.” He blamed this attitude on “Serbian propaganda.”

Austria-Hungary attempted to “use” the Albanian leaders to preclude Italian involvement and to “oppose the ambitions of Belgrade.” With this policy, Vienna showed its preference for chaos and instability in these areas, because such a state would allegedly justify the Austrian presence. Maintaining instability also worked to obstruct Serbian and Italian designs on the region. From 1904-1908, the Albanian districts between Prizren and Pec, areas contiguous to the Austrian and Italian zones, were thus incited to a state of constant revolt and turmoil; and they were deliberately excluded from the reforms.

The mission of the international officers was complex and ambiguous and hampered by a lack of communications. It also proved unpredictable, even for the powerful Austrians. There were instances when the gendarmes were attacked. At the Kumanovo station, it was reported by the Austrian officer that it was “unstable” because “Albanian gangs” spread terror in the region.

On July 26, 1904, Colonel Ferdinand Richter was the victim of a murder attempt by an Albanian gendarme, Hassan Emin, who shot up his apartment in Kumanovo. The officers established a network of gendarmerie stations, expanding on the karakols, for greater security. The gendarmes also made agreements with mokhtars, the chiefs of villages. A gendarme school was established in Salonika in 1904, where 3,000 gendarmes would be educated during the years 1904-1908, when the reform program ended.

Zones of Exemption

All in all, the Austro-Hungarian machinations meant that the following Ottoman sandzaks would be excluded from Mürzsteg Programme oversight: Koritza (except the caza of Kastoria), the sandzak of Elbasan, the western part of the caza of Ochrid, the districts of Debar and Prizren, the southwest sector of the sandzak of Pec, and the sandzaks of Tachlidja and Senitza of Novi Pazar.

Great Britain and Italy wanted further clarification as to why the Albanian districts were to be excluded from the reform plan’s purview. They were informed that Article 3 of the Mürzsteg program, which envisioned a division of the vilayets along homogenous national and ethnic lines, mandated it.

Ever vigilant, Vienna also sought to prevent Monastir from being assigned to Italy. It suggested that Russia control the Monastir sector, but Russia declined to take this, one of the most turbulent areas in revolution-era Macedonia. So at its meeting of April 5, 1904, the commission parceled out Macedonia in five sectors as such: Austria-Hungary would control Skopje; Italy would control Monastir; Russia would control Salonika; France would control Serres; and Britain would control Drama, in the east. But Austria-Hungary was able to place a restriction on the Italian sector, stipulating that General Degiorgis and his contingent should not reside in the same sector. Austria also was able to successfully exclude the Albanian districts from the purview of the reforms.

Tensions and Questions of Authority

Another question soon presented itself. What kind of authority should the Italian, General Degiorgis, have over the Turkish gendarmerie? The commission decided that he should have effective control and direct command. Abdul Hamid, however, rejected this decision. He nominated General Mustafa Pasha to command the gendarmerie in the vilayets. The commission backed down. Degiorgis would act only as an inspector, consultant, providing surveillance, but not making any decision himself. It was another sign of weakness from the allegedly mighty Great Powers.

This failure handicapped the Western mission from the beginning. And power plays between the Great Powers ensured that there would be no common front in negotiating with the Turks. For example, General Degiorgis requested the power to transmit orders to the Ottoman officers and to denounce those who do not obey, to remove officers from the gendarmerie who were unfit or who had displayed bad behavior, and a written consent for the use of the officers and NCOs for a two year term.

However, the Turkish government rejected these proposals as a violation of sovereignty. When Russia and Austria-Hungary argued that the effective implementation of article 2 required this power, Germany intervened on behalf of Turkey. Adolf Frieherr Marschall von Bieberstein, the German ambassador to Constantinople from 1897-1912, met with Tewfik Pasha, the Foreign Minister of Ottoman Turkey, to prevent the Mürzsteg Reforms from coming into force.

Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria co-sponsored the Mürzsteg Reforms, and fatefully annexed Bosnia in 1908 (photo: public domain)

The German position was that the general’s request exceeded the authority granted by Article 2. Interestingly, the Germans also argued that the requirements and interests of Islam should be taken into account: it would be blasphemous that a Christian should command a Muslim.

A second demand was made. Some 60 foreign officers were requested for the mission, whose “executive power” was defined; the power to “denounce” gendarmes was defined as “removing” them. The Turkish government accepted 25 officers for each sector, with additional officers brought in as needed. The military attaches considered 5 officers per sector as insufficient. Giesl wanted to increase the amount of Austrian officers in the vilayet of Kosovo. The Italian general accused Austria-Hungary of seeking to advance its own interests and influence in the region at the expense of the reforms. It was not an auspicious start to a joint action that allegedly reflected the best of Europe’s humanitarian impulses.

Partial Bibliography

Booth, John. Troubles in the Balkans. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1905.

Brailsford, Henry Noel. Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future. London: Methuen & Co., 1906.

Curtis, William Eleroy. The Turk and His Lost Provinces. Chicago: Fleming Revell Co., 1903.

Fraser, John Foster. Pictures from the Balkans. London: Cassell and Company, 1906.

Lange-Akhund, Nadine. The Macedonian Question, 1893-1908: From Western Sources. NY: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Macartney, Carlile Aylmer. The Habsburg Empire, 1790-1918. NY: Macmillan, 1969.

Mazower, Mark. Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

May, Arthur J. The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914. NY: W.W. Norton, 1951.

Sakellariou, M.B., ed. Macedonia. Athens: Ekdotike Athenon S.A., 1983.

Shea, John. Macedonia and Greece: The Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997.

Sonnichsen, Albert. Confessions of a Macedonian Bandit: A Californian in the Balkan Wars. NY: Duffield & Co., 1909.

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