In most cases the towns and cities that were swept clean of so many of their former residents were once ruled by one of three large empires: the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Hapsburg Empire or, as it became known in its latter years, Austria-Hungary. These empires were not nation-states. To use present-day terminology, they were multinational, home to a multitude of ethnic groups. In fact, few of the subjects of Europe's old empires possessed a strong sense of national identity as we define it today. There was no Austro-Hungarian "nation"; instead a diverse mixture of people--who spoke German, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Italian, Slovenian, Romanian, and Serbo-Croatian, among other languages-lived in Austria-Hungary. These residents of the Hapsburg Empire were united riot by any shared national identity but because they were ruled by a common sovereign. Similarly, there was no Ottoman nationality; the Ottoman Empire was home to a mix of people who shared a common ruler, the sultan, but who practiced many religions-including Islam, Judaism, and numerous varieties of Christianity-and spoke many different languages. In the Russian Empire, Russians made up a large part of the empire's population, but the tsar's subjects lacked a common language, religion, or ethnic identity.So where Greeks were fighting Jews and Turks, Bulgarians began to protest Greek control of the Orthodox millet. Thus when during the 1860’s Bulgarian merchants at Constantinople campaigned for an Orthodox church separate from the Greek patriarchate. Ottoman authorities granted this request in 1870, creating an autonomous church called the Bulgarian Exarchate. But 1866, the Bulgarian nationalist writer and journalist Georgi Stoikov Rakovski in his poems also portrayed a nation suffering from four hundred years of foreign rule. "The Turkish yoke, four centuries endured, let us smash heroically," he exhorted. Rakovski encouraged a violent revenge: "Let Turkish heads roll, and their corpses become playthings. Let us sweep away Ottoman power."
Thus while pioneers of Bulgarian nationalism did not yet have a state, many of them did not live in Bulgaria, only recently begun to identify themselves as Bulgarian rather than as Greek intellectuals.
With an earlier attempt suppressed, in April 1876 Bulgarian nationalists tried to stage an uprising concentrated in the towns and villages of the Balkan mountain range. Hristo Botev, excited by the news, predicted "a terrific and repulsive slaughter with, countless victims on each side," and Turkish defeat. Only in the first prediction was he correct, at least in the short run. (British Foreign Office Documents, FO , 424, vol. 43, p. 61.)
The Bulgarian rebellion soon became synonymous with fields of skulls and bones. By the summer of 1876, reports emerged of atrocities, of "Bulgarian horrors," carried out by Ottoman irregular forces to suppress the revolt and in retaliation against Bulgarians. The American journalist Januarius MacGahan, then reporting for the London Daily News, provided gruesome details. For his efforts in publicizing Bulgaria's plight, he became known as the "Liberator of Bulgaria"a statue dedicated to him now stands in his hometown of New Lexington, Ohio.
His reports of atrocities caused a political sensation in Britain, where there was already great interest in the fate of the empires of Eastern Europe and Western Asia-an issue referred to at the time as the "Eastern Question." Incensed by the news from Bulgaria, William Gladstone, Britain's former prime minister and the leader of Liberal opposition to his Conservative rival Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, excoriated the Turks and condemned British policy in the region. For years Britain had sided with Turkey in order to counter Russian ambitions.
Gladstone decried what he termed the, "Bulgarian horrors." In a pamphlet on the subject, he called for the Turks to "now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves one and all, bag and baggage." It's likely Gladstone, who listed the various categories of Turkish police and officials he wanted to see leave, was only calling for an end to Turkish administration in Bosnia Herzegovina and Bulgaria, but his use of the phrase "bag and baggage" soon became synonymous with calling for the expulsion of the Turks. (R. T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876, 2nd ed, 1975, p.110.)
Defenders of Turkey tried to turn the debate into an argument about numbers: they claimed that the reports of deaths were exaggerated. In 1877 Layard, who after his early travels through the Ottoman Empire had gained fame as an archaeologist and was now British ambassador to the sultan's government at Constantinople, rejected the key claims about the Bulgarian atrocities. In reality, Layard countered, some 3,500 people, including Christians and Turks, had been killed in Bulgaria instead of the 60,000 Christians alleged to have perished in the "horrors." With this argument Layard set up something of a straw man. MacGahan himself stressed the difficulty in determining the number of deaths, noting that estimates ranged all the way from 15,000 to 40,000 or even 100,000 deaths. But, he wrote, "fifteen thousand is enough. (FO 424, vol. 55, p. 113.)
Throughout the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire proved it was still capable of defeating uprisings across the Balkans. In 1875 its forces suppressed a rebellion in Bosnia Herzegovina, and in 1876 the Kingdom of Serbia was quickly defeated when it declared war on the empire. In the spring of 1877, however, Ottoman authorities faced a far more formidable enemy than rebel groups or new Balkan states: the Russian Empire. For generations the tsars had waged war against the Ottomans along the southern borders of the Russian Empire. More often than not, Russia had emerged victorious, though the most recent Russian-Ottoman conflict, the Crime an War in which British and French forces backed Turkey, was an exception. In April 1877, with the consent of local Romanian authorities, Russian forces moved into the Romanian provinces and massed north of the Danube to prepare for an offensive to the south. Bad weather and high water delayed the invasion, but in late June the Russian army finally launched its long-expected invasion across the Danube. Moving south into Bulgaria, Russians reported Christian enthusiasm, with shouts of "Hurrah!" and "Bravo!" at the town of Tirnova. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 had begun. Although this war has been largely whole region was Bulgarian pure and simple, since the Turkish inhabitants with rare exceptions had gone away bag and baggage. (Colonel Epauchin, Operations of General Gurko's Advance Guard in 1877, London, 1900, pp. 35-36.)
A British diplomat at Varna reported that "the roads are crowded by Turkish families flying from their homes." Thousands of families camped in fields in eastern Bulgaria. In August 1877 a journalist put the number of "semi-starved" Turkish families in one town at sixty thousand. Others turned southward across the Balkan mountain passes. Some reached Adrianople, the original Ottoman capital in Europe, while others traveled all the way to Constantinople. (Wentworth Huyshe, The Liberation of Bulgaria, London, 1894, p. 181. See also FO 424, vol. 59, p. 198.)
However the Russo- Turkish War was one of the first to feature what would become a common element of ethnic cleansing: civilians who expect to be attacked because of their identity. This fear of attack, in addition or apart from actual violence, remains a major cause of flight in ethnic cleansing. From Kazanlak, a center of the rose trade on the southern flank of the Balkan Mountains, British Consul Blunt described the pervasive fear. "The Bulgarians are afraid," he wrote, "that the Turks, if successful, will massacre them, while the Turks attribute the same intention to the Bulgarians should the Russians be victorious." Depending on which army was approaching, Muslims and Bulgarians hurriedly packed up their belongings and abandoned their homes.
Each phase of the war led to flight. Muslims fled first during the initial Russian offensive, but Bulgarians in turn fled when Russian forces retreated in the war's second phase. As Turkish forces returned to towns along the southern edge of the Balkan Mountains, many Bulgarian Christians packed their possessions and left. Some made their way south to the comparative safety of larger towns and cities such as Adrianople; others went north following the Russian army. The countryside north of the mountains swarmed with refugees. A correspondent for the Daily News suggested that the "whole population of the southern slope of the Balkans have crossed the ridge, and are now drifting slowly down the northern slope." Meanwhile some Muslims returned to their homes. A British officer serving in the Ottoman army, Valentine Baker, recalled that "the people gained heart, and pushing onward, re-occupied the villages which they had originally quitted.” (James F. Clarke, The Pen and the Sword' Studies in Bulgarian History, ed. Dermis P. Hupchick, 1988, pp. 37-43, 50-53.)
By late 1877 it had become clear how civilians would react to the two armies' advances and retreats. Thus in the war's third and final phase, Ottoman defenses collapsed, and Muslims poured out of Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia. The mood in Sofia was grim as large numbers of Muslims and Jews prepared to leave the town. Among all the region's non-Muslims, Jews enjoyed the most comfortable relations with Muslims, and they shared Muslim fears when Russia won the war. On December 20, Captain Fife, a British military attache, observed "the feeling of alarm amongst the inhabitants, and the daily departure of large numbers of them from the town." The mood soon turned still blacker. Panicked Muslims and remaining Turks, tried to make their way out of Bulgaria despite bitter winter weather. By December 28 a relief worker saw women and children begging government officials for carts for the journey south. (FO 424, vol. 59, p. 84.)
The debate over whether Russians or Bulgarians caused Turks to flee is much more than a long-forgotten dispute about responsibility for crimes in obscure towns and villages. The controversy concerns a key issue in ethnic cleansing: who is responsible-state and military authorities, or ordinary people? If perpetrators in Bulgaria in 1877 were chiefly Russians, then the Russian state, acting through its military, initiated and organized Muslim flight, which would support the hypothesis that ethnic cleansing is a crime carried out by states. But if the perpetrators were chiefly local Bulgarians, this would confirm the view that ethnic cleansing rises from society's grass roots.
Detailed eyewitness reports collected by British diplomats revealed a more complex pattern of attack in which both Russian Cossacks and local Bulgarians drove out Bulgarian Muslims. One of the most striking examples came from Balvan, a village in north central Bulgaria. British Vice Consul Edmund Calvert collected much of the evidence about Balvan from Muslim refugees who escaped to the south. The war reached Balvan when Cossacks arrived on July 7 and demanded that residents surrender their arms. The villagers complied, but the next day two more squadrons of Cossacks arrived, this time accompanied by two thousand to three thousand Bulgarians from nearby villages, armed with hatchets, clubs, and guns. The mob plundered the village, taking away cattle and seizing valuables. "They then set the village on fire," driving those who tried to escape " back into the flames." All the while, "the Cossacks, who formed an outer cordon around the village, looked on quietly."
The attack on Balvan was not unique. Similar attacks were made on villages both north and south of the Balkan mountain range. As Cossacks surrounded the village of Btikltimtik, Bulgarians took the men to a barn, which they set on fire, shooting at those who tried to escape. On July 29, only days before Turkish troops recaptured the village, Bulgarians and Cossacks set fire to houses containing the village's women and children.
Meanwhile in Greece little over a decade later, William Stillman, the American consul in the town of Canea in western Crete, observed attacking a monastery at Arkadi, Ottoman forces carried out what Stillman referred to as a "Holocaust," reportedly killing "all who fell into their hands" until a priest blew up the magazine. (William J. Stillman, American Consul in a Cretan war, rev. ed. of The Cretan Insurrection of 1866-7-8, 1966, pp. 38, 63, 67.)
The mounting violence encouraged the formation of Epitropi, Greek committees of reform that soon turned to military action. Christians threw support behind the Epitropi while Muslims in the countryside began to flee their homes for coastal towns. After months of mounting tension, violence exploded on May 24, 1896, at Canea in western Crete. Fighting between Christians and Muslims came to a halt with an August 1896 agreement, but the familiar cycle of violence and panic soon resumed. In early February 1897 fire destroyed the Christian quarter at Canea, and almost all of Canea's remaining Christians fled, either to Greek islands, or to ships from an international squadron of European powers that arrived at the town in midmonth. Through the spring months, Muslim refugees poured into the port towns emptied of Christian residents. (Correspondence Respecting the Affairs in Crete, August 1896, Turkey No. 7, pp. 11, 72-73, 110-112)
As in the Russo- Turkish War of 1877-1878, the massive flight of civilians on Crete in the 1890s cannot be explained primarily as a crime of states, because the power of both Greece and the Ottoman Empire was so obviously limited on Crete. Ottoman forces struggled to pacify the island, and the Kingdom of Greece intervened directly only in the last months of the conflict. Crete's own Greek rebels presented a far greater threat to the island's Muslims than did the relatively small contingent of fifteen hundred Greek troops who arrived in February 1897. The rebels' Cretan Committee warned in February 1897 that the island's Muslims would pay a heavy price if Crete did not gain union with Greece. If Greeks were to conclude that Muslims had prevented union, "we should see a war of extermination waged between Christians and Turks.” (Correspondence Respecting the Affairs if Crete and the war Between Turkey and Greece (1897), Turkey No. 11, p. 146.)
The prototypical pogroms were mob attacks against Jews in the late Russian Empire, but even more violent attacks occurred against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the 1890’s, and waves of massacres and attacks characterized the early-twentieth century conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, then called Tatars, in the 'Caucasus.
Pogroms and ethnic cleansing share similar features, but they differ in intent and scale. In most pogroms there is no effort to expel an entire ethnic or religious population, and the violence is usually shorter-lived or more sporadic than in ethnic cleansing. On a spectrum of violence against ethnic and religious groups, where genocide or extermination lies at the extreme end and ethnic cleansing lies in the middle, pogroms are a comparatively more limited form.
Despite these differences, the history of ethnic cleansing cannot be fully understood in isolation from pogroms. Pogroms did not make future, more comprehensive violence inevitable, but the same groups that endured pogroms in the decades before World War I also suffered later attacks. This counts for both the massacres during the 1890’s on Armenians plus, the violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the early 1900’s.
Pogroms by their very nature, provide a vehicle for popular participation in ethnic and religious violence. Almost from the start, pogroms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries raised suspicion of official complicity. It was hard to believe that mobs roamed the streets without some kind of encouragement by state authorities. But while public authorities may have done little to stop pogroms, this kind of violence typically reveals a breakdown of law and order rather than deliberate state instigation and direction.
Where we already mentioned the Russian pogroms in a different context two weeks ago, one could ad that the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 marked a new height in the Russian violence against Jews. Multiple pogroms occurred in 1904 as Russia mobilized for war against Japan, and even more in 1905 after the empire's defeat. The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 had drawn on traditional forms of anti-Semitism, such as the libel of Jewish ritual murder, but during the war nationalism provided a new motive for attacking Jews. Anti-Semitic newspapers and pamphlets charged Jews with not doing their fair share for Russia in the war against Japan, and made bizarre and groundless claims of Jewish treason and collaboration. Anti-Semites seized on reports that Jacob Schiff, a New York banker, helped to issue bonds for Japan. Schiff was not Russian, and other foreign Jewish bankers in fact worked with the Russian government. Still, claims of Jewish culpability proved especially explosive in towns and cities where Russian reservists awaited transport to the war zone in the east.
While living in the Russian empire made life risky for Jews, and more and more of them decided to leave their homes and seek new lives in what they saw as a new world. Many left to find economic opportunity, but they also left to escape violent attacks. More than 90,000 Jews left Russia for the United States in 1905.
Taken together the above should certainly dispel the myth that (although no doubt worse was to come) in the beginning of the 20th century Europe seemed ‘benign.’But then, who can blame the author’s of the two books we just referred to, after all if a book is presented in the form of a good script, chances that it is made into a film are higher. But in contrast to The Da Vinci Code of course -- both the books we just referred to are entirely based on historical fact -- and to say the least, highly educational.
Rife with conspiracy theories, the Young Turks' mistrust of the non-Turkish populations within their borders was even more evident then that of the Ottoman Sultan. Thus, the Armenian genocide was a horrific illustration of the convulsions that could seize a multi-ethnic polity trying to mutate from empire into nation state. As the Archbishop of Aleppo vainly protested: “We don't wish to separate ourselves from the Turkish state. A separation would be impossible, since nationalities and religions are so mixed that a pure division by nations is impossible. Additionally, the various groups are economically interdependent, one upon the other, in such a way that, should a division come, they would be destroyed.”