Beyond ‘ethnic cleansing’: aspects of the functioning of violence in the Ottoman and post‐Ottoman Balkans

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to offer a critical discussion of some salient aspects of the role of violence in the Balkans within a broad chronological purview that ranges from the Ottoman period until the mid‐1940s. This study analyzes the continuity and change between pre‐modern and modern functions of violence in the region; explores the ‘national’ and ‘ethnic’ motivation of Balkan violence; and highlights the importance of religion, and its role in warfare. It is argued that massive violence was important to Balkan nation‐states as they strived to materialize their irredentist plans, and suggests that ethnicity and nationalism have only limited impact on Balkan warfare, for nationally inspired violence is not only relatively recent, but also incompletely applied, even in the twentieth century.

Keywords:

• nationalism
• ethnicity
• violence

Notes

1. The locus classicus for an analysis of the construction of the Balkans as a land of violence is Todorova 1997.

2. For the regulation of violence in Montenegro, see Boehm 1984; for a detailed description of the provisions of the Albanian unwritten law, see Hasluck 1954. For a penetrating account of the functioning of the unwritten law in northern Albania, see Durham 1909.

3. For the construction of this community, see Obolensky 1971. For its functioning during the period of Ottoman rule, see Kitromilides 1996, 163–191, and Kitromilides 1994, study X.

4. For the Serbian case, see Stokes 1976, 77–90; Meriage 1977, 187–205; Paxton 1972, 337–62.

5. For the attitudes of the Greek Catholics, see Frazee 1979, 315–26.

6. For the ‘hell of fire and blood’ that followed the capture of the city by the Greeks, see Brewer 2001, 119–23.

7. On the cutting and public display of heads in the Balkans, see the observations in Mazower 2000, 130–2.

8. For the establishment of the Exarchate, see Meininger 1987; Arnakis 1963, 115–44.

9. This section draws on Livanios 1999, 195–221, from which the quotations of this paragraph are taken.

10. For the emergence of the Macedonian movement, see Perry 1988.

11. For IMRO violence and tactics, see Perry 1988, 155–8, 183–93.

12. For the use of the term ‘terrorist’ as self‐identification, see the case of the guerrilla leader Pando Klyashev, as cited in Aarbakke 2003, 125. For the 1903 terrorist campaign in Salonica and its background (orchestrated by Bulgarian‐Macedonian anarchists), see Christowe 1935, 76–112. For the kidnapping of the American missionary Ellen Stone by Macedonian guerrillas (the first case of an American kidnapped in the Balkans for political purposes), see Sherman 1980. For the Ilinden Revolt, see the collection of documents in Gounaris 1993.

13. These atrocities were documented in a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, published in 1914. It was reissued in 1993 with an introduction by George F. Kennan. References are to this edition. See Carnegie Endowment 1993, esp. 71–108, 277–377.

14. As cited in Jelavich 1993, 206. For further details, see Nagy‐Talavera 1970.

15. For the position of the Macedonians in interwar Yugoslavia, see Banac 1984, 307–28.

16. ‘No Jew’, wrote Charles Maurras, ‘could appreciate the beauties of Racine’s line in Bérénice: “Dans l’orient désert quel devint mon ennui”’ (quoted in Kedourie 1961, 72).

17. Naimark 2001, to cite a recent example, includes the population exchange in his book on ‘ethnic cleansing’, and positions it alongside the German extermination of the Jews.

18. On the Catholic character of the Croat state and the issue of conversions, see Dedijer 1992. On Stepinac and his efforts to counter discrimination against converted Jews and Serbs, see Alexander 1987, 69–70.

19. This observation also applies to the case of the Muslims who were massacred or forced to flee by Christians in the nineteenth century. McCarthy 1995 is a revealing case: the title of the book clearly refers to ‘Muslims’, a religious identity that was shared by many Turkish, Tartar, Albanian, Bosnian and even Greek ethnic groups in the Balkans and the Black Sea. However, the book insists in using the term ‘ethnic’ to describe their destruction, although the ethnicity of these groups played little role in their expulsion or their identity.

20. This issue is treated in Livanios 2003, 68–83.