THE POWER KEG : BALKAN PENINSULA

THE VOLATILE BALKAN PENINSULA
TILTING THE POWER BALANCE IN THE REGION & WORLD
The Balkans is the historical name of a geographic region of southeastern Europe. The region takes its name from the Balkan Mountains, which run through the centre of Bulgaria into eastern Serbia. The region has a combined area of 550,000 km2 and a population of about 55 million people.Balkan is an old Turkish word meaning “a chain of wooded mountains”.The ancient Greek name for the Balkan Peninsula was the “Peninsula of Haemus”.

THE BALKAN WARS 1912 – 1913
The Balkans soon were convulsed in a major regional war, from which Greece emerged victorious and with its territory substantially enlarged. At the heart of the Balkan Wars were three issues: the disposition of Macedonia, the problem of Crete, and liberation of the countries still under Ottoman control, especially Albania. Some Macedonians wanted full unification with Greece, others wanted a separate Macedonian state, and still others wanted Macedonia to be included in a Serbian or Albanian or Bulgarian state. This issue was appallingly divisive, and the choice often was literally a matter of life or death. Guerrilla fighters and propagandists entered Macedonia from Greece and all the other countries of the region. Athens actively supported the irredentist movement in Macedonia with money, materials, and about 2,000 troops. Thessaloniki became more of a Greek city as non-Greek merchants suffered boycotts and left. Greece’s lack of access to this key port heightened tension with the Slavic neighbors.

Under these circumstances, all the Great Powers became more involved in the Macedonian problem in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Britain pressured Greece to curb guerrilla activities. When the Young Turks took over the government of the Ottoman Empire with a reformist agenda in 1908, a short period of cordial negotiations with the Greeks was chilled by reversion to nationalist, authoritarian rule in Constantinople.New Ottoman intransigence over Crete and Macedonia combined with Venizelos’s demand for complete reunification to raise the prospect of war in 1910.

Nationalism in the Balkans was the final element of the war that erupted in 1912. Early that year, a mutual defense pact between Serbia and Bulgaria divided northern Macedonia between those two countries. In response Athens signed bilateral pacts with both neighbors. Essentially, the three Balkan powers thus agreed to cooperate militarily against the Porte, but they did not agree on the vital question of how to distribute territory surrendered by the Ottoman Empire.

The Balkan powers initiated the First Balkan War by marshaling over 1 million troops and then declaring war on the Turks in October 1912.Venizelos’s military modernization paid rich dividends. Within a matter of weeks, the Greek army took Thessaloniki and besieged Ioannina to the west. The armies of all three allies fought mainly to gain a favorable position in a postwar settlement. In the May 1913 Treaty of London, the Ottoman Empire ceded all its European possessions to the Balkan allies, with the exception of Thrace and Albania, the latter of which became independent.

Because the Treaty of London made no division of territory among the allies, and because Greece and Serbia had divided Macedonian territory between themselves in a bilateral agreement, Bulgaria attacked both, initiating the Second Balkan War. Greece and Serbia won victories that ensured major territorial gains at the Treaty of Bucharest in August 1913.

The addition of southern Epirus, Macedonia, Crete, and some of the Aegean Islands expanded Greece by 68 percent, including some of the richest agricultural land on the peninsula, and the population nearly doubled. The major Greek cities of Ioannina and Thessaloniki were
reclaimed. Although more than 3 million Greeks remained in Ottoman territory, the Balkan Wars had brought the Megali Idea closer to realization than ever before. When King Constantine was crowned following the assassination of King George in Thessaloniki in March 1913, national morale had reached a high point.

REACTION IN THE BALKAN PENINSULA NATIONS
Frustrated in the north by Austria-Hungary’s incorporation of Bosnia with its 975,000 Orthodox Serbs (and many more Serbs and Serb-sympathizers of other faiths), and forced (March 1909) to accept the annexation and restrain anti-Habsburg agitation among Serbian nationalist groups, the Serbian government looked to formerly Serb territories in the south, notably “Old Serbia” (the Sanjak of Novi Pazar and the province of Kosovo).

On August 15, 1909, the Military League a group of Greek officers took action against the government to reform their country’s national government and reorganize the army. The league found itself unable to create a new political system, till the league summoned the Cretan
politician Eleutherios Venizelos to Athens as its political adviser. Venizelos persuaded the king to revise the constitution and asked the league to disband in favor of a National Assembly. In March 1910 the Military League dissolved itself.

Bulgaria, which had secured Ottoman recognition of her independence in April 1909 and enjoyed the friendship of Russia,[2] also looked to districts of Ottoman Thrace and Macedonia. In March 1910, an Albanian insurrection broke out in Kosovo which was covertly supported by the young Turks. In August 1910 Montenegro followed Bulgaria’s precedent by becoming a kingdom.

THE BALKAN WARS AND THE PARTITION OF MACEDONIA
Following their own interests and aims to conquer and partition the European part of Ottoman Turkey, the neighbouring Balkan states Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro decided to start a war. The Treaty between Serbia and Bulgaria signed on March 12th 1912 (with a secret annexe) included a possibility for the transformation of Macedonia into an autonomous region and anticipated the arbitration of the Russian Tsar.

In such form, this agreement was a compromise to avoid the territorial separation and partition of Macedonia. After Greece and Montenegro joined the agreement, a Balkan Alliance was formed and it immediately began preparations for a war against the Ottoman Empire. In autumn 1912 the Balkan allies declared war on Turkey.

The offensive actions of the Balkan allies against the Turkish army were carried out mainly on Macedonian territory and on the Thracian front. Believing that this war would bring the long-expected freedom, the Macedonian people took active part in the First Balkan War with their own regiments (chetas) and voluntary units. Forty-four such units were operating in Macedonia at the time impeding the mobilization and the movement of the Turkish army with their diversions. About 14,000 Macedonians fought together with the Bulgarian army within the so-called “Macedonian Regiment”. At the same time there were Macedonian soldiers distributed in thirty units within the “National Defense” and the “Voluntary Regiments” of the Serbian army. A similar formation, called the “Holy Regiment”, was operating within the Greek army. The victories of the Balkan allies over the Turkish army conditioned Turkey to sign a cease-fire and a short-term truce, but the battles went on until May 30th, 1913.

THE BALKAN LEAGUE
Bulgarian forces waiting to commence their assault on Adrianople following Italy’s victory in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911-1912 the Young Turks fell from power after a coup. The Balkan countries saw this as an opportunity to attack and fulfill their desires of expansion.
With the initial encouragement of Russian agents, a series of agreements was concluded between Serbia and Bulgaria in March 1912. Military victory against the Ottoman empire would not be possible while it could bring reinforcements from Asia. The condition of the Ottoman railways of the time was primitive, so most reinforcement would have to come by sea through the Aegean. Greece was the only Balkan country with a navy powerful enough to deny use of the Aegean to the Ottomans whose navy was very weak; thus a treaty was signed between Greece and Bulgaria in May 1912. Montenegro concluded agreements between Serbia and Bulgaria later that year. Serbia and Bulgaria signed treaties to divide between them the territory of northern Macedonia, but no such concrete agreement was signed by Greece.

The resulting alliance between Greece, Serbia,Montenegro and Bulgaria

became known as the Balkan League; its existence was undesirable for all the Great Powers. The league was loose at best, though a secret liaison officer was exchanged between the Greek and the Serbian army
after the war began. Greece delayed the start of the war several times in the summer of 1912, in order to better prepare her navy, but Montenegro declared war on October 8 (September 25 O.S.). Following an ultimatum to the Ottomans, the remaining members of the alliance
entered the conflict on October 17.

Drawing new borders under the excuse of establishing a “balance” and peace on the Balkans was a violent denial of the rights of the Macedonian people to live and develop as a free, unified and independent nation. The aspirations towards the creation of a state of their own as a necessity, a guarantee of the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Macedonia, were evident in the ideas and actions of the Macedonian patriots. Despite the conquering and partitioning of their homeland they fought for independence and the establishment of a Macedonian government and national assembly which would decide on the form of government and the internal structure of the Macedonian state. However, the attempts to prevent the compulsory partition of Macedonia were in vain because the Balkan and the European states remained deaf to the demands of the Macedonian people for preserving the integrity of their land and its constitution as a state.

The new masters of the conquered Macedonian regions introduced a violent military and police regime, denied the national individuality of the Macedonian people, deprived them of their rights and tortured and denationalized the Macedonian people. A regime of “special decrees” from the mid-nineteenth century was imposed in the territory under Serbian rule. In the part of Macedonia under Bulgarian rule, military commanders helped by comitadji voivodes ruled over the civil authorities and “dispensed justice” to the people. In the Macedonian districts under Greek rule the notorious Cretan gandarmerie, which acted in support of the conservative Greek governors, kept law and order. The territorial, ethnic and
economic disintegration of Macedonia caused severe damage to the economy, to the Macedonian movement for national liberation and to its socio-political development.

After the Balkan Wars, Macedonia was completely devastated. Besides the tens of thousands killed in the war, there were several hundreds of thousands of refugees (more than 135,000 Macedonians and a small number of Bulgarians from Thrace escaped from the Aegean part of Macedonia occupied by the Greek army alone). There were numerous cases of genocide towards the Macedonian population in the territories occupied by the Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian armies and, according to the Carnegie Commission, several towns like Voden, Negush, Ber, Enidze Vardar, Dojran, etc., more than 200 villages (out of which around 170 villages with 17,000 homesteads in the Aegean part of Macedonia) were completely destroyed. In June 1913 the Greek army burnt to ashes the Macedonian town of Kukush with its 1,846 houses, 612 shops, 6 factories, etc. At the same time 4,000 houses were burned to the ground in the Seres vicinity.

The tragic outcome of the Balkan Wars was a real national catastrophe for Macedonia.After all this bloodshed in the Balkan the allies could not reach an agreement as how to partition the territories taken over from Turkey. The partition was carried out by force of arms and sanctioned by the Bucharest Peace Treaty signed on August 10th, 1913 according to which all the Balkan states expanded their territories. Macedonia was not only denied its autonomy which had originally been one of the causes of the war against Turkey, but it was forcefully divided and partitioned by the neighboring Balkan states. Greece seized the biggest, southern part of Macedonia, Serbia won the central Vardar region and the Pirin part with the Strumica vicinity was given to Bulgaria. The unresolved Macedonian question continued to be “an apple of discord” for the Balkan states. It remained in the whirlpool of events which were of fatal importance both for Macedonia and the future of the Balkans.