FORGOTTEN WARS/Забравени борби

This essay is written very much from a Bulgarian perspective and I am certain that there are many who will take issue with my account of events. I welcome any such contribution to the blog.

In this country we are currently being bombarded by some extremely sickly commemorations of the sinking of the luxury liner Titanic, on which 1,517 died. As it happens 2012 also happens to be the anniversary of the outbreak of the First Balkan war, which led in turn to the Second Balkan War; Apart from the losses and victims which cannot be exactly ascertained, the toll of the two Balkan Wars consisted of 415,000 lives lost both in battle and from various other causes, and 4,000,000,000 (in round figures) francs war expenditure. [1] The resultant emergence of Serbia as a significant local power was one of the causes of the much greater slaughter of World War One, which we will, presumably, be commemorating in two years time.

So we remember the one historical event, but the second barely registers on the western European consciousness. Why has the one lodged iconically and the other vanished from view? Well, numbers seem to mean nothing, as Alan Bennett has remarked, ‘when men die like flies, that is how they die like,’ or more put more crudely by Stalin, one mans death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.

Similarly, consequences seem not to be a factor, the sinking of the Titanic, aside from some improvements in maritime safety, was a trivial event, barely a footnote in the terrible history of the twentieth century.

The Titanic story has now however taken on the character of myth; good and evil, rich and poor, the wise and foolish, hubris, cowardice and courage, triumph and tragedy, even humour finding its way into the tale. It is a tale of human dimensions and of course it is precisely because of the human dimensions of the tale that it has taken on the status of what has become a modern morality play.

The realities of the Wars that took place in South Eastern Europe in the early years of the century are altogether more complex not lending themselves to any neat morality tales, which is not the same as saying that the region has not provided a valuable scapegoat, a screen on which Western Europe can project its own shadow.

 The English language has a specific phrase demonising the region, Balkanisation, meaning, according to my dictionary and thesaurus to carve up, dissever, divide, split up, and separate, into small, quarrelsome, ineffectual states; as if Western Europe was completely immune to such phenomenon.

Recently there has been a great deal of propaganda put out by Islamist fellow travellers about the wonderful virtues of the Ottoman Caliphate, to which I have previously referred.

http://alextalbot.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/reframing-caliphate.html.

 The reality of Ottoman rule, whatever virtues it had previously possessed, and I would argue they were few, was rotten to its very core, corrupt, oppressive, and violent and determined to hold onto its remaining European ‘possessions’ by violent means. It is difficult therefore to see how it could be dislocated from this toehold without violence, somehow Ghandi’s methods would not do.[2]

The 1^st Balkan War, launched by the Balkan League, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, was really unfinished business, the completion of a process begun in the nineteenth century, involving the emergence of free Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian states which in turn had managed to overthrow the Ottoman yolk. However they were all states with a sizable Turkish occupation of some sort on territory they aspired to incorporate. (That this territory was disputed amongst the states of the league sowed the seeds for future tragedy).

The ensuing conflicts were fought with a degree of bitterness and enmity not seen in Europe since the middle-ages, if you exempt the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria in the 1870’s. This was the true beginning of the phenomenon that came to be called ‘ethnic cleansing.’ The refusal of all combatants to a greater or lesser extent to differentiate between civilians and combatants marked the beginning of a trend that was to sweep like a virus across the whole world, changing the nature of warfare forever. In so many respects the war that broke out in October 1912 marked a curtain raiser for the horrors to come, the opening shot not coming in Sarajevo but in Montenegro two years earlier.

However to blame and demonize the emerging states of South Eastern Europe is to some extent a case of blaming the victims, the victims of a malevolent empire. The real evil lay with a brutal and brutalising Turkish occupation that had lasted, in the case of Bulgaria, for as long as 500 years. As Auden has reflected:-

‘Those to whom evil is done,
Do evil in return.’

The second Balkan War, that broke out in June 1913 was a direct consequence of the first, in particular the failure of Greece and Serbia to live up to the agreements they had made with Bulgaria regarding the allocation of liberated territory, in particular Macedonia. Macedonia was overwhelmingly Bulgarian in ethnicity and as the Bulgarian army had tied down the bulk of the Turkish forces at the gates of Istanbul the Serbs and Greeks poured into Macedonia, the Bulgarians naively expecting their allies to relinquish large portions of their territorial gains.
Who fired the first shot is still a matter of dispute, though had the belligerents waited for international arbitration the resultant agreement would have been more favourable for Bulgaria and more importantly the Ethnic Bulgarians of Macedonia.[3] The outcome of the 2^nd Balkan War was disastrous for Bulgaria, in an age characterised by treachery, cynicism and opportunism the behaviour of Bulgaria’s former allies and particularly Romania marked a particular low. Greece and Serbia signed a pact to guarantee their hold on the territory they had gained; Romania seized the opportunity to make a territorial grab and more understandably Turkey sought to regain lost ground. Bulgaria was forced to sue for peace.
One of the most unpleasant features of this second war, later to be replicated by the Nazi’s, was the ferociously racist propaganda employed by the Greeks, who in their propaganda portrayed the Bulgarians, their former allies remember, as being sub human. All sides committed war crimes and the ensuing settlement left a bitter and revisionist Bulgaria, a dangerously chauvinistic and triumphalist Serbia and a Greece with delusions of the extent of its own power. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now all this is long ago and far away and largely forgotten, most young Bulgarians when asked about the war of 1912 are likely to respond, what war? I am not sure that this is altogether a bad thing, the poison of that period having finally lost its toxicity.
This is not to say that the scars of this period are all fully healed, or, to mix a metaphor, that the ghosts do not still haunt, as manifested by the childish refusal of Greece to recognise the claim of Macedonia to that name.[4] Moreover as we have seen in the last 20 years nationalists in the region are still capable of hideous crimes and ethnic tensions still have the capacity to burst back into life.[5]

Bulgaria, I would argue, represents one of the most mature countries in the region, a country that has long since given up on a revisionist agenda and come to terms with the facts of history. It is also re-assuring to observe the good relations that now exist between Bulgaria and Turkey and Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is calling for joint commemoration of the armed conflict together with erstwhile adversaries of the Balkan League, Serbia’s Vuk Jeremić is fully onboard with this idea. I have been unable whilst writing this to establish the views of the other beligerents.

There will it seems be some commerations in Bulgaria itself and as someone who grew up in the shadow of the 2^nd World War and whose grandfather[s] fought in the 1^st I am very much aware of the power of commemeration. Wars are not fought by politicians or diplomats, nor is the fighting done by generals, but in the 1^st and 2^nd Balkan Wars it was fought by peasants and workers, drawn from towns and villages across the region. Some would never return. So its seems fitting to pay tribute to them, their courage ensured that Bulgaria was finally freed from Turkish oppression.

 They shall not grow old as we grow old,

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun
We will remember them.

 Те не трябва да остарее, както ние остарее,
Възраст не уморен тях, нито годините осъдят.
При захождането на слънцето
Ние ще ги помня.

*In the Balkan Wars, the Serbian losses amounted to 36,000 killed, 60,000 wounded 45,000 invalids and one milliard dinars of war expenditure. Bulgaria had 55,000 killed, 105,000 wounded, 40,000 invalids and 2,000,000,000 levas war expenditure. Turkey had 150,000 killed, 80,000 massacred, 450,000 died of epidemics, and 1,075,000,000 French francs war expenditure. In Greece the total killed in battle and died from disease was 30,000 and 20,000 were invalided. Moreover, the Serbian army killed during the Balkan Wars about 100,000 Albanians and burnt down their villages. A large section of Macedonia and Thrace was laid waste by fire.

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[1] I am grateful to Wikkepedia for helping me to assemble this information.

[2] Ghandi is given much credit for removing the British from India. However , as George Orwell pointed out at the time, The British were more than happy for Ghandi to advocate non violence, it was violence that they were afraid of; the British withdrawal from India owed far more to British decline than to the activities of Mr Ghandi.

[3] In 1913, Greece took control of Southern Macedonia and began an official policy of forced assimilation which included the settlement of Greeks from other provinces into southern Macedonia, as well as the linguistic and cultural Hellenizatition of Slav speakers. which continued even after World War I.  The Greeks expelled Exarchist churchmen and teachers and closed Bulgarian schools and churches. Bulgarian language (including the Macedonian dialects) was prohibited, and its surreptitious use, whenever detected, was ridiculed or punished, Serbian behaviour followed the same process. (Wikepedia)

[4] Much that is unreasonable has been asked of Greece during the current financial crisis, however given the hold that the rest of the Euro zone countries have over Athens what is reasonable is that they remove the block they have created to Macedonia entering the EU.

[5] Moreover in researching this article I have had to wade through a positive swamp of propaganda from all sides.

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