The Bulgarians Know How Wonderful turks Are

[imported_Hellektor]

The Armenian Genocide is sometimes wrongly referred to as ‘the first European genocide of the twentieth century’. Yet in the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, the Christian states of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro partitioned the Ottoman territories in Europe and slaughtered or expelled much of the Muslim population in the process. As the journalist Leon Trotsky, who reported on the Balkan Wars, wrote at the time, ‘the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts[.]’ The ethnic cleansing practised by the Christian Balkan states acted as a decisive influence on the CUP to adopt similar methods. The Armenian rebels who fought alongside the Russians against the Ottomans in World War I, and the Greeks who invaded Anatolia under Lloyd George’s guidance, carried out systematic atrocities against Turkish Muslims. Yet neither Greece nor Bulgaria has been pressed to acknowledge these crimes as the price of membership of the EU; nor have European parliamentary resolutions recognised them.

Will you PLEASE tell us what the so-called Muslims were doing in the Balkans in the first place?

Don't you think the Balkans had enough of Turkish yoke and barbarities, they rose against them and threw them out of their homes?
Had Armenians done the same, of which they are accused all the time, they could have liberated their home as well and the Armenian Genocide would never have happened.

But alas and alack, they decided to remain loyal to the Ottoman government and they got genocide as thank you:

Look for the "decision of the Bureau at the eighth General Assembly of Dashnaktsoutioun in 1914" in this post.

[ScythianVizier]

Will you PLEASE tell us what the so-called Muslims were doing in the Balkans in the first place?

They used to live in the Balkans.

Don't you think the Balkans had enough of Turkish yoke and barbarities, they rose against them and threw them out of their homes?
Had Armenians done the same, of which they are accused all the time, they could have liberated their home as well and the Armenian Genocide would never have happened.

Your approach to the issue is quite biased. The Balkan christians lived with the Balkan muslims for centuries, and the muslims did not kill them. However, when the tide is turned, the Balkan christians demonstrated how barbaric they were.

The rest of your analysis is speculation based upon "if statements", and those can not be respected when assessing historical facts.

But alas and alack, they decided to remain loyal to the Ottoman government and they got genocide as thank you:

Look for the "decision of the Bureau at the eighth General Assembly of Dashnaktsoutioun in 1914" in this post.

The Christian Europeans considered muslims as some thread in Balkans, Crimea, and in Caucasus since those muslims could have played the role of the Armenian, Greek, Bulgar, Serb rebels if they stayed at where they used to live. So, the Europeans applied barbaric ethnic cleansing methods, and executed mass slaughters in Balkans, Crimea, and in Caucasus, and in particular, they targeted the civilians.

Conversely, they must have forecasted that these actions would have side effects in Anatolia such as hatred or rage targeting the christians, but they did not simply care as they envisaged the Armenians (and other ethnicities) as some tools to dismember the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

[Romik]

"How Wonderful" Haha this is the funniest topic I've seen in a while

[ScythianVizier]

"From the Middle Ages onwards, state terror became known as the campaigns of "fire and sword", which were regularly combined with the troops looting and raping civilian population. Looting cities and villages had of course been part of wars, conquests and crusades from the dawn of the history, but this activity became state terror by the conscious adoption of the strategic goal of the "fire and sword" campaigns that aimed at the subjugation and discouragement of the local population by using fear (terror).

A notorious user of the "fire and sword" strategy was General Aleksey Yermolov, who used to terrorize Chechens and Dagestanis during the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century. General Yermolov believed that "the total subjugation of the Caucasians" was only possible with the use of extreme cruelty, which would target civilian population, instead of the Caucasian fighters, known as the Murids, who were difficult to defeat. Yermolov concentrated his troops to destroy villages, burn houses, devastate cropfields, and slaughter the people and cattle. They also cut down beech forests to take away shelter from the Chechens. The outcome of this strategy was, however, that population fled to the mountains and was mobilized into an even fiercer resistance and retaliations against the Russian forts.

Another strategy of terror targeting civilian population was also initiated by the policies of imperial Russia. In addition to Yermolov's unsuccessful terror campaigns in the Caucasus, the Russian Empire launched a new strategy, which was to have long-lasting and tragic consequences for world history. It was the strategy of genocide, combined with mass deportation. The first victims were the Crimean Tatars, soon to be followed by Circassians, and finally Jews.

The first genocidal act took place within days of the declaration of Crimea's annexation by Tsarina Catherine II. At the end of April 1783, several thousand Crimean Tatar intellectuals, military officers and clergy were rounded up in Karasubazar and killed. The whole early 1800s marked a period of genocide and ethnic cleansing targeting the Crimean Tatars and aiming at wiping out their culture, intellectual heritage as well as physical presence from the Crimean Peninsula.[2] Following the Crimean War (1853-1856), by the summer of 1860, the flight of Tatars from the terror in Crimea had turned the once flourishing peninsula into a "torched earth" landscape.[3]

What happened first to the Crimean Tatars, stroke next the Circassians in the 1860s. An unprecedented genocide and wave of terror aimed at emptying the whole Caucasus from Circassians. Russia started a mass expulsion in Circassia in 1860, with catastrophic consequences. Unlike the Tatars, who chose the exile and fled from the dar al-harb, the Circassians put up armed resistance, fortified their capital, Sochi, and made appeals to Turkey and the West to gain recognition for independent Circassia. After having forcibly halted the exodus of Crimean Tatars, in 1862, Russia launched terror campaign, massacres and targeted famine against Circassians, and by May 1864, the Circassian resistance movement had been crushed. In 1865, Russia spread the terror campaign against Chechens. By the 1880s, more than three million Circassians (up to 90 % of the population) as well as hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Abkhazians, Georgian Muslims and other Caucasians had been forced to emigrate to Turkey in the proportionally most massive ethnic cleansing of the time. The number of those directly killed has not been properly investigated. Suddenly, as in the case of the Crimean Tatars, Russia stopped the persecution of the remaining populations, and crushed the voluntary emigration movements by deporting the organizers to Siberia. This coincided with the launch of yet another campaign -–the pogroms and expulsions of Jews.[4]

The careful timing, planning and systematic organization of the ethnic cleansings and genocide against Crimean Tatars, Caucasian Muslims and Jews indicate that imperial Russia, even during the reigns of some monarchs, who have been considered as "more enlightened", did not follow a random strategy in Russia's southward expansion – the policy that Catherine II and her favorite Grigory Potyomkin had designed in order to "gain Constantinople and Jerusalem". Also regarding the history of the time, the systematic use of ethnic cleansing, pogroms and genocide as a means of imperial expansion and colonization marked the beginning of a novel and sinister trend in imperial politics. What was launched by Russia's brosok na yug, with their first victims being the Crimean Tatars and Circassians, was continued against the Jews, and the fashion was soon exported both west – targeting Jews across Europe since the 1870s – and south – leading to the atrocities against Armenians in the 1910s.

The history of modern ethnic cleansing and genocide, therefore, began in the outskirts of the Russian Empire in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century. The relevant difference to the medieval campaigns was that the campaigns of "fire and sword" had primarily sought for the subjugation of the conquered populations by terror, the ethnic cleansings in Crimea and the Caucasus marked the beginning of a tradition, where the goal was no longer just vanquishing active resistance, but ethnic cleansing and the physical elimination of the opponent as a collective, ethnic, entity."

http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/2004/terrorism.htm

[ScythianVizier]

This what Leon Trotsky noted during the Balkan War:

"The Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts".

http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/sections/greater_europe/document.2005-09-29.8090352715

This is some adademic reference in relation to the Turco-Russo War of 1878:

"Bulgarian nationalists began a revolt in 1876... [which was] similar to what had occurred fifty years earlier in Greece -- in the first days of the revolt 1,000 Turkish peasants were killed in cold blood.... Because the [Ottoman] army was fighting elsewhere, the government armed local Turks, as well as Circassian and Tatar refugees who had been settled in Bulgaria, as well as Circassian and Tatar refugees who had been settled in Bulgaria, and allowed them to put down the rebels. They did so with the same ferocity the rebels had used in killing Turks. Between 3,000 and 12,000 Bulgarian Christians died before the revolt was crushed.

In 1877 and 1878 the Russians made use in Bulgaria of all the tactics they had perfected in the Caucasus. Their official agents were the Cossacks and sometimes other army units. To these were joined Bulgarian revolutionaries and Bulgarian peasants eager to seize the lands, crops and cattle of the Turks. The tactics were once again those of state terror. In a typical Turkish village, Cossacks would disarm the villagers, then surround the village and shoot all but a few who tried to escape. Hemmed in, the Turks were attacked by Bulgarians, who murdered the inhabitants... The scenes recorded by European diplomats equal any pictures of inhumanity and horror in history....

When peace came in 1878, European powers intervened and called the Congress of Berlin to set the terms of the Russian victory. The Russians were forced by the British, Germans and others who dominated the Congress to agree to let the Turkish refugees return to their homes, but they seldom did so. Many of those who tried to return were murdered or enslaved,. and many refused to leave their refugee enclaves until the Ottomans, once again, took them into settlements in Anatolia."

http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/ottoman/module4/lecture4.htm

[Joseph]

This what Leon Trotsky noted during the Balkan War:

"The Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts".

http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/sections/greater_europe/document.2005-09-29.8090352715

This is some adademic reference in relation to the Turco-Russo War of 1878:

"Bulgarian nationalists began a revolt in 1876... [which was] similar to what had occurred fifty years earlier in Greece -- in the first days of the revolt 1,000 Turkish peasants were killed in cold blood.... Because the [Ottoman] army was fighting elsewhere, the government armed local Turks, as well as Circassian and Tatar refugees who had been settled in Bulgaria, as well as Circassian and Tatar refugees who had been settled in Bulgaria, and allowed them to put down the rebels. They did so with the same ferocity the rebels had used in killing Turks. Between 3,000 and 12,000 Bulgarian Christians died before the revolt was crushed.

In 1877 and 1878 the Russians made use in Bulgaria of all the tactics they had perfected in the Caucasus. Their official agents were the Cossacks and sometimes other army units. To these were joined Bulgarian revolutionaries and Bulgarian peasants eager to seize the lands, crops and cattle of the Turks. The tactics were once again those of state terror. In a typical Turkish village, Cossacks would disarm the villagers, then surround the village and shoot all but a few who tried to escape. Hemmed in, the Turks were attacked by Bulgarians, who murdered the inhabitants... The scenes recorded by European diplomats equal any pictures of inhumanity and horror in history....

When peace came in 1878, European powers intervened and called the Congress of Berlin to set the terms of the Russian victory. The Russians were forced by the British, Germans and others who dominated the Congress to agree to let the Turkish refugees return to their homes, but they seldom did so. Many of those who tried to return were murdered or enslaved,. and many refused to leave their refugee enclaves until the Ottomans, once again, took them into settlements in Anatolia."

http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/ot...4/lecture4.htm

As I have written several times, I definitely see the correlation between what happened to various Mulsim ethnic groups in the Caucasus and the Balkans and how it would impact Armenians in Anatolia. Unfortunately, the Armenians would undeservedly take the brunt of Muslim anger from 1877 onward.

[ScythianVizier]

I agree, Joseph. However, I believe that the Europeans must have envisaged the consequences of their policies towards the muslim Ottomans, such as the impact of mass slaughters and forced emigration, which consisted of millions and which lasted for more than a century (1780s-1920s).