Demografija Balkana

Gost1 · Post Postao/la **Gost1** » 07 dec 2019 01:07

THE DEMOGRAPHY OF ETHNIC CLEANSING IN THE BALKANS
JUSTIN MCCARTHY

Rector Bey, distinguished visitors, colleagues, friends, I am going to talk a little bit today about nationalism, but especially about effective nationalism, and the people of the Balkans, specifically the Muslims. I am going to give you a summary and an introduction because there is only a limited time to talk about a very very difficult and long topic: the moving of peoples. The moving of peoples in the Middle East and the Balkans, which is really an old tradition. It began before we had history. People have been moved back and forth across the Balkans, forced to leave their homes ever since the beginning of history.

The best term to use for all of these things is the term “forced migration”. Any general term that you try to use to describe what happened in the Balkans to the peoples, especially the Muslim peoples of the Balkans can be very confusing. People use words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”. The word that is used by demographers is usually “forced migration”, forced migration which means people that were forced out of their homes with the gun in their heads, saying, “You will either move or you will die.”. This happened in very many different ways in the Balkans. The Serbs used forced migration by treaty in which the Ottomans were forced to move Muslims out of Serbia. In the Crimea, there was forced migration because of administration and because of judicial oppression by the Russians. In Greece, in the 1820s Muslims were forced out because of outright murder. It was never rational. It was never completely right to divide up the Ottoman Empire and to end the Ottoman Empire. This was because the ethnic and religious groups in the OttomanEmpire were simply too completely mixed, even down to the village level. It was always going to be impossible to separate the various peoples of the Balkans without tremendous human suffering and that is of course exactly what happened. The rise of nationalism, however, dictated that these people would be separated no matter what the cost was. If the states were created, if you are actually going to create states in the Balkans rationally and morally, you would have done it by population transfer.

The map you see in front of you is what you would have done if you divided up people by their ethnic group. Now I say “ethnic group”, but actually we only know the religious groups of people. We only know the religious groups because of the Ottomans kept the census data, the population registration data by religion. They did not keep these records by ethnic group. So, for instance, we don’t know who is a Macedonian and who is a Bulgarian. We don’t know the difference because most of the Macedonians were the members of the Bulgarian church. They were very different people. They didn’t think they were the same people necessarily. But we can’t make that separation. So looking at this map you’ll see that there was an area in which you would have a state of Bulgarians, in which Bulgarians were the majority of the population, that’s the red in the middle. You would have a state that was Greek that went up almost all the way to Salonika, but not to Salonika. You would have a Muslim state that was Albanian in Kosova, in Yanya. As you see that whole area was Albanian. You would also have obviously a Bosnian state. And you would have two states of Turkish Muslims. The one in the north going up through the Dobruja, in Romania today, and in the South in Thrace. These were based on what the population was at the beginning of the troubles that took place starting with the 1877 and 1878 war. It’s a theoretical division. It’s not what I would say you should do, but if you are going to divide the populations of the Balkans justly, properly, you would make these states and you would move people back and forth, people who didn’t want to stay in one, going to the other. A population transfer is not a nice thing to do. A population transfer is a very difficult. But in fact, it is the best way to deal with the fact that people simply would not live together. Why they wouldn’t live together?

Primarily because of the Russian invasions that happened in 1877 and 1878, that the Turks call the “93 War”. As you can see, in 1877 and 1878 what happened was the Muslims were forced out, the greatest number of Muslims. The Bulgarians, also forced out, fled from the Ottoman Empire. The Bosnian Muslims after the war migrated to what remained of the Ottoman Empire. There was the expulsion of Muslims and the concentration of Christian peoples

The losses were great. As you can see, I am primarily looking at the losses of Muslims because Muslims were the ones who suffered the most. But the losses in Romania, the Dobruca area, were monumental, were awful. Now I say “loss”, most of these people were dead and many of them moved. In Greece, 88% were gone. In the Serbian area, in the Niş (Nish) area, at the end of the wars, 91% of Montenegro, all the Muslims were gone. In the area taken by Austria, the Bosnian area today, 35% were gone. If you look down below, however, you’ll see that even though the Muslims suffered the worst of all, the actual suffering, and I use the Bulgarian area as an example, the actual suffering of the non-Muslim people of the Bulgarians was also great. It’s one of the features of this demographic study that the deaths are so great, the situation is so horrible that you don’t even notice, it’s just awful. So for instance, almost 20% of the Muslims were dead at the end of that time. And I say only 6% of the Bulgarians, actually, 6% is a horrible death rate. There is almost no death in human history as bad as that. So the Bulgarians, not simply the Muslims, but the Bulgarians were suffering terribly.

The strategy, the reason that people were moved out of their home, especially the Muslims, was perfected by the Russians. It was perfected not only in the Balkans but in the Caucasus especially, where it was used against the Caucasian Muslims by the Russian invaders. And the strategy as you can see is first of all to attack villages. You attack a village, and in attacking the village, it can be locals, it can be the Russian army, it can be any number of people. What they do is, what they do in the attack to the villages is the first of all kill all the men, or if the men are even there at the time, and they take the women, they rape the women, they lock the women up, for instance,in a mosque, in a hay barn or something and then burn them to death. They also make sure that someone escapes. Because someone has to escape to tell the next village what happened. This is called “terrorism”. The people that are terrorized then they hear what happened to the village over there, and they start to flee. And whole regions are denuded of their population. They’re denuded of their population because they are afraid. And no rational person wants to live on a battle field, especially not if they know that their people are being massacred. But if people do stay behind, if people do stay behind, the law and the government are used against them. Especially this is true of the Muslims but also of the Bulgarians, and parts of Macedonia, in which they simply have no rights from the government. They’re not heard. A Muslim before a Serbian court has no rights at all. A Muslim before a Bulgarian court has no rights at all after the 1877 - 1878 War. But the biggest thing is, the refugees are not allowed to return. A reasonable person becomes a refugee in a war. If you’re going to fight or leave the homeland, you leave of course. The question is whether you are allowed back or not. And the answer is “No!”. They were not allowed back.

After the 1877 - 1878 War, you can see what the population looked like. The population in the Balkans was quite different after that time. Before that war, the Muslim population had been the largest population of Ottoman Europe. But it was not the majority. The majority were various Christian populations, all divided up into different groups. After this war, because so many Muslims went into Macedonia and Thrace, and so many Bulgarians left Macedonia and Thrace, the Muslims were now not only a plurality, not only the biggest group but the majority of the population in the Ottoman Balkans, in which you can see in front of you is you see in Eastern Thrace, the area that we see here, which is largely a part of Turkey today, the Muslims were in absolute majority. Church predominated, but the largest group in the area was Greek, the largest Christian group was Greek.

If you look at the one area that could be claimed by Bulgaria, because the Bulgarians were a large portion of that population, it was the area that was absolutely closest to the Bulgarian border. And this indeed was an area where many people went back and forth and actually and hardly ended up in Bulgaria actually. So that’s pretty much all could be claimed if you’re going to have the Bulgarians take part of Thrace. That would be the part, that might be if you are going to do that at all would be a rational thing to do

In Macedonia and the west although it’s a little hard to see because it is very hard to fit all the populations onto the map. Necessarily have population by Kaza, by district, by ilçe today. In this population, the Muslims, especially the Muslims of Albania and the Muslims of Bosnia, these people are a majority. There is no question, but the Albanians and the Slavic-speaking Muslims are majority in this area. The Serbs actually have any kind of ethnic claim only to maybe a very very small area. But basically the Serbs have no ethnic claim there at all. Simply there aren’t Serbs living there. They don’t live in that area. People that live there are to a certain extent Bulgarians and to a certain extentGreeks, the vast majority of Muslims, primarily Albanians, but there are not Serbs. This is in a way indicative of what goes wrong in the Balkans because it is that very area that the Serbs are going to take over. Even though the one group that never should have had it.

If you look at Albania, if you look at the Albanian region, you find what should have been created. This is what Albania should have looked like. If you are going to create a land where the Albanians were a majority, this is it. This is what it should look like based on who lived in the area. And I am only counting as a majority Albanian Muslims even though the Albanian Christians, the Greek Orthodox, and Roman Catholics, much closer to the Muslim Albanians than they ever would be to the Serbs or to the Bulgarians. So there should have been a large Balkan state, primarily for Albanians in the west. As we know, this did not take place.

If you look at where you would have created a Turkish state, in 1912 this is what a Turkish state should have looked like. You can have other people living in the northernmost areas, very small areas, but basically the Turks are a majority in this whole region and of course in Anatolia as well. If you are going to create a state based on the population, it would have been like this. This is the way it should have looked. But as we can see, that is not what happened. There should have been a Muslim state in the west, primarily Albanians. There should have been a Muslim state in the east of Europe, primarily of Turks. But this is not what happened at all because of the Balkan Wars. The invasions of the Balkan Wars had nothing to do with demography, they had nothing to do with the rights of people, and they surely had nothing to do with democracy, or what we call “One man, one vote” or the right of people to decide their own futures. An example of what happened is the march of Bulgarian armies.

You see here the march of the Bulgarian armies which actually went in two directions: down towards Istanbul, ending in Çatalca, and over towards Salonika. These are the populations of the kazas on the way. This is where the Bulgarians invaded in other words. The one thing you will note is that none of these areas are Bulgarian. This has nothing to do with the rights of the Bulgarian people; it has nothing to do with building up the Bulgarian population in places where the Bulgarians are. No! This is out and outright invasion to take over the land that should be someone else’s. In order to do this, the only way you can create, what they call “facts on the ground”, the only way you can create a system in which the people who live there are not there anymore is either by killing them or forcing them to flee. And that is exactly what happened. People were killed and they were forced to flee. In Serbia, in the Balkan Wars, in Montenegro, especially the Montenegro invasion, everything was considerably worst. Basically the whole of northern Albania was destroyed by the Serbs, by the Serbian speakers, Montenegrins who came in, and many people in the area of Yenipazar also, they were completely destroyed. So there were simply no Muslims left in many of these areas.

These are what the migrations looked like at the end of the Balkan Wars. Muslims escaped. The victorian armies are going to the Aegean ports, where they were rescued by the sea and taken, as you can see taken especially to İzmir, were also somewhere as far as Egypt. Overland, they went to Eastern Thrace. They ended up going to Anatolia. After the war, the Greeks and others but especially the Greeks facilitated, they helped the Muslims who remained there go to Salonika. They actually put them on boats because they wanted to get rid of them, which they successfully did. Bulgarians and Greeks for the first time, people in the Balkans realized that they could not live together any longer, so the Bulgarians and Greeks exchanged their populations.

The mortality is not the mortality of the Balkan Wars, specifically the mortality of the Muslims. Muslim deaths 632.000, 27% of the Muslims and these are almost Turks because Albanians are not included. 27%, one out of four of Turks of the Balkans were dead at the end of the Balkan Wars. This is an astonishing death rate. This is one of the worst death rates that has ever been seen in human history. 27% of the Muslims are dead. More than 60% of the Muslims had either been forced out or dead in the conquest of Macedonia by the Serbs and the Montenegrins. Christians also suffered. And I would not want to say it that it was just Muslims who suffered. They suffered more.

But the Bulgarians especially also suffered tremendous losses. In the Bulgarian conquest, the Ottomans at the end of the war retook Eastern Thrace. The Greeks and the Bulgarians, especially the Bulgarians, fled. This is only reasonable because they had been slaughtering Muslim villages and they surely did not want to stay around when the Turks came back again. The Greeks in 1913, in 1914 left Western Anatolia where the life was made difficult for them by the government. The numbers that left in those times are unknown really. We do not know exactly the numbers of Greeks that left Anatolia. Someone said a hundred thousand which I think is too many. But as you will see, I've included them in the figures for the population exchange. Most of the Turks were gone then from the Balkans, but more disasters were to come, specifically the disaster of the greek invasion of Anatolia.

In the Greek invasion of Anatolia, right from the beginning, the intention was to force the Muslims out, the Turks out. And that is exactly what happened. As you can see, Turkish internal refugees in the areas where the Greeks invaded, there were 1.2 millionTurks, who were forced out of their homes, forced to Istanbul, forced into Anatolia, forced into the Italian areas, basically forced to wherever they could run to. The Turkish nationalist resurgents, however, meant that it was the turn of the Greeks to leave. Because of course having killed and forced the Turks, the Greeks now found that the Turks had come back, and the Turks would have exerted, would have taken their vengeance. The amazing thing is how little the Turks killed the Greeks in the area, how much Mustafa Kemal managed to hold his troops and check when they obviously wanted to take their revenge.

But in the population exchange, in the great population exchange that took place at the end of the war under the Treaty of Lausanne, you see that there were 850 thousand Greeks who were exchanged, which includes some who came earlier and 480 thousand Turks. So once again they could not live together, and so they were separated. It looks here like there were many many more Greeks who suffered than the Turks. But actually, when you put together the figures of the Turks who were expelled from Greece and the Greeks who were expelled from Turkey from 1912 and the Balkan wars, when you put those together, you end up with almost exactly the same numbers. The numbers of Turks who were forced out of Greece and the numbers of Greeks who were forced out of Turkey were almost exactly the same. Once again, you have people who simply could not live together, and thus could only, could only live separately. The responsibility, I mean, who is at fault for all of these things? Who is at fault for some of the greatest crimes that had ever been committed in the 19th or the 20th century? Some of the worst things that people had ever done. Obviously nationalism. The idea that your country deserves to take the land, no matter who's living on it because you can force them out and take it yourself, that your nation should triumph no matter what. This is an evil thing. Obviously, the Ottomans failed, the Ottomans simply could not take care of their own people properly. Sometimes because of their mistakes, often because of there wasn’t anything that they could do. The Russians, the Russians are the people who were primarily responsible, because the Russians were the ones who led the attacks that killed so many of the people. But also people seldom talk about this. The greatest share, maybe one of the great shares, of responsibility was on the European powers, on the Europeans who made promises.

Specifically, the Europeans who promised that they would guarantee the Ottoman borders, the Europeans who promised that if anyone tried to stop the Ottoman borders, to invade the Ottoman Empire, to change the borders of the Ottoman Empire, if anyone did that, the Europeans, the British, the French would go to war, to help the Ottomans. These were absolute promises. In fact, they were called moral duties. Things that the British and the French said they had to do. Under the Treaty of Paris in 1856, they promised that if anyone invaded the Ottoman Empire, they would go to war to save the Ottoman borders. They said the same thing in 1871. They said the same thing in 1878, in the Treaty of berlin. In the Treaty of Berlin, the Europeans not only guaranteed the Ottoman borders, but they said that the Muslims of the Balkans, of Bulgaria, of Serbia, of Montenegro, of Greece, that they had an absolute right to return to their homes, an absolute right. TheEuropeans would make sure that they had that right.

Do you know how many returned to their homes? Almost none. Because when they did, they were killed. What did the Europeans do about this? Obvious violation of the treaty, violation of their promises. What did they do? Nothing. They ignored the carnage. And they refused even to tell their own people about what was happening. They refused to tell their own people that the Muslims were being slaughtered. It was all in the consular records. The consuls kept their records. They wrote down the Muslims were being killed in tremendous numbers. And when the parliament in England asked the prime minister, said “We want to see these records. Let us see the consular records. Let us see what's going on”. The prime minister said, “No, that would not be a good idea.”. Consequently, we didn’t even know until they opened the British archives, we didn’t know a lot of the things the Europeans did know. It turned out the British and French governments knew exactly what was happening and decided to do nothing about it. After the war, they brought in the Greeks. They violated the principles of the Treaty of Mudros, I mean the Armistice of Mudros. When the Turks agreed to give up the World War I, the Europeans promised that nothing would happen unless the Turks attacked them, or unless the Turks attacked Christian groups. They did none of these things, but the British invaded anyways. They took over Istanbul. They helped the Greeks into Izmir. They deliberately caused all the troubles that came, because they did not care about the rights of the Turks. In the Balkans then, the migrations that took place and the deaths that took place were some of the largest mass movements of peoples that there had ever been. Although the main targets were Muslims, Greeks and especially Bulgarians suffered terribly as well. Serbs were the people who lost the least. And just so we understand quite how bad it was.

This is the mortality in various important inhuman times in modern history. The World War I, the suffering of the British, the French, the Serbs. The Russian Revolution. And in more modern time, Germany in World War II, Japan in World War II. Rwanda, which is the worst of the modern genocides obviously. If you put those all together and you compare them to the Muslims of Bulgaria in 1877-78, in the Balkan wars, and you compare the Independence War, the people in Western Anatolia. Just look! There it is! I ask you, you have heard about Rwanda, or the world has heard about Rwanda. They’ve heard about the sufferings of the Russians in the war. They heard about the sufferings of people in World War II. Who has heard about the sufferings of Muslims, which were much worse? Obviously, it is the Muslims of the Balkans, and then the other people of the Balkans, but especially the Muslims who suffered more than any Europeans any modern European wars. Sadly their suffering is known very little today. European parliaments, even religious leaders make statements about what they call “genocide”.They exaggerate the losses of some people, and they don’t talk about the Muslims at all. Those who write general books about genocide and ethnic cleansing, they seldom mention the Balkans, they never mention Anatolia. But some of the worst suffering and the worst inhumanity in history took place in the Balkans and Anatolia. And it definitely should be known today. Thank you