POWDER KEG IN THE BALKANS
Markham, R. H.
Powder Keg In The Balkans By R. H. MARKHAM FOR more than 2 weeks the official press and radio of Communist-governed Yugoslavia have been carrying on a bitter campaign against Greece and the...
...And before I had been in Bulgaria a month, there were blood-curdling reports in the Sofia papers of Turkish massacres in Macedonia...
...It was a backward, primitive land of terror, revolution, conspiracy, and extortion, with every village at the mercy of roving bands of patriots and of Turkish soldiers hunting the roving patriots...
...In 1941 Bulgaria joined Germany in the present war and invaded Yugoslavia and Greece to occupy Macedonia...
...Neither Bulgarians nor Serbs now make individual claims to those Slavs in Greek Macedonia...
...Secondly, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria are united on the Macedonian question as far as Greece is concerned...
...But I surmise their denial is without foundation...
...WHAT was and is this Macedonia, about which the very Bulgarian sparrows chirp and nightingales sing...
...This is not a Platonic matter...
...It was a comparatively small area, about the size of Maryland...
...Macedonia was inhabited by Turks, Slavs, Greeks, a few Aromanians (Latins) and a number of Albanians...
...Some of the pupils and teachers were Macedonian refugees...
...During the war some of these Bulgaro-Macedonians were not friendly to the Greeks...
...I can well imagine that Greek refugees, after all they have suffered at the hands of the Bulgarians, and fired by the hatred of decades, may be terrorizing some of these Bulgarian residents...
...The Serbs, I soon learned, presented the case quite differently...
...Now the question immediately arises: Are the Greeks really terrorizing Macedonian Slavs...
...In 1923 Macedonian conspirators massacred the Bulgarian Premier Stamboliisky because of Macedonia...
...By that agreement the Tsar created a Great Bulgaria, which embraced a long stretch of the Aegean coast and contained most of Macedonia...
...In the first place, there is no Great Power except Great Britain to hold Russia in check...
...The Balkan situation is radically different from what it has been for a century, and very unfavorable to Greece...
...After 33 years of close association with the "Macedonian problem," Macedonian refugees, massacres, raids, Macedonian assassinations, songs, prayers, parades, costumes—after 33 years of this I hear the word "Macedonia" with a feeling of sad mysticism, like the word Armageddon or Babylonia or "the ruins of Carthage...
...Macedonians were deputies in the National Assembly, professors in the University, doctors in the hospitals, little curb merchants, influential bankers...
...He wants to bring every Balkan Yugoslav into his new federated state...
...A short time previously the Bulgarian nremier had been a former Macedonian revolutionist...
...Through it ran the beautiful Vardar river, on whose banks rose stately poplars, in whose shadows comely maidens sang sad songs of bondage...
...Is he not "saving democratic Slavs from Greek reactionaries ?" He will ring all the changes on the Atlantic Charter...
...So the Muscovite Empire is far freer to push southward than it has ever been before...
...And it is directed toward a point of weakest resistance...
...Before I had been there 2 days I heard of Macedonia...
...Officially, this includes only the part in Federated Yugoslavia, but potentially it embraces all Macedonia...
...Bulgarians hate the Greeks and they treated the native Greek inhabitants with much cruelty...
...Russia's intense interest in Macedonia and the Aegean coast is shown by the Treaty of San Stefano, which she made in 1878 after she had driven Turkey out of Europe...
...CAN weak little Greece hold that flood...
...AFTER World War I, Macedonia was divided among Yugoslavia (Serbia), Bulgaria, and Greece, with Bulgaria getting the smallest part...
...From the little town in which I at first lived, the people looked south to a splendid chain of mountains and said, "Beyond lies Macedonia, a land of tears and hopes, of beautiful blue lakes and snow-topped peaks, of Bulgaria's fabled past and golden future...
...And American writers and preachers will applaud and support him...
...And over all this, mixed with it all, were rivalries among the Great Powers, Russia, Great Britain, Austro-Hungary, and Turkey...
...Now these 2 expansive forces are united and swept along by the mightiest land empire on 2 continents...
...Other American missionaries had seen a bank and ship blown up in the Salonica harbor by Bulgaro-Macedonian terrorists, wanting to call "Europe's" attention to the terrible Turkish regime...
...Its chief city was the spacious, bright port of Salonica...
...Practically no nation on earth has made greater sacrifices than the Bulgarians to reach a national goal and that goal is Macedonia...
...I first visited Bulgaria in the early Spring of 1912 and took up my abode in an American boarding school...
...In 1915 Bulgaria joined Germany in the Great War and attacked Serbia to get more of Macedonia...
...I know of no place on earth around which such furious passions center as around Macedonia...
...This time, however, Russia's agent is not a Great Bulgaria, but Yugoslavia and Bulgaria together...
...They are reviving the most dynamic, meaning the most violent, Macedonian traditions...
...They don't say "54-40 or fight," but "The Greeks are terrorizing the Macedonians as the Turks used to...
...But after seeing many Balkan wars and countless upheavals over Macedonia, I believe the international situation in the little area north of Salonica where Greeks and Slavs are said to be killing each other "as Turks never killed them" deserves careful watching...
...In 1903 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro jointly attacked Turkey to free Macedonia...
...It was a land of fourfold strife, with Bulgars, Serbs, and Greeks fighting one another and all fighting Turks...
...Now the very same men, with the government of "free Macedonia" at their disposal, the Yugoslav radio system at their command, and the Soviet microphones and press in their service, are carrying on the same sort of campaign...
...And will not Tito make his cause seem as just as Loch invar's...
...If the Greeks really are terrorizing the Bulgaro-Macedonians, they are playing into the hands of their enemies at an extremely precarious moment...
...Great Britain, fearing this sensational Russian advance, forced the Tsar to relinquish his acquisition...
...For half a century Macedonia has been the major issue in Sofia and a major issue in Athens and Belgrade...
...And the Greeks, I learned, ardently believed that most of Macedonia should belong to Greece...
...I do not predict that Stalin will turn Tito loose on Greece...
...A few years earlier an American woman missionary had been kidnapped by Macedonian revolutionists and held for a large ransom, which was eventually used for arms...
...And the articles were illustrated with vivid, colored drawings...
...What Bulgarian wouldn't die for Macedonia...
...A noted Bulgaro-Macedonian revolutionist came into our school yard at night to see one of our native teachers...
...Later many of my own friends did die...
...It has a Macedonian government or committee of its own, made up largely of belligerent, irrepressible Macedonian revolutionists...
...He will make the world echo with the Four Freedoms...
...TO understand why, one must try to form an elemental picture of Macedonia and its relation to Bulgaria, Serbia (Yugoslavia) and Greece...
...Moscow is backing this campaign with the tremendous weight of its prestige...
...And the special tool is "Free Macedonia," one of the independent units in Tito's federated Yugoslavia...
...It officially annexed those areas, set up its own administration, opened Bulgarian schools, introduced some improvements, re-established a large Bulgarian civilian population, driving out many Greeks...
...Powder Keg In The Balkans By R. H. MARKHAM FOR more than 2 weeks the official press and radio of Communist-governed Yugoslavia have been carrying on a bitter campaign against Greece and the present Greek government...
...Tito speaks for them both...
...In 1934 another Bulgarian conspiracy overthrew the Sofia government because of Macedonia...
...I believe irate Greeks are persecuting Macedonian Slavs...
...The Macedonian "cause" filled the Bulgarian atmosphere and lured the minds of Bulgarian youth...
...Onr late enemy Bulgaria would be rewarded...
...I know from personal experience how Bulgarians and Greeks kill each other...
...He made the very sweeping charge that the Greeks were causing terror in Macedonia (the Greek portion) "comparable with the most horrible savagery in the times of Turkish slavery...
...Great Britain would receive another extremely serious setback, and the mighty totalitarian power, Russia, would gain a new impetus for new expansion...
...Russia, too, is a dynamic empire with a vigorous government...
...our ally Greece would be ruined...
...However, more than 100,000 Bulgarian inhabitants, residing in that area from ancient times, remained in Greek Macedonia...
...Tito, also, is an extreme nationalist and belligerently expansive...
...They are in the mood of the bold, hard American pioneers who settled in Texas and who wrested California from the Mexicans...
...Greek terror," according to the charge, "included murder, rape, beatings, imprisonment, and the burning of villages...
...And what if the Balkan Slavs should press to the Aegean and seize parts of Northern Greece...
...A number of them are old Bulgaro-Macedonian conspirators...
...After the Germans were driven from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and a new Bulgarian, Communist-led government had established friendly relations with Russia, the Bulgarian invaders were forced to restore all occupied land to Greece and to withdraw all the new Bulgarian settlers...
...He may merely want to use that threat to wring concessions from Churchill and Truman...
...It means "we must free Macedonia from the Greeks...
...The drive reached its high point of vehemence when Marshal Tito, himself, Yugoslavia's Communist dictator, broadcast a flaming speech about Greek terror in Macedonia and Greek soldiers violating the Yugoslav border...
...The Greek government denies it...
...In the same year the Greek army raided Bulgaria because of Macedonia...
...When Macedonian revolutionists shrieked to the world about Turkish terror that meant they were preparing to act and to force the Great Powers to act...
...Bulgaro-Macedonian revolutionists are not philosophers, but killers...
...Its second was mosque-filled Skoplje...
...They merely call them Macedonians and claim them jointly...
...At that moment, in the Spring of 1912, it was all in European Turkey, where it had been for 500 years...
...It was "under the yoke," travailing for liberation...
...Tito's Partisans are also men of violent passions and robust acts...
...In 1913 they fought among themselves over Macedonia with Roumania joining in...
...These extravagant charges were published by the Soviet News Agency Tass and broadcast by the Moscow radio...
...They said that the Slavs in Macedonia were Serbs, that Macedonia should be Serbian, that the Bulgarians were interlopers...
...And the Slavs, constituting the main population, were all Bulgarians, original Bulgarians of the purest type, the founders of the nation...
...The drive is a vital element in an extensive program of Russian expansion...
...Some have been active terrorists...
...From April 1941 to October 1944, Bulgaria, which was Germany's ally, occupied most of Yugoslav Macedonia and much of Greek Macedonia...
...It is a land of fable and of bloody reality, of boundless devotion, and bestial murders...
...Now Soviet Russia is seeking the restoration of Slav hegemony in the Balkans, much as it was established at San Stefano...
...Such was what the Bulgarians told us of Macedonia, and they believed it...
...The Greek civil administration and army" were held responsible...
...At least a quarter of a million Greeks were forced to flee under deplorable circumstances...
...A third new factor is the existence of a "Free Macedonia...
...In school exercises pupils declaimed about Macedonia, students on excursions sang of Macedonia, soldiers tramped down the streets to Macedonian marches...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 30
