Reception of the Foreigners
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The arrival of the international officers was greeted favorably by Macedonia’s Slavic populations. They saw the officers “as protection against the arbitrariness of the Ottoman administration.” The Greeks however were more hostile, having their own different and irredentist interests. The French military attaché reported that in the vilayet of Kosovo, “the arrival of Austro-Hungarian officers in the vilayet had irritated the Serbians, and Bulgarians and the Turkish or Albanian Moslems.”
In Skopje, the Muslims of the “well-to-do classes” were hostile to the Austrian officers, offended at the liberties granted to Christians in a city where the official religion was Islam. They saw the increase in rights to Christians as an insult and a humiliation for Islam. Christians were the rayah, or herd, in Muslim society. One of the Western officers wisecracked that “they consider us more or less like a plague from God. As for the Turkish authorities, they hate us, but respect us.” Captain Leon Falconetti noted that the Turks maintain “a conspiracy of silence.”
It was abundantly clear that the Great Powers were determined to use the conflict in Macedonia to advance their own national interests, while neglecting the human and civil rights of the Christian population. Decision-making was hampered by the fact that negotiations, debates, and discussions would be needed before the divergent interests and goals of the six Great Powers could be reconciled. This resulted in compromises and half-measures that led to delays and indecision. And so as the Programme, fatally compromised from the start wore on, the relations between the interventionists and both the Turkish and Christian populations worsened- though this did not prevent all sides from trying to curry favor with the outsiders.
On February 1, 1904, Italian Lieutenant General Emilio Degiorgis arrived in Constantinople as the head of the military commission charged with reforming or reorganizing the Turkish gendarmerie. Enrico Albera and Major Rodolfo Ridolfi were also part of the Italian mission. Ridolfi directed the Salonika school for chiefs of station. The first meeting of the military commission took place on February 8, 1904.
Each Great Power sent a military delegate, referred to as “military deputies.” Six military attachés from the embassies also were part of the commission. Two more attachés were added to the commission, one for Degiorgis and another for the Russian officer on the commission, making a total of 15. The military commission met on a daily basis from February 8-April 9, 1904. Brigadier General Osman Nizami Pasha and Colonel Zia Bey of the Turkish General Staff also attended the meetings, which were conducted in French.
