In the heart of the Balkan peninsula, stretching from Lake Orchrida,
which washes the Albanian frontiers, to Drima on the Aegean Sea; from
Salonika to Mount Shar north of Skoplje, lies Macedonia, a beautiful
country nearly three times as large as Belgium and inhabited by two and a
half million people who possess the same language, the same culture, and
with few exceptions, the same religion. Of this people, seventy per cent,
are pure Bulgars.
Behind this country lie twenty centuries of tumultious and tragic
history, Rome, the Barbarians, the Crusades, Venice, the Ottoman,
Alexander and the Empire of the Old World. On of the most powerful
efforts for liberty of the Turks; always crushed, always regenerated, up
to the victory of the Balkan Allies in 1912. A first dsitribution of
Macedonian lands between Belgrade and Athens after the first Bulgar
defeat in 1913. A second in 1918 after the World War and the second
Bulgar defeat.
Today, a heavier servitude than the old one rests upon Macedonia, because
the new master are stronger than the Turks, and more violent, and Europe,
this time, supports and approves them. Five to six hundred thousand
Macedonians (an entire people) have sought refuge in Bulgaria since the
annexation of their country by Greece and Serbia.
Those who were able to leave have left, since the peace of July 1913, and
since the Armistice of October 1918, rather than suffer foreign
domination. All the intellectuals, all the teachers, all those whom their
antecedents or their relations rendered undesirable or suspect, have been
expelled since the installation of the conquerors. Thousands more, before
the frontiers closed, fled and abandoned all their property, often
leaving behind them all or a part of their family.
Of the same blood, the same language, the same traditions as the Bulgars,
they have been received by them as brothers.
Finally, the Greek authorities expelled thousands of Macedonian families
en bloc after the disaster of Smyrna, in order to install the Hellenic
population of Asia Minor on their lands and in their homes, which they
had confiscated without indemnity. The outcasts of Macedonia were shepherded
by the Bulgarian Government, with the aid of the League of Nations,
towards Bourgas, on the Black Sea and towards Dobroudja.
There they transformed what was before only broken stones and swamps into
a flourishing country. Nothing distinguishes these Bulgars of Macedonia
from the Bulgars of Bulgaria in the midst of whom they live. They are
neighbours in the same villages, a number of them have won high social
positions, some have become ministers, even Presidents of the Bulgarian
Council.
Yet all have remained Macedonian. They look incessantly towards their
beloved Fatherland, towards the obscure hamlets, the little
white-and-rose cities of the frontier. There they were born and there
most of them lived for so long that, if the barriers were removed
tomorrow, every one of them would return to his native land.
"But your fields, the lands which the Government of Sofia have given to
you and which your children and you have worked for fifteen years," I
asked a Macedonian labourer near Belica, "would you abandon them?"
"My lands?" he replied. "They are over yonder in Macedonia. They are
waiting for me. I hope to live long enough to return and sit on the stone
bench which my father had placed under the apricot-trees before the door.
He, also, is waiting for me."
Five hundred thousand Macedonians in Bulgaria, where they are at home,
where they have married, where they have nothing to fear from anyone,
still think and speak as this old peasant of Belica.
Fifteen hundred thousand Macedonians, in the annexed land under Greek or
Serbian domination, live and have their children in the hope of this
return, and in the expectation of it.
What a tremendous pressure is here! What a colossal weight of desire
waiting only for the right moment to take shape in action.
Soon after the annexation, attempts were made to "Hellenise" or
"Serbianise" the Macedonians who remained in their country, and when they
attempted their first gestures of revolt, they had the breath knocked out
of them by the crushing violence of their new masters. The gendarmes, the
prison, the certainty that they had no chance of help from anyone, has
taught them in the past fifteen years to walk straight along the road
indicated to them. They have become docile, respectful, obedient. They
have learned to smile through their tears.
I have seen them, and the memory of the decay into which these free men
have fallen makes my blood boil still.
The Macedonians in Bulgaria are waiting also. But they are free, and for
fifteen years they have pursued an obstinate dream that they will
liberate their lost brothers. All the resources they have are consecrated
to this task. There is not one among them, wherever the hazard of exile
has placed him, who does not belong to a society, an association, a group
of some sort destined to keep up among its members, and especially among
the youth, the sentiment of national solidarity and the cult of a native
land momentarily lost.
These organisations have their form in associations of Macedonian
women;student associations; organisations for the assistance of old
people, orphans, sick; associations for propaganda abroad; all form a
network that lets nothing pass between its meshes.
Not a Macedonian in Bulgaria! Not a Macedonian in foreign countries! That
is the national slogan. And the apex of this organization is a handful of
men working in broad daylight with legal methods and means; the
Macedonian National Committee, which commands its energies, centralises
its resources, and directs its activities.
In the shadow, beside the National Committee, but absolutely distinct
from it, absolutely foreign to its work and actions, is another group of
men, directed by other chiefsm the ORIM. We shall meet with it again.
The Macedonian question has existed for half a century. The desire for
Macedinian liberty has become a burning obsession. This determination for
liberty cost the Turks their possessions in Europe. Initial cause of the
two Balkan wars, it was in order to liberate Macedonia that Bulgaria
prepared the coalition in 1912, and it was in order to seize her fro the
victtorious Bulgars that the Serbs and the Greeks, in turn, joined
against her in 1913. Macedonia was indirectly, but certainly, at the
origin of the World War. A hot spot, Indeed!
Since the peace of 1918 the question of Macedonia has become like a worm
in the brain of Yugoslavia. To pretend to reduce the Macedonian question,
as the propagandists of Belgrade try, to the proportion of an absurd
struggle between a great modern state and a few handfuls of bandits, is
an absurdity.
A latent insurrection which has lasted fifteen years and which will
surely excite a new European conflagration unless things change
drastically, merits more than two or three thousand lines of trite
nonsense in certain recent news stories.
Whence comes the danger?
From the Macedonians themselves? From legal organisations such as the
National Committee, or extra-legal as the ORIM?
Not at all!
The peril comes from the fact that the Serbs have annexed, thanks to
France's support, territories and populations which they have declared
Serb when they were, and intended to remain, Bulgarian. They have been
able to subject them, but they have not been able to assimilate them, and
Macedonia, always ready for the insurrection, weighs upon Serbian
politics like a ball and chain.
In order to free themselves from this impediment, the Pan-Serb directors
of Belgrade have decided to use the activity of the Macedonian
nationalist organisations as an excuse for attacking Bulgaria. The
Pan-Serbs have calculated in this way that they would kill two birds with
one stone, and that they would compel the Macedonians to renounce all
hope of liberation by destroying their support in Bulgaria. By destroying
Bulgarian independence, also, they would reach Salonika and the Aegean.
Pan-Serbism has been working with all its force for several years to
carry out this design. The violent campaign conducted by the Pan-Serb
Press Bureau in France within the last few years, by means of books and
newspapers, and by faked documents has had no other object than to
prepare French opinion for a Bulgaro-Yugoslav conflict.
History has shown them the need for this. In June 1914, assured of the
support of Russia (whose Pan-Slav party, directed by Sazonov, pushed them
to action), the Pan-Serbs risked their all. French public opinion
accepted the denials of the Serb Government that it had organised the
double assassination at Sarajevo. It was because of the Serbs, and in
order to defend their rights, that France went to war.
Today, since the publication of the debates which ended in the
condemnation of the assassins of the Austrian Archduke, it is no longer
possible to deny that these men acted at the formal instigation of
certain Serbian officials. The Provision of money, arms, forged
passports, and guides for crossing the frontier as far as Sarajevo in
order to ascertain the most favorable spot for the attack, the act of
Gavrilo Princip and the Tchabrinovitch, has all been shown to be the work
of men depending directly on the Government of Belgrade.
France must not be duped by another Sarajevo staged to save the Yugoslav
dictatorship.
During my visit to Bulgaria I took the opportunity of visiting Dr.
Stanicheff, the President of the Macedonian National Committee.
I have rarely encountered a more engaging personality than this
"revolutionary." Little over fifty years of age, tall, with steel-grey
hair, clear of eye, a long, fine face lengthened still more by a pointed
beard, he has incarnated the determined strength of his people. I saw him
last on a fine morning of August 1932, at the Committee, in Alexandra the
First Street in Sofia, a few steps from the National Bank.
The great Macedonian organisation has chosen for its headquarters an old
bourgeois house with a ramshackle facade occupied on the ground floor by
a coiffeur de dames. It is a peaceful street where lovers, because of the
near-by garden, have their rendezvous. Nearly opposite, at the corner of
the street leading towards the Central Post Office and the Opera, is the
most important pavement shoe-shine rank in Sofia. I have often thought
that they were the men whom a young colleague of mine must have taken for
the sentinels who, he alleged, were posted around the National Committee.
From a distance, the shinning brushes which they carry at the belt might,
indeed, give the illusion of hand-grenades or Browning pistols.
This place has been described as a mysterious and terrible fortress, with
cellars encumbered with bombs and infernal machines, rooms barricaded and
transformed into laboratories, manned by a garrison armed to the teeth,
and always on the watch. This description, written in between two glasses
of slivovitza on a cafe table and published last year in great Parisian
journal, made thousands of honest men shudder!
Yet in reality, what does one find: not even a doorman at the street
door; no one on the stairs; not the shadow of a doorman in the lobby
at the end of which, in a little side room, sits a simple smiling old
man, scribbling addresses and keeping ledgers. Nothing which might
prevent the first comer, should it suit his fancy, from entering the
office of the president and shooting him down like a rabbit.
Dr. Stanicheff greeted me cordially and asked my business. My answer was
a follows: "I have come to the Balkans to investigate by myself, in my
own manner, where and how I please. I do not want to be a machine for
registering the voices of those whose opinions I like. I want to be a
photographer who chooses his viewpoint and his personages for himself. I
want to operate the camera and develop the negatives myself. I have NO
other mission than to 'photograph' things and people at the right angle
and under a good light, and to present them to the public without
retouching."
My host with a sign of his head showed his appreciation of my attitude.
"The Macedonian question," I asked. "Will you explain to me as if I knew
nothing about it. I have read all the books that your friends have
written about it. All the replies from Belgrade and Athens, also. If I
have made an opinion, I want to forget. Give me yours."
I still hear the laughter of Dr. Stanicheff:
"My opinion?" he said. "It is the opinion of a man with a Serbian price
on his head? But you know it in advance! It is very simple. There is no
Macedonian problem!"
I started. Everyone from one end to the other of the Balkans has given me
the same answer! "There is no Macedonian question" was just what Dr.
Radovanovitch said to me in Belgrade not eight days before.
Dr. Stanicheff continued. "The word 'problem' stands for a very doubtful,
controversial thing. Whereas the Macedonian question is clearness itself.
To men of good faith it possesses the accuracy of a geometrical or
algebraic theorem.
"The vast majority of Macedonians are Bulgars, at least in the proportion
of four to one. They are Bulgars by origin, by custom, and by language.
And all the geographers, all the philologists, be they German, Russian,
English, French or Swiss, are all of the same opinion. Not fifty years
ago all the Serb specialists said so too.
"The celebrated orientalist and historian, Louis Leger, professor at the
College of France, whom the savants of the entire world recognised as
their master in all Slav questions, wrote in 1917 in Le Panslavisme et
l'Interet francais: 'Macedonia is almost entirely peopled with Bulgars in
spite of the affirmations to the contrary of the Serbs and the Greeks
whose pretensions cannot prevail against the precise declarations of
independent ethnologists, such as Lejean, Kiepert, Rittich, Grigorovitch,
Helferding and MacKenzie. It was only when Serbia lost Bosnia and
Herzegovina by the treaty of Berlin that certain statesmen had the idea
of seeking a compensation on the Macedonian side and claiming the
existence of Serbs in this country, which is solely peopled with Bulgars."
"M. Ludovic Naudeau, former war correspondent of the Journal in the
Balkans, declared on 7th February, 1927, to the Comite National d'etudes
sociales et politiques de Paris: 'Before the War, when one traveled
about Macedonia, one encountered Bulgars, and not Serbs. Now Macedonia
today has been baptised Serb.'
"It is not necessary to be a great savant in order to substantiate our
claims. We do not need to rummage in archives, to compare phonetics and
to follow the migrations of races across the ages. It suffices to see,
one beside the other, a Bulgar from Bulgaria and a Macedonian from
Geuvgueli, from Veles or from Skoplje. Try it yourself."
"The Serbs say the Macedonians are Serbs, Serbs torn from Serbia by the
Ottoman conquest, five centuries ago," I told him.
"The Serbs said that to you, did they? Naturally! The unfortunate part of
it is that they waited to make this magnificent discovery until they had
need of pretext to justify their political designs on Macedonia, and that
up to then there was not a single Serb to deny the exclusively Bulgarian
character of Macedonia.
"Today, thanks to your Frenchmen who won the War for them, the Serbs have
achieved their ends. They are installed in Macedonia. And they have made
haste to declare solemnly, peremptorily, to the world that all the
population of Macedonia are purely and undisputably Serb. As for the five
hundred thousand Macedonians refuged in Bulgaria since 1913, the Serbian
statistics soon reduced them to a few tens of thousands of Bulgar
immigrants returned to their country of origin.
"Why this lie, which is so clumsy that it has become an insult even to
those who use it? Thousands of Europeans of all nationalities who have
come to Bulgaria in the past fifteen years have been able to verify with
their own eyes the presence of Macedonian refugees and to give an account
of their numbers.
"Why the Serbs find themselves bound to deny the evidence, you know as
well as I. They have done it to avoid the application in Macedonia of the
stipulations of the treaty of Saint-Germain which organised the
protection of ethnic minorities in the annexed territories. In order to
accomplish this it was necesary to make the Great Powers admit that the
Macedonians were not Bulgars (to whom the special statutes of the treaty
were applicable) but Serbs subject to all the laws of Serbia. It was also
necessary, consequently, to deny the existence of the immense Macedonian
emigration into Bulgaria.
"The move has succeeded perfectly, thanks to the support lent by certain
of your statesmen to the men of Belgrade. Not one of the Macedonian
requests for frontier revision has ever been examined by the League of
nations. When they arrive at Geneva Belgrade says : 'No!' France supports
her, all the friends of France say 'Amen!' and the trick is done.
"For the League of Nations there are no Macedonians; hence there can be
no Macedonian question! And today fifty thousand Serb soldiers, gendarmes
and irregulars, fourteen years after the so-called return of Macedonia to
her pretended country, occupy our country and impose upon her a regime
which you will be able to judge when you have seen it.
We talked until the office closed. I left Dr. Stanicheff at the corner of
the avenue Marie Louise. My eyes followed him as he made off among the
crowd jostling each other on the burning sidewalk. He walked with head
held high and with a rapid step, as unmindful of the sweltering sun as of
the assassins who were perhaps waiting for him at his door, as they
waited for his friend Dimitri Mihailoff in June 1932; and as they waited
for Simeon Evtimoff - one of the most noble and most upright young
Europeans. [Previous] [Next]
"Let us forget about that, my dear Doctor," I interrupted him. "The Serbs
have replied to all of the accusations made against them by your friends
by categorically denying them. You pretend that they lie. They declare
that it is you and your firends who lie. Well, I shall see for myself!
Let us come back for a little while ago. How do you expect Belgrade,
after fourteen years of uninterrupted Serb occupation, to consent, with a
good will and without being constrained by force, to give up Macedonia?
The independence of Macedonia? The hypothesis of the Dantzig corridor to
Germany."
"I know it!" agreed Dr. Stanicheff. "Today it is impossible. Too many
interests are leagued against right, our right. To give satisfaction to
Macedonia would be to open the door to a general revision of all the
peace treaties. Unless France, without whom they cannot live, compels
them to do so, they will never consent. So we must learn to wait. We know
that a day will come when our legitimate aspirations will be satisfied.
We shall be patient. We have waited for such a long time that we can wait
still longer.
"But what do we demand today? Only that the Government of Belgrade gives
to our misarable annexed compatriots, loyally and without reservations,
all the rights and all the liberties which they agreed to give them by
the treaty of Saint-Germain. That, in other words, it stops treating them
like outlaws. Nothing more!
"If Belgrade did that, loyally and without reservations, if property,
honour, and individual liberty were guaranteed in Macedonia as they are
in all civilized countries, all conflict between Yugoslavia and us would
cease. Our refugees would return to their old homesteads. They would
agree to be Yugoslav subjects- which does not mean Serbs!"
"What programme and what intentions do you attribute to the ORIM?" he
asked in reply. "The men who direct the ORIM think as do those who direct
the National Committee. Many times they have publically declared that they
were ready to lay down their arms if Belgrade would cease to maltreat the
annexed Macedonians and give them the legal guarantees and the liberties
to which they have a right. The ORIM added, however, that until then they
would continue the struggle.
"Unfortunately, I admit, we are still a long way from this solution of
justice and good sense! The Serb administration is nowhere near
abandoning the methods of violence which have raised all the Macedonians
up against her. She will not modify her methods. She will even aggravate
them and, besides, look what is happening in Croatia."
Dr. Stanicheff looked straight into my eyes.
"If you knew me better," he said, "you would know how horrible such
violence is to me. But there are cases where violence is just, where
violence becomes a sacred duty. They reproach our revolutionary
organisations for reprisals against the Serb administrators and police,
their terrorist attacks in annexed Macedonia, but they say nothing of
their deeds which have inspired our attacks.
"Tell me how your public opinion would have received the following facts
if they had taken place in Alsace-Lorraine during the German occupation?
I cite them to you among a thousand others- and I could cite worse....
"At the village of Debrevo, a young girl of sixteen, Kostadine Miladin
Tatcheva, was declared guilty of having hummed a Bulgarian song. She was
stripped naked, strapped to a bench, given sixty blows of a club on her
back, and then was violated by the chief of the detachment and his six men.
"At Yastermnik, by the order in the presence of the Chief of the State
Police, Jika Lazitch (the man who is today Minister of the Interior of
Yugoslavia) three peasants, Kostadin Demianoff, Ivan Angeloff and Georgui
Stoicheff, and three peasant women Llinka Ivantcheva, Mita Dimitrieva and
Mirsa Valinove, all of whom were denounced for having given refuge to
revolutionists, were whipped to death before all the village. The women
were first outraged in a dreadful fashion. *
* I have since verified these things for myself.
I saw the scars of the two victims at Souchitza, and heard with my own
ears from the mouths of three witnesses (whose names and addresses I had
obtained from a responsible source) the story of this abominable thing.
The truth of the atrocities of Dobrevo and Yastremnik has been certified
to me by a diplomatic representative of France. T have held in my own
hands the reports of our two agents who related them. One of these
reports ends with the following words: Such facts, which would stir
public opinion to horror if they were known, justify, unfortunately, all
the reports of the Macedonian revolutionists and are absolutely without
excuse. They maintain sentiments of hatred and a desire for revenge in
the population which only await the occasion to manifest themselves.
"A country which employs a Lazitch," said the French diplomat whose
testimony I have mentioned, "dishonours herself. This minister is a man
of blood...I have seen him at work!"
I, too. I was at Belgrade, in July 1932, dinning at the Excelsior
Restaurant behind the royal palace, with my old friend Dragomir
Stefanovitch, former charge d'affaires of Serbia at Paris during the War.
Lazitch came to sit down next to us. Stefanovitch who knew him introduced
us. I noticed his intelligent, hard eyes and brutal jaws. His nails were
black, but he talked well.
He had just returned from Macedonia where he had been organising the
State Police. I noticed one thing particularly, all the while he was
animatedly telling us risque stories about women, he did not stop picking
little flies from the table cloth which he would hold for a moment
struggling between his fingers. Then, without stopping his flow of talk,
gently, one by one, he tore off their wings, and with the end of his
cigarette, tapping lightly, unhurriedly, he forced them to crawl by
burning their abdomens.
"With the Macedonian women also," he said to us, "in order to render them
amorous, when they are insensible, we place hot irons on a good spot."
"These abominations," went on Dr. Stanicheff, "against which nothing
protects our unfortunate compatriots, make it impossible to find a
peaceful solution in Macedonia.
"Since the Serbs have occupied her, Macedonia has become a hell. Hundreds
of homes and farms, entire villages, under the pretext of punishing their
inhabitants because of their alleged sympathies for revolutionary
organisations, have been burned by gendarmes or Serb irregulars. All our
cemeteries have been profaned, all the monuments to our dead have been
destroyed, all the riches of our churches, of our libraries, of our
monasteries have been stolen. Innumerable women and young girls have been
sullied; countless Macedonians have been tortured, beaten, imprisoned and
put to death without trial. Our priests have been insulted, and our
teachers too: our children have no longer the right to bear their names
unless it has a Serb termination. An entire people has been deprived of
the right to think, to speak or to pray, other than as their masters
wish. They can no longer come and go, even from village to village,
without permission; they can no longer go out in the evening after certain
hours, they are crushed by taxes have no justice, have no recourse
against the pleasure or the crimes of administrators and police to whom
they are subjected.
"That is the Macedonian question, sir. The agony of a martyred people who
yet do not wish to die.
"Imagine a man who has succeeded in finding a refuge in Bulgaria after
weeks of hiding himself in the mountains, and who learns that his wife
has served as a plaything, before all the terrified neighbours, for the
police come to search her home. Imagine the feelings of the father whose
daughter has been treated as a prostitute. Imagine the feelings of a
brother whose dishonoured sister has drowned herself in despair. Do you
dare call their vengeance assassination?
"The Carnegie Commission, which included besides the Belgian Minister
Vandervelde, two Frenchmen, M. d'Estournelles de Constant and M. Justin
Godart, published a report on the Macedonian atrocities that is more
overwhelming than any of our accusations.
"I defy you, sir, to find a single copy of their report. Belgrade has
somehow succeeded in making them vanish."
The Macedonian question is not solved by a long, long chalk.
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