Reflections on a Failure: the Situation in December 1904
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This was abetted in some respects by the Austrians, who for their own interests sought to keep the members of the international mission out of Albanian areas. The Austrians jealously accused General Degiorgis of trying to expand the Italian zone of influence to the Albanian areas, through the person of Norwegian Captain Karl Ingvar Nandrup, who had been installed alongside the Turkish authorities and was tasked with writing reports on the progress of the Mürzsteg Programme for his king, Oscar II.
Therefore, whenever any actions occurred against insurgents, the Turkish authorities would inform Nandrup, who was then sent to make an inspection. In Skopje, Nandrup met General Degiorgis during one such tour of the vilayet. Nandrup was, unlike other monitors, trusted by the Ottomans. General Degiorgis was also satisfied with his performance. Yet others considered him and the reform team in general to be incompetent.
General Degiorgis had received Hilmi Pasha’s permission to send Nandrup to Pristina and his comrade, Major Viktor Axel Unander, to Koritza west of the Italian sector. But after the Austrian complaints, Degiorgis backed down and the decision was made to keep to keep Unander subordinate to the orders of Hilmi Pasha, and to keep Captain Karl Ingvar Nandrup in Skopje.
The Norwegian finished out his term in the full awareness that the Mürzsteg Reform Programme was failing, and that the representatives of the Great Powers were trying their best to keep that fact from the Western public. Captain Nandrup’s intimate final report, written on December 30, 1904 and entitled ‘Note by the hand of an archivist,’ is a sobering corrective to the positive propaganda being disseminated in the official reports of the Civil Agents. It was translated into English by Swedish Prof. Dr Orjan Lindberger, and excerpted in a 1989 paper by historian Blagoj Stoicovski. The report would be the last that Nandrup would submit before wrapping up his one-year term in Macedonia. In this report, Nandrup detailed Great Powers aspirations, especially the policy of Austria-Hungary, along with their vision for the future of Macedonia.
As always with multi-national intervening projects, damage control was key for the Great Powers in Macedonia. European newspapers published the report by the Civil Agents, in which the implementation, the progress, and the results of the reforms were depicted as satisfactory and successful. The reports were self-congratulatory and subjective, released to assure public opinion in Europe, to justify and rationalize the international intervention. The report was meant to counter the sensationalistic reports in daily newspapers and journals which had been feeding Western audiences a steady diet of Macedonian murders, outrages, atrocities and massacres. The December 1904 report of Karl Ingvar Nandrup, however, shows that the results of the Mürzsteg Programme were pitifully meager. He charged that a Potemkin village of sort was being created by the Civil Agents, in order to conceal the deplorable and desperate situation prevailing in Macedonia since the beginning of the Mürzsteg intervention:
“…I am sorry to say that we who are in close touch with the events are unable to see the slightest sign of an amelioration; on the contrary, I must assert that the actual state is worse than it has been. In my opinion, the report of the civil agents aims to deceive Europe and cover the deplorable failure of the Mürzsteg program and the pitiable comedy played by the Powers on the Balkan Peninsula.”
The sunnier report of the Civil Agents had concluded that the majority of the refugees had been returned to their homes and that most of the villages and towns destroyed and burned during the insurgency had been repaired and reconstructed. In 1903, according to Stoicovski, 198 Christian villages had been destroyed and 12,241 houses burned. There were 70,000 displaced and there were 30,000 refugees, while 1,500 were imprisoned. Of the refugees, 6,000, or 20%, were estimated to have returned. Food and housing shortages remained.
However, according to critics like Captain Nandrup, the funds allocated by the Turkish government for the reconstruction and relief effort were insufficient to feed and house the refugees and displaced during the winter. The Macedonian population faced famine conditions, and most of the destroyed and burned houses had not in fact been rebuilt.
Public security in Macedonia had deteriorated to a point where it was worse than it had been before the arrival of Nandrup and the other Western reformers. Very little had actually changed on the ground. Murders, assaults, and robberies continued. The Turkish officials were able to do nothing against this, but sometimes got to participate.
Further, very little had been achieved by way of judicial reforms. An unfair system of taxation remained in Macedonia for Christians. The planned financial reorganization had not proven effective, even though the Ottoman military force in Macedonia had been reduced. Nandrup calculated that the budget of the three Macedonian vilayets should have produced a surplus of at least 15 million francs a year. But the officers in the army and the public officials did not receive their salaries regularly. Observers noted that the two Civil Agents were placed in a helpless and awkward position.
Nandrup emphasized four factors which impeded the reforms as explained by the Civil Agents: 1) the resistance and obstruction of the Turkish authorities, 2) the poor economy, 3) the revolutionary propaganda, and, 4) the hostilities between the Christian groups.
Of course, it was not all the fault of the Turks and the Westerners. Nandrup noted how Bulgarian and Greek “propaganda” played a role in the conflict. He noted how Bulgarian Committees agitated in Macedonia and how Greeks sought to “Hellenize” parts of Macedonia. There were obvious tensions between Greeks and Bulgarians and their respective agendas.
Nandrup reported that there were twelve massacres in the region during his year-long stay in Skopje. He criticized political leaders for not acting decisively and forcefully. But he also noted a lack of energy on the part of the officers who were charged by the Great Powers to lead the police reorganization in Macedonia. In his final thoughts, the Norwegian questioned whether the whole mission had not really been a foolish mistake:
“…when you have abandoned a position in your own country, hoping to be able to use your capacity in helping a suffering people, and you see yourself reduced to playing the part of a fool in a pitiable comedy, then you cannot feel at ease, and I am longing for the day when I can return home.”
This depressing outlook was shared by other international observers. A couple months after Captain Nandrup’s final report was issued, the atrocities were still occurring. One was cited by Henry Noel Brailsford, the leader of the British aid mission to Macedonia, and a foreign correspondent for The Manchester Guardian and other publications. He had spent time on assignment in the Balkans in the 1890’s. His 1905 book Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future recounts his experiences in Macedonia during the insurgency and the implementation of the reforms. Brailsford described the Ottoman Turkish attack on Kuklish in 1905 thus:
“…a typical outrage occurred in February, 1905, at the Bulgarian village of Kuklish, where, according to the report of a Russian gendarmerie captain, 64 houses out of 105 were burned, 38 unarmed peasants killed, including two women and a baby, five persons wounded, and eleven women violated. The whole place was pillaged, and the officers made no attempt to check the savagery of their men. It is worthy of note that the ‘reformed’ gendarmes who were present behaved exactly like the unregenerate soldiery.”
Zervi, Mogila, Konopnitsa, and other Macedonian towns were similarly attacked during the spring and summer of 1905 by the “reformed” gendarmerie.
On May 23, 1905, the arrest of Romanian or Vlach school inspectors by the Turks and the assault on the Romanian consulate on the orders of the vali of Ioannina provoked a diplomatic crisis. This led to the creation of a separate Vlach nationality or “millet” in Macedonia, with its own official language schools and churches. Ottoman Turkey was divided into millets, or communities based on religious affiliation who were autonomous with their own religious leaders and own laws and customs and language. The Turkish government supported this splintering of groups in Macedonia because it divided the Christian populations even further and pitted the Christians against each other.
Brailsford again gave the following on-the-spot, eyewitness evaluation of the reforms:
“…the Mürzsteg programme aimed at something more than the improvement of the Turkish administrative machinery. It has done a very little in this direction, and when it is complete it may do more. Its chief aim, however, was to bring some measure of appeasement, to restore order, to re-establish confidence, to repair devastation, and, in a word, to remove the motives for rebellion. Here it has failed, and the failure is so conspicuous that it has actually aggravated the normal anarchy.
The Macedonians were encouraged to hope; the loss of their hope has deepened their despair and increased their recklessness. The reforms left the Turks supreme in all administrative matters. They used their liberty to resort to all the old devices of repression and provocation. They still seemed to contemplate an eventual war with Bulgaria, and to make a pretext, they tried to drive the Bulgarians to desperate courses. They were for ever mobilising their troops, calling out the reserves, and accumulating armaments. The troops lived on the peasants and drained the exchequer. Mutinies were frequent and discipline was lax. Under the plea of searching for arms they harried the villages and carried on their perquisitions, with the usual accompaniments of rapine and brutality.”
The bottom line, for the British observer, was that life for Macedonian civilians had not been qualitatively improved after two years of reforms:
“…as in 1903, the migratory Macedonian labourers who annually visit Constantinople in search of work were confined to their villages and forbidden to travel. A curfew ordinance was enforced, which renders any peasant abroad after sundown liable to be summarily shot. Half the refugees from the Adrianople region have been unable to return, and their lands were occupied by Moslem ‘squatters.’”
