(1) "Inbringing this painful chapter to a conclusion, we desire to remind the reader that it presents only a partial and abstract picture of the war. It brings together in a continuous perspective the sufferings of the noncombatant populations of Macedonia and Thrace at the hands of armies flushed with victory or embittered by defeat. To base upon it any moral judgment would be to show an uncritical and unhistorical spirit. An estimate of the moral qualities of the Balkan peoples under the strain of war must also take account of their courage, endurance, and devotion. If a heightened national sentiment helps to explain these excesses, it also inspired the bravery that won victory and the steadiness that sustained defeat. The moralist who seeks to understand the brutality to which these pages bear witness, must reflect that all the Balkan races have grown up amid Turkish models of warfare. Folk-songs, history and oral tradition in the Balkans uniformly speak of war as a process which includes rape and pillage, devastation and massacre. In Macedonia all this was not a distant memory but a recent experience. The new and modern feature of these wars was that for the first time in Balkan annals an effort, however imperfect, was made by some of the combatants and by some of the civil officials, to respect an European ideal of humanity. The only moral which we should care to draw from these events is that war under exceptional conditions produced something worse than its normal results. The extreme barbarity of some episodes was a local circumstance which has its root in Balkan history. But the main fact is that war suspended the restraints of civil life, inflamed the passions that slumber in time of peace, destroyed the natural kindliness between neighbors, and set in its place the will to injure. That is everywhere the essence of war."

from:"The Other Balkan Wars; 
A Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction 
and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George Kennan"

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(2) "The reader who has perused the preceding pages and followed the endless chain of deplorable events studied and described by the Commission, has doubtless discovered the common feature which unites the Balkan nations, though it is necessary to discover that war is waged not only by the armies but by the nations themselves. The local population is divided into as many fragmentary parts as it contains nationalities, and these fight together, each being desirous to substitute itself for the others. This is why these wars are so sanguinary, why they produce so great a loss in men, and end in the annihilation of the population and the ruin of whole regions.We have repeatedly been able to show that the worst atrocities were not due to the excesses of the regular soldiery, nor can they always be laid to the charge of the volunteers, the bashi-bazouk. [1] The populations mutually slaughtered and pursued with a ferocity heightened by mutual knowledge and the old hatreds and resentments they cherished.

The first consequence of this fact is, that the object of these armed conflicts, overt or covert, clearly conceived or vaguely felt, but always and everywhere the same, was the complete extermination of an alien population. In some cases this object expressed itself in the form of an implacable and categorical "order" - to kill the whole male population of the occupied regions."

from:"The Other Balkan Wars; 
A Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction 
and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George Kennan"

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(3) "We thus arrive at the second characteristic feature of the Balkan wars, a feature which is a necessary correlative of the first. Since the population of the countries about to be occupied knew, by tradition, instinet and experience, what they had to expect from the armies of the enemy and from the neighboring countries to which these armies belonged, they did not await their arrival, but fled. Thus, generally speaking, the army of the enemy found on its way nothing but villages which were either half deserted or entirely abandoned. To execute the orders for extermination, it was only necessary to set fire to them. The population, warned by the glow from these fires, fled in all haste. There followed a veritable migration of peoples, for in Macedonia, as in Thrace, there was hardly a spot which was not, at a given moment, on the line of march of some army of other. The Commission everywhere encountered this second fact. All along the railways interminable trains of carts drawn by oxen followed one another; behind them came emigrant families and, in the neighborhood of the big towns, bodies of refugees were found encamped".

from:"The Other Balkan Wars; 
A Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction 
and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George Kennan"

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(4)"The Turks are fleeing before the Christians, the Bulgarians before the Greeks and the Turks, the Greeks and the Turks before the Bulgarians, the Albanians before the Servians; and if emigration is not so general as between the Servians and the Bulgarians, the reason is that these two nations have not, so to speak, encountered on their own soil, while that soil coveted by each, namely Macedonia, they regarded as already peopled by men of their own race.[2]"

from:"The Other Balkan Wars; 
A Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction 
and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George Kennan"

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(5) "The events described above serve to afford one more confirmation of an ancient truth, which it is useful to recall. That legitimate national sentiment which inspires acts of heroism, and the perverted and chauvinistie nationalism which leads to crime are but two closely related states of the collective mind. Perhaps indeed the state of mind is the same, its social value varying with the object to which it is directed. We regard as just and legitimate, we even admire the deeds, the manifestations by which nationality defends its existence. We speak constantly of the "good cause" of oppressed nationalities, or nationalities struggling against difficulties to find themselves. But when these same nationalities pass from the defensive to the offensive, and instead of securing their own existence, begin to impinge on the existence of another national individuality, they are doing something illicit, even criminal. In such a case, as we have seen, the theory of State interests and the State feeling or instinct, is invoked. But the State itself must learn to conform to the principle of the moral freedom of modern nationalities, as it has learned to accept that of individual freedom. It is not nationality which should sacrifice its existence to any erroneous or outworn idea of the State. In applying this sound maxim to the facts of the second Balkan war, the conclusion is forced upon one, that in so far as the treaty of Bucharest has sanctioned the illegitimate claims of victorious nationalities, it is a work of injustice which in all probability will fail to resist the action of time. Would it not be more in consonance with the real feeling of solidarity of peoples to re-cast the treaty, than to wait for the development and ripening of its evil fruit? The question of the moment is not a new territorial division, such as would probably provoke that new conflict which the whole world wishes to avoid Mutual tolerance is all that is required; and it is justified by the fact that the offence is mutual. The confused tangle of Balkan nationalism can not be straightened out, either by attempts to assimilate at any price, or by a new migration. But in the question of the Macedonian Slavs in Greek Macedonia, each national group needs the protection of some neighboring State, - the Roumanians, the Bulgarians, the Turks, the Greeks, even the Servians. The way to arrive at such mutual protection is simple enough - a return to the Greek-Bulgarian proposals so wrongly rejected at the Bucharest Conference. All that is needed is an effective mutual guarantee of religious and educational autonomy. If there be any utility in the grave lesson of the events we have described, it must be to lead the allies of the day before yesterday, the impassioned foes of yesterday, the jealous and frigid neighbors of today to solidarity tomorrow in their work for the welfare of the Balkans. The treaty of Bucharest needs to be revised and completed in this sense, if it is not to be broken down by some new caprice of history."

from:"The Other Balkan Wars; 
A Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction 
and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George Kennan"

Pictures by V. Brangolica, from the archive of MCMS

Notes

[1] This term of dismal memory has taken on an altogether fresh significance during the latest wars. A bashi-bazouk is no longer necessarily a Turk. He is the volunteer, the Freischarler of all the belligerent nations without distinction; the Bulgarian comitadji, the Greek andarte; generally speaking he is any combatant not wearing the uniform of the regular.

[2] The Athenian correspondent of the Times gives these figures on August 21; they record the numbers passing the frontier. He himself has them from an "individual coming from Macedonia" who "gave him details on the emigration movement going on in the districts of Upper Macedonia, which the Greek troops are clearing all the time." This agrees with the information received by the Commission from the refugees themselves, at Salonica and Sofia, as to the specific character of this exodus, which was prepared and encouraged by the Greek authorities who offered carts and even motors to thoso who agreed to emigrate (See below.).