Results of the Uprising: The Reaction from Abroad
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If the revolutionaries did not achieve freedom, what they did gain was an increase in attention and sympathy from European publics shocked at the Turkish atrocities.
Again, the emotive Western writers played a role in consciousness-raising, as the politicians on the other hand had long sought to keep a positive spin on things to ensure the status quo held. A sampling of what confronted the journalists is described in Englishman John Booth’s 1905 book, Troubles in the Balkans. Take for example Booth’s visit to the destroyed village of Kremen: “…three miles further some strange heaps of rubble lay piled on each side of the path, and we were riding on a thickness of smashed tiles. This was Kremen.
Scrambling to the top of a heap of earth and stones one got the full effect. Shapeless wall-shoulders stood out of the mass, and the end of a charred beam pointed drunkenly into the sky; all down the hillside below the loose piles bulged and the empty, shorn walls gaped; no sound came up from the crushed houses - no figure moved in the choked streets, hardly traceable in the general level of rubbish; everywhere was desolation and black ruin.
…A year before, it seemed, a band of insurgents from Bulgaria had been lurking in the neighbourhood and no doubt had come to Kremen for food. The people were accused of having harboured revolutionaries, and a body of troops arrived to execute vengeance on the village, which was not done in any haphazard fashion, but deliberately and with fore-thought. The troops brought with them ponies carrying tins of petroleum lashed to their packsaddles, which were unloaded, and the soldiers, producing squirts, soon covered the walls and roofs with the spirit. After each house had been thoroughly sacked the tins were emptied upon piles of bedding and the whole village was fired at a given signal. Lurid descriptions of the usual horrible scenes followed - old men brained whilst trying to protect their daughters; women's hands cut off and their children murdered before their eyes; outrage, pillage, and massacre let loose. Truly the Turkish soldier - quiet enough in peace time - is a demon out of hell when the lust of blood is on him. The police-officer and the escort had the decency to look ashamed of their countrymen's work, and made no effort to hide the worst evidences of it.
Kremen is only a sample. The countryside is thick with the ruins of Christian villages stamped out in the same way, with the same old weary details in every case. There is nothing new in it all - it did not happen for the first time that year nor fifty years before. It has been going on for centuries, and always will go on until the Christians in Macedonia are given the right to live a freeman's life and the power to uphold that right by the only people who can give it - the Powers of Europe.”
The Western political leaders somewhat reluctantly rose to the challenge presented in such accounts. The significant result of Ilinden was that it widened the field of interesting parties, who were no longer limited to Russia and Austria-Hungary. In the aftermath of the spectacular failure of the Krusevo Republic, the French ambassador in St. Petersburg, M. Maurice Bompard, stressed that France wanted “to take a more active part” in Balkan affairs.
The British Foreign Ministry too stated that “the moment has arrived when Europe cannot remain indifferent” to the events in the three vilayets of Macedonia. The government had been stung by criticism following Balfour’s claim that “...the balance of criminality lies not with the Turks, but with the rebels.”
The London Daily News attacked the prime minister’s statement immediately on September 14, 1903, editorializing that: “…the balance of criminality is surely here in our own land. Britain had denied Macedonia freedom at [the 1878 Congress of] Berlin, knowing that (continued) Ottoman rule was synonymous with cruelty and tyranny, and by adopting a laissez-faire attitude at the juncture, Britain is a consenting party to all the ghastly murders and massacres in Macedonia.”
The British Foreign Secretary from 1900-1905, Lord Landsdowne, and the 5th Marquess, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, called for the establishment of international military control in Macedonia, sending foreign soldiers to assist Hilmi Pasha, a reassessment of orientation that would become increasingly pronounced over the next four years. By 1907, a British government that had once opposed any reduction of Ottoman sovereignty would actually call for Macedonian autonomy.
Such shifts were major achievements for the revolutionaries. However, at the same time they were self-defeating; every new Great Power to arrive on the scene in Macedonia wanted to expand its own influence, inevitably resulting in internal dissonance and a weakened common front, and slowed impetus for practical reform. This, combined with the Ottoman tactic of playing the different Christian sides against one another, ensured that the bloodshed would continue and that Macedonia would never be free, reforms or no reforms.
