Ethnic Cleansing of Macedonia

 

where are the administrators of this forum??

 

B. Inappropriate posting

 

6. Nationalism, derogatory remarks to national or ethnic groups, jingoism, bigotry, racism, political propaganda.

 

written against a particular political, cultural, or historical aspect of that national group. An acceptable remark is one that is objective and presents facts without a certain element of tone in the message

 

are you permitted to publish ultra-nationalistic sites???

Originally posted by bg_turk   No, not all can be accused in the same way. Bulgarians did NOT embark on a campaign to systematically destroy all Greek villages, the violance against Greeks like in Seres for instance was mostly local, it was not a global campaign against every single greek village in the area.

Maybe not during the Balkan wars,which is still doubtfull.You cannot act for 10 years,when theoritically there where no wars, deliberately and in a war period you  act locally......Bulgarian Guerillas were sent deliberately into a campain of assimilating Greek Orthodox into Bulgarian Exarchy by the use of force,or in other words making them Bulgars so they can eventually control the area where modern Greek Macedonia is.

Edited by Spartakus

Rubbish?Not a very conveincing and valid argument i must admit.

bg_turk wrote
"The purpose was to crush the uprising and to preserve the territorial integrity of the empire. Yes, it was brutal, but its purpose was not to ethnically cleanse bulgarians from a certain area and repopulate that area with Turks, on the other hand the purpose of the Greeks in Aegean Macedonia was to create an ethnically pure region only for greeks, "
So your telling me destroying villages and putting children to the sword is not on the same, if the intention was not to replace them with your own people? Im sorry but forced conversians of christians into muslims was also cited in the report, as a bulgarian  excuse of their own ethnic cleansing and forced conversions.

"The intent of ridding macedonia from slavs is obvious in the telegram by Constanie to the European abassodors, where he dehumanizes bulgarians as not being part of the human race."
wow a telegram and you have the smoking gun evidance. Even the Carnagie Endowment for international Peace report doesnt think the bulgarians were any different, they just werent as open. Check out some more of this report you may have missed when pasting....

CHAPTER IV

The War and the Nationalities

1. Extermination, emigration, assimilation

"The orders given to the Slav armies were perhaps a trifle less barbarous. It does not, however, follow that there was no intention of conquering the territory without maintaining an alien population there. "Orders of extermination" were not given, orders to the contrary were indeed given [see below]. But in private conversations the same idea is constantly met. What proves that it was not a mere mode of speaking, Is the fact that the Turkish population suffered at the hands of the Bulgarians, and the Albanian population at the hands of the Servians as well. As regards the Bulgarians, this is proved by the villages in which all the Turkish quarters were burned, and which were visited by the member of the Commission in Thrace"

It goes on about forced conversians of muslims, having to eat pork and quotes one of your own; a intellectual and writer (A. Strachimirov)about such acts of ethnic violence.

"Those who stand for the thought and the honor of our country ought to know that our authorities have, in the countries on the frontier inhabited by the pomaks and recently liberated, acted in a way which is a disgrace to their country and to humanity.."

read the rest if you want....

BTW Judging by bulgarian track record on its own muslim minority, i would not think bulgaria would of been any nicer had it won the wars it lost.

"No, not all can be accused in the same way."
The report accuses all sides of varoius atrocites all doing the same thing; killing civilans/prisoners and burning villages. This is just your subjective take on history, supported by bits of information that are selectively read (or cut and pasted)

and yes bulgarians are being accused such things in the report, if you didnt get it from the earlier quotes.

CHAPTER II
The War and the Noncombatant Population

1. The plight of the Macedonian Moslems during the First war

"It remains to mention the practice followed by the Bulgarians, over a wide area, of reconverting the pomaks by force to Christianity. The pomaks are Bulgarians by race and language, who at some period of the Turkish conquest were converted by force to Islam. They speak no Turkish, and retain some traditional memory of their Christian past; but circumstances have usually made them fanatical Mohammedans. They number in the newly conquered territories at least 80,000 persons, and are chiefly concentrated to the north and east of Nevrocop. The Bulgarian Holy Synod conceived the design of converting them en masse, and it was frequently able to reckon on the support of the military and civil authorities, not to mention the insurgent bands. It was not usually necessary to employ actual violence; threats, backed by the manifest power to enforce them, commonly sufficed to induce whole villages to submit to the ceremony of baptism. The policy was carried out systematically, and long before the outbreak of the second war, the pomaks in most districts conformed outwardly to the Bulgarian church, and listened with a show of docility to the ministrations of the priests and nuns sent by the Holy Synod to instruct them in the tenets of Christianity. This aberration, in sharp contrast to the toleration which the Bulgarian Kingdom has usually shown to the Moslems within its frontiers, must rank among the least excusable brutalities of the war. The Holy Synod argued that since force had been used to convert the pomaks to Islam, force might fairly be used to reverse the process. The argument is one proof the more that races whose minds have been molded for centuries by the law of reprisal and the practice of vengeance, tend to a common level of degradation. "

"Bulgarians did NOT embark on a campaign to systematically destroy all Greek villages, the violance against Greeks like in Seres for instance was mostly local"

But in the same chapter the report says

"The responsibility of the regular Bulgarian authorities is more directly indicated in the massacre of Turks which took place in the town of Serres shortly after its capture. Here there was an adequate Bulgarian garrison, and a regular administration....The instruments of this atrocity were chiefly Macedonian insurgents (comitadjis), but they acted under the eyes of the Bulgarian military authorities, who had in Serres a regular force sufficient to control them."



Edited by Leonidas

BlindOne ..........Everybody seeing the obvious and clear think except from them that supposing must keep the rules

It's ok we know them  very well

 

Originally posted by akritas   are you permitted to publish ultra-nationalistic sites???

I never used any of the text from that site in any of my posts. You are the one who published all of that rubbish. How can I be accused of propaganda for something that I never even wrote???

The sight I gave you as a source for the image you asked, and although the source may have a heavy anti-greek bias, I think it gives a description of that image, will you care to translate that description?

Originally posted by Leonidas So your telling me destroying villages and putting children to the sword is not on the same, if the intention was not to replace them with your own people? Im sorry but forced conversians of christians into muslims was also cited in the report, as a bulgarian  excuse of their own ethnic cleansing and forced conversions.

"putting children to the sword" - my god, and then you accuse me of propaganda. Should I start writing what greeks did to little boys in Macedonia who refused to call themselves greek?

Yes, ideally we should call every single death a from of ethnic cleansing, every death, whether it is turkish, greek, bulgarian, vlach, gypsy,etc. is equally tragic, but to say the curshing of the April Uprising was comparable to the Greek cleansing of Macedonia would do injustice to the fact that as a result of the latter the entire region lost its slavic population.

"The orders given to the Slav armies were perhaps a trifle less barbarous. It does not, however, follow that there was no intention of conquering the territory without maintaining an alien population there. "Orders of extermination" were not given, orders to the contrary were indeed given [see below]. But in private conversations the same idea is constantly met. What proves that it was not a mere mode of speaking, Is the fact that the Turkish population suffered at the hands of the Bulgarians, and the Albanian population at the hands of the Servians as well. As regards the Bulgarians, this is proved by the villages in which all the Turkish quarters were burned, and which were visited by the member of the Commission in Thrace" It goes on about forced conversians of muslims, having to eat pork and quotes one of your own; a intellectual and writer (A. Strachimirov)about such acts of ethnic violence. "Those who stand for the thought and the honor of our country ought to know that our authorities have, in the countries on the frontier inhabited by the pomaks and recently liberated, acted in a way which is a disgrace to their country and to humanity.." read the rest if you want....

Yes, I would have been glad to read the rest, if you cared to provide a link to the location from where you copy pasted this material.

The Bulgarian crimes against the pomaks were one of the darkest pictures of its history. It was a form of ethnic cleansing, but it was achieved not by killing or deporting as in the case of Greece, but rather by forceful assimilation. If I am not mistaked there is a picture in the Carnegie report (sorry I do not have it with me now to quote the exact page) showing Bulgarian forces making pomaks eat pork - a disgraceful episode.

BTW Judging by bulgarian track record on its own muslim minority, i would not think bulgaria would of been any nicer had it won the wars it lost.

Could you please be more explicit on that? The track record of Bulgaria against its muslim minority is really horrible, but compared to the track records of Greece and Turkey against its minority in fact with a fair deal of confidence I might say it quite good. Today I would rather be a Turk in Bulgaria, rather than a Kurd (Mountain Turk) in Turkey or a slavophone or muslim greek (Greece even refuses to acnowledge the right of Turks to call themselves Turkish, banning every single organization which has Turkish in its name, a recent example is the Turkish Union of Xanthi).

The situation of the pomaks was fairly bleak, unfortunate and tragic from the early days. I personally feel very strongly for them and I believe that every single Bulgarian citizen should learn these things in history in order to understand what horrendous crimes were comitted in their name.  Bulgarians relied very heavily on a theory that they were originally slavs and forcefully converted into Islam. There is no doubt about their slavic origins, but there is singificant ammount of evidence to suggest that their conversion to islam may not have been that forcefull, and their experience probably was like that of the Bosniaks - i.e. it was a group which did not have a strong link to Christianity before the Ottoman conquest and therefore it chose Islam as its religion thereafter.

Concerning the situation of the Turks, most of the time it was not that bad. It is no secret that the policy of the Bulgarian state was to assimilate or to continously drive them out, but apart from the turbulent Russian invasion in 1878 (when the turkish share dropped from 25% to around 10%) and in the 1980s when several hundred thousand Turks were forced to leave (and nearly all of them have reclaimed their citizenship now after the democratic changes) there has been no major forced movement of Turks from Bulgaria. On the other hand the Greek state still has a law in which annually it is disenfrenchising its citizens of Turkish origin without any legal justification, Turkey on the other hand has gone even farther and comitted massive propgroms on its tiny Greek minority in Fener, Istanbul.

The most tragic episode of the history of the Turks in Bulgaria was the Revival process, when all citizens of Bulgaria were forced to carry Bulgarian names (apart from Armenians) but it is encouraging to see that Bulgaria has acnowledged this crime and the Bulgarian president has publically apologized for it. Bulgaria has even take steps to reverse the ef fects by granting Bulgarian Turks the opportunity to restore their citizenship and to return.

Concerning the Revival Process in the 80s comiitted by the Communist Regime, I would like to point out that while it was widely condemned internaionally, most notably by the USA and the EU, Greece was the only country in the democratic world that supported the regime in Bulgaria in this crime against humanity.

"Bulgarians did NOT embark on a campaign to systematically destroy all Greek villages, the violance against Greeks like in Seres for instance was mostly local" But in the same chapter the report says "The responsibility of the regular Bulgarian authorities is more directly indicated in the massacre of Turks which took place in the town of Serres shortly after its capture. Here there was an adequate Bulgarian garrison, and a regular administration....The instruments of this atrocity were chiefly Macedonian insurgents (comitadjis), but they acted under the eyes of the Bulgarian military authorities, who had in Serres a regular force sufficient to control them."

yes, i completely agree with you, the brutality of the Bulgarian army was absolutely horrendous in those instances, and there is no justification for it. but again please note the difference - greek ethnically cleansed EVERY single Bulgarian village up to the border, the incident in Seres (or Syar in BG) was only ONE of the otherwise many brutalities of the Bulgarians, i.e. to say their objective was not the destruction of the entire moslem or greek population in the region.  

Edited by bg_turk

Originally posted by BlindOne It is obviously that Benzi and Bg_Turk are just bad propagandists and almost all they wrote here are lies and pure propaganda.

Actually, in this topic, Bg_turk is propaganding THE ABSOLUTE TRUTH.