The Young Turks
I knew that choosing Macedonia to focus on for one week would be rather confronting. The fascination Macedonia holds for me so far does not equal a ton of knowledge (as opposed to, say, my fascination with Uzbekistan, which has led to me owning an entire small bookshelf of material on the republic). But that’s all right, I suppose. Now I know that I need to learn more about Macedonia. I can feel the gaps in my mind, questions arising, wanting to flesh out the scenario a bit more for myself.
I spent some time today looking through my books and notes, trying to find my “way in” for today.
There is a whole connection between Macedonia and Mustapha Kemal Ataturk (the creator of modern Turkey) which I was unaware of until just now. Again, from what I have read, things that happen in Macedonia send out shock waves with global consequences. This has been true since Alexander the Great launched his ships of conquest from Salonika. Macedonia was the place from which world events sprung. So here’s how I understand the connection between Ataturk (who basically equals Turkey) and Macedonia:
In 1903, IMRO began a violent uprising against the Turks and the entire Ottoman Empire. IMRO took over some villages at the top of a mountain in Macedonia and proclaimed it an independent republic called the “Krushovo Republic”. This republic lasted 10 days, and then 2000 Turkish troops marched in and completely massacred everybody. One of the stories told is that forty of the guerrillas, instead of surrendering, kissed one another goodbye, and shot themselves in the mouth. Another story is that the Turks, as they took back the area, raped 150 women and small girls. There are other horror stories. Of the Turks complete inhumanity and cruelty.
There was a worldwide protest against the Turkish Sultanate for this behavior, led by Great Britain and the West. The British prime minister, the Russian czar and the Habsburg Emperor (Franz Joseph) all put tremendous pressure on the Ottomans to call off the dogs, so to speak, and to calm the hell down about Macedonia. Just CALM DOWN. The pressure became so great, the outrage so pronounced, that an international peacekeeping force marched into Macedonia in 1904, to keep an eye on the situation. (Of course, history has proven how useless peacekeeping forces are, in places as volatile and violent as Macedonia. I read a wonderful interview with Philip Gourevitch, the author of a book about the genocide in Rwanda, and he said in the interview, “One of the things I have learned is that if you find yourself living in a UN ‘safe zone’, just know that your life is in danger. It is the most dangerous place on the planet to be….in a UN Safe Zone. Run for your life.”)
And now for Turkey/Ataturk:
Mustapha Kemal Ataturk was born in Macedonia. (Of COURSE.) Additionally, the “Young Turk Revolution”, which ended up toppling the Ottoman Empire (which had lasted for 400 years or something like that) originated in Macedonia. The Young Turk revolution originally demanded “liberty, equality, fraternity, justice”. They wanted to force the Sultan to draw up (or accept from them) a liberal constitution. They wanted to preserve the empire, but they wanted to loosen up the iron-fist a bit. (A precursor to Gorbachev….) However (as with so many revolutions), the Young Turks didn’t really have a plan. They didn’t know how to go about creating a government, or re-creating Turkey into your basic normal country, which also happens to be a massive empire. They also were coming from a place of ethnicity, nationalism, and racial hatred. A terrible mix. CLEARLY.
The problem, as always in the Balkans, was the confusing ethnic mix of peoples. Orthodox Christians were enraged at the thought of a Muslim-run confederation, where perhaps they had constitutional safeguards as protected minorities. Remember that Turkey was a dreaded and brutal nation for 400 years. Nobody trusted them, nobody believed them when they said “No, we promise to take care of you.” Everyone in the Balkans knew, firsthand, what horrors the Turks were capable of.
The Young Turk Revolution, just like Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, accelerated the shattering of the Ottoman Empire. That was not their intent at all. They wanted the empire to open up to change, to stop resisting transformation. But by introducing minor changes, by discussing modern-day ideas like constitutions, and protections of minorities, etc., all hell broke loose. The door was cracked open a teeny bit by the Young Turks, then the entire population of the Balkans, sick to death of the Ottoman tyranny, pushed open the door the rest of the way. Violently.
1908 was a big year: (Turkey clearly losing control)
–Bulgaria declared its complete independence from Turkey.
–The island of Crete (which was part of Turkey at the time) voted for union with Greece.
–The Habsburgs annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina (which they had been administering since The Treaty of Berlin)
That last bit there, with the Habsburgs, is the cause of World War I. Puts a chill up your spine, no?
Came across the following passage about all of this mess in (where else) Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts, which breaks it all down:
Put another way, Bulgarian-financed guerrillas in Macedonia had triggered a revolution among young Turkish officers stationed there, which then fanned throughout the Ottoman Empire; this development, in turn, encouraged Astria-Hungary to annex Bosnia, inflicting on its Serbian population a tyranny so great that a Bosnian Serb would later assassinate the Habsburg Archduke and ignite World War I.
But before all of this: Turkish Muslims were enraged by the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration. Everyone in Turkey began revolting: army units, theological students, clerics. They began demonstrating for “sharia” (Islamic law, of course, which the Taliban perfected). As always, with Muslim fanatics, they wanted to go backwards. They wanted the Ottomans to crack down on all these uppity minorities, crack down HARD, and go back to the perfect time when the Turks ruled the world.
The Young Turks crushed this counterrevolution. They forced the Sultan into exile in, where else, Macedonia. That would be like forcing Hitler into exile in a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. The Sultan had to hide, terrified for his life, in this land of people who hated him and wanted him to pay for what his empire had done.
Then, the Young Turks fell off the deep end. Maybe they had some good ideas, maybe originally their nationalism was benign, but then they screwed it all up and perpetrated the century’s first genocide against the Armenians in 1915. It was a mass murder of 1.5 million Armenians, orchestrated by the government. The Armenians threatened the Turks demographically and religiously. They were Christians, there were large numbers of them, and they were right in the middle of the Turkish homeland. In order for Turkey to be great and unified again, then the Armenians had to disappear.
This genocide occurred on the world stage. Nobody protested. Nobody did anything. There is a story about Hitler, planning Germany’s genocide thirty years later, and answering the feeble protests (“What will people say? Won’t they notice and try to stop it?”) of the people around him: Hitler’s response was: “Who remembers Armenia?”
Okay, so this is now becoming way too long, and I have strayed far from Macedonia….However, it is all connected. The Young Turks becoming so terrifying and so brutal forced the Balkans to do something which had never happened before, and which has never happened since: they united. They buried the hatchet in the face of such a clear enemy, and formed an alliance. After all, none of the Great Powers out there were intervening in any of this. They realized that no great warrior from the West was going to lead a cavalry charge and save them, so Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria joined up together, and fought for themselves. Incredible. These historic enemies…people who literally are still in a rage about what happened in 612 AD, or whatever.
In 1912, this alliance declared war on the Ottoman Empire. (A very very ballsy thing to do.) Their principal goal was to liberate poor forgotten important Macedonia.
