The Balkans: A Short History (19 page)

The decade of wars between 1912 and 1922 illuminated the scale of the problem. There had been many victims of the clash between Greek and Bulgarian bands in Ottoman Macedonia. But the numbers were far fewer than the civilian casualties of regular armies during the Balkan wars. In 1912, for the first time in the history of the region, modern states took advantage of a military conflict to pursue long-range demographic goals. In the former Ottoman districts of Kosovo and Monastir, in particular, the conquering Serb army killed perhaps thousands of civilians. Despite some Serb officers’ careless talk of “exterminating” the Albanian population, this was killing prompted more by revenge than genocide. Still, the shootings appalled eyewitnesses and investigators. “The Turks are fleeing before the Christians, the Bulgarians before the Greeks and the Turks, the Greeks and Turks before the Bulgarians, the Albanians before the Servian,” noted the investigating Carnegie Commission in 1914. “The means employed by the Greek against the Bulgarian, by the Turk against the Slav, by the Servian against the Albanian, is no longer extermination or emigration; it is an indirect method which must, however, lead to the same end, that of conversion and assimilation.” Forced conversions, mass executions and the flight of tens of thousands of refugees were the consequence of this attempt to liquidate the remaining Ottoman provinces in Europe in accordance with the principle of nationality.
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Civilians in the Balkans continued to be viewed with suspicion by military forces during the First World War. In Kosovo, the struggle between Serbs and Albanians raged unchecked. The Bulgarian occupation of Macedonia and southern Serbia was brutal enough to provoke uprisings. But it was not just the Balkan peoples themselves who were involved: the imperial powers too were behaving more repressively than in the past. On October 8, 1914, for instance, the Austrian politician Josef Redlich recorded in his diary a visit from a Hungarian journalist, Josef Diner-Denes, who described a “race war” [
Rassenkrieg
] directed by the Habsburg authorities against the Serbs in southern Hungary. “Hundreds of Serbs have been interned, many of them innocent people.” A little more than a month later, Diner-Denes brought him more news: “In Syrmia, says Diner, ten thousand Serbs have been killed as traitors; border areas have been depopulated [
entvolkerf
].” Redlich interpreted this as sign that a “systematic policy of extermination [
systematische Ausrottungspolitik
]” had been decreed against the Serbs.
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This kind of language prefigured Nazi terminology even though the Habsburg repression could scarcely compare in scale with the destruction unleashed in the same area by Hitler’s Wehrmacht three decades later. Nevertheless, mass executions, concentration camps and deportation of the Serbian elite were all used by Franz Josef ’s military to ensure order in the occupied territories. In Anatolia, when war broke out, the Ottoman authorities deported thousands of Greeks away from the Asia Minor seaboard into the interior. Then, in 1915–1916, they killed perhaps as many as 1 million Armenians in an organized campaign of systematic massacre—executing some, leaving others to starve to death on forced marches. “Who now remembers the Armenians?”—Hitler’s famous question of 1939—referred back to these events, as did Franz Werfel’s thinly disguised anti-Nazi allegory of the 1930s,
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

There were other, less extreme, ways of dealing with the issue of minorities. One policy with a future was what the experts benignly called “population transfer.” Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this—the moment which marked the definitive end of the old Ottoman world—was the compulsory bilateral exchange of populations agreed between Greece and Turkey in 1923: more than 1 million Greek Orthodox former Ottoman citizens were moved to Greece from Asia Minor, while 380,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey. In fact, the total number of refugees involved was probably closer to 2 million, when one takes into account the other Greek refugees from the Black Sea littoral and eastern Thrace, as well as the many Muslims who had fled from elsewhere in the Balkans. Exception was made only for the Greek community in Constantinople, and for Muslims in western Thrace. A huge proportion of the inhabitants of both countries—at least one fifth in the Greek case—had thus experienced exile, flight and deprivation, while the state itself had to tackle problems of relief, sanitation, resettlement and the economic dislocation that came from uprooting communities in such numbers. But from the nationalist perspective, which Kemal Atatürk and Eleuthérios Venizélos—the two countries’ dominant figures—shared, the population exchange was vitally important in helping to create ethnically homogeneous nation-states: the Greek province of Macedonia became overwhelmingly Greek (89 percent in 1923 compared with 43 percent in 1912), while the Turkish Anatolian coast became almost entirely Muslim, and Izmir—formerly known as the “infidel” because of its predominantly Christian population—rose from the ashes as a Turkish port.

Although the Greco-Turkish population exchange always appealed to international power brokers as a rational means of improving peace—and indeed did help improve relations between the two states after 1930—it was not followed up during the interwar period. Instead the Balkan states were made to sign minority-rights treaties by the Great Powers, which were monitored by the League of Nations. These treaties went beyond the old nineteenth-century protection of individuals to cover collective rights, whose importance the results of the war had underlined. In 1918, Romania had acquired not only huge new territories but also substantial Hungarian, German, Ukrainian and Jewish populations. Only 72 percent of the population were ethnic Romanians. Nearly 15 percent of the population of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes did not belong to one of these three groups. One fifth of the population of Bulgaria was not Bulgarian. Greece—wrestling with more than 1 million refugees in a total population of just over 6 million—had Slavs, Jews and Muslim minorities. Even Albania, with its small Greek minority, was incorporated in the new minority-rights regime.
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The new system, however, satisfied neither minority nor majority. The former found that their complaints fell on deaf ears, since it turned out that there was no effective enforcement machinery at the league’s disposal. The latter were irritated by an arrangement that allowed other states to intervene in their internal affairs. Grappling with enormous problems of reconstruction and development in a period of economic crisis and political uncertainty, Balkan states could not help resenting any action that reminded them of their own weakness. When we read of the uphill task the league faced in obliging the Albanian government in the 1930s to permit the Greek minority its own schools, it is easier to grasp how far the minority-rights regime had fallen short of expectations.
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Balkan states were in effect free to treat their minorities much as they wished. Rapid territorial expansion meant they often imposed their authority in the manner of colonial powers, sending gendarmes, teachers, settler farmers and tax collectors into remote provinces among peoples who spoke different languages. The Greeks in their “new lands,” the Romanians in Bessarabia and Bukovina, the Serbs in their “new southern regions” and indeed in Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro too, all saw themselves building a new state amid basically unfriendly populations. None went to quite the lengths of the interwar Polish state, which, in its struggle with Ukrainian nationalists, ended up burning villages and sending in the army; but there was systematic repression all the same. Minorities were frequently discriminated against in property disputes and forced to speak the new language of the state in public; their own remained for behind closed doors. “All the Macedonians have had to Serbianize their names by ending them with ‘itch’ instead of ‘off,’ ” wrote Henri Pozzi in 1935; in Greece surnames ended in “os” or “is.”
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As their new rulers suspected, many among these minorities did harbor revisionist sentiments: having seen how quickly and dramatically borders had changed between 1912 and 1922, they hoped to change them again. Croat and Macedonian émigré organizations plotted to overthrow the Versailles settlement, aligning themselves with revisionist powers like Fascist Italy. Macedonian autonomists virtually ran parts of western Bulgaria as a separate fiefdom and destabilized Bulgarian politics until the army stepped in. Hungarian and especially German minorities were regarded as potential fifth columns—a suspicion justified so far as the Germans were concerned by the Nazi use of ethnic Germans abroad for foreign policy goals. When the Second World War broke out, the revisionist agenda was traced on the map of southeastern Europe: Yugoslavia disappeared again and Albania, Bulgaria and Hungary expanded at the expense of Romania and Greece.

However, ethnic repression was not the whole story and should not be viewed in isolation from the broader governing philosophy of twentieth-century Balkan elites. It was liberals rather than conservatives who tended to advocate the least tolerant policies toward minorities. They did so because they saw themselves as embarked on a policy of state modernization in which a strong central power would drag their country into the twentieth century through active social and economic reforms. By almost all indicators (for instance, literacy rates, crop yields or longevity), the Balkans lagged behind the rest of Europe: the modernizers’ task was immense. They were against the cultural fragmentation produced by allowing minorities their own schools and in favor of building more state schools so that they would learn the majority language. But it was not just minorities they suspected; they targeted all groups that might slip beyond their control, whether these were the communal self-governing structures of ethnic minorities, the Church, brigands, or potentially rebellious workers’ or peasants’ movements. They were also, at least in the 1920s, in favor of industrialization, the reform of agriculture and access to financial markets abroad—policies that required the participation of peoples with urban skills and languages, such as Germans, Jews and other minority groups. Liberal state-building, in other words, was unsympathetic to minority aspirations, but it was not entirely exclusionary. Repression was often not so much the ultimate goal as an aspect of the modernization of the state.

There was a sharp contrast here with the Nazi policy of defining and treating minorities in accordance with the principles of biological racism; this found only a faint echo in the Balkans. By learning the language and perhaps modifying one’s name, assimilation was possible for Greeks in Albania, Vlachs and Slavs in Greece, Ukrainians and Macedonians in Romania; it was possible for religious outsiders like Jews and Muslims if they converted. Only in Romania did anti-Semitic governments condone pogroms and boycotts and limit Jewish enrollment in the universities. Extremist anti-Semitic movements such as the National Christian Party and the fascistic Iron Guard attracted considerable support there. In late 1940, after the Iron Guard finally entered the government, this violence erupted in a series of massacres, which killed thousands. But elsewhere, interwar anti-Semitism remained an element of popular Christian culture with little political impact. And in general, Balkan states did not bother with defining minorities in law, still less with forbidding interaction on racial grounds or arranging for their segregation, expropriation or expulsion, as the Nazis would after 1933. Such measures presupposed a degree of faith in science and bureaucracy that was absent in the impoverished, poorly administered, rural societies of southeastern Europe.
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After 1941, however, Nazi occupation brought to the surface—indeed deliberately exploited—the tensions simmering between ethnic groups and offered some minorities the chance to turn the tables on their interwar masters. For the first time in the modern era, Croatia won independence, as a puppet state of the Axis; it was ruled by an extreme nationalist party, the Ustache, which had failed to win much support before the war. This government banned the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, persecuted Serbs and Jews, and set up a one-party state whose aim was “to work for the principle that the Croatian people alone will always rule in Croatia.” Its legal definition of Croatian nationality was woolly [“one of Aryan origin who has proven by his conduct that he did not engage in activities against the liberation efforts of the Croatian people”] and allowed loopholes that less hard-line civil servants could apply with discretion. But there was nothing woolly about the violence the regime unleashed almost immediately, mostly against Serbs and Jews, under the eyes of a far from critical Catholic Church. This led to the imprisonment and death of several hundred thousand people, notably in the Jasenovac camp, and gave a huge boost to the emergence of the partisan resistance movement.
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The Nazi occupation triggered off ethnic civil war more widely in the Balkans. Serb Chetniks talked of their intention “to cleanse Bosnia of everything that is not Serb” and killed tens of thousands of non-Serbs. Bulgarian troops annexed parts of Greek Thrace, killed thousands of civilians, banned the use of Greek and tried to resettle the province with Bulgarians. A similar policy was attempted in former Yugoslav Macedonia, but in both cases wartime colonization was a failure. Partisan reprisals and the hardships of wartime outweighed the attractions of free land and property. Given that agrarian resettlement in borderlands was usually a limited success even in peacetime—from Yugoslav efforts in interwar Macedonia to Greek efforts on its northern border in the 1950s, peasants rarely stayed put and usually followed the general drift toward the safety and wealth offered by cities—it is not surprising that it failed during the war. What is significant is that it was tried, for it indicates that for some Balkan states (as indeed for Nazi Germany itself ), this war was not just about military victory but about permanent demographic engineering in new territories.
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