The Failure of the Reform Programme
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By September of 1909, the Mürzsteg Reform Plan was officially dead. Its tepid results meant that it would only be a matter of time before the lackluster intervention – and the status quo it propped up – would be overtaken by events. Among these the most important were the Young Turk revolution of July 1908, and the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia three months later.
The Great Powers, which had gone into Macedonia with the stated hope of making benevolent rulers of the Turks, instead abetted the bloodshed and followed their interests. Yet their interpretation of their own best interests was antiquated; it was based on obsolete conceptions of the world and the relation of states with one another. At this feverish time of transition, however, each of the Great Powers followed its own interventionist and colonialist intuition on a quixotic quest deep into the Balkans. None of the states would come out of it unscathed, even if the full brunt of the blowback only arrived five years after the end of the Mürzsteg Programme, with the onset of the Great War.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was well into its twilight years. Once an unstoppable juggernaut that had expanded to the gates of Vienna and taken leading roles in arts, sciences and culture, the empire had been bruised and battered during a series of punishing wars that saw its Balkan territories steadily reduced during the 19th century. But the thorniest and most intractable struggle of all, one which drag down not only the Turks but their Balkan neighbors as well, was the ideological and military battle for Macedonia. In 1902, the Ottoman state was confronted with an ongoing guerrilla insurgency in Macedonia, while a new insurrection was being planned for the following year. The long-subjugated Christian populations were rising up against an oppressor whose power was waning, something which alarmed the Great Powers.
They sought variously, inconsistently and in the end fruitlessly to assert or abrogate the status quo. Austria-Hungary and Russia, both seeking to restore stability and the status quo, took a diplomatic joint leadership position and sought to intervene in the conflict. Both of these Great Powers made it clear to the Turks that administrative reforms were urgently needed in the face of the growing humanitarian crisis.
At the same time, the neighboring Balkan states were warned “to keep their turbulent elements in check in order not to lay themselves open to the suspicion of wanting to create complications” in Macedonia, wrote English reporter H.N. Brailsford. The nations of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Romania, all of which had their own unpleasant memories of Ottoman rule, also had rival and competing claims to Macedonia. Each had sent comitadji guerrilla groups into the region. Of what exactly did these groups consist? Just over 30 years later, Balkan sojourner Rebecca West met one such former guerrilla, an encounter which gave her the opportunity to describe the character of the comitadji. Her depiction is both witty and telling:
“…the comitadji who waged guerrilla warfare against the Turks in Macedonia before the war covered a wide range of character. Some were highly disciplined, courageous, and ascetic men, often from good families in the freed Slav countries, who harried the Turkish troops, particularly those sent to punish Christian villages, and who held unofficial courts to correct the collapse of the legal system in the Turkish provinces. Others were fanatics who were happy in massacring the Turks but even happier when they were purging the movement of suspected traitors. Others were robust nationalists, to whom the proceedings seemed a natural way of spirited living. Others were black-guards who were in the business because they enjoyed murder and banditry.
All intermediate shades of character were fully represented. This made it difficult for the Western student to form a clear opinion about Near Eastern politics; it also made it difficult, very difficult, for a Macedonian peasant who saw a band of armed men approaching his village.” The comitadji guerrilla raids provoked brutal reprisals by the Turkish military forces, which included the widespread murder of civilians and the burning and destruction of numerous villages and towns in Macedonia. The humanitarian disaster and crisis were worsening, perpetuated by an ongoing insurgency that, while undertaken by a diverse range of groups whose purpose was often opaque, took on broadly nationalist contours as the war continued.
