engleski

New interpretation of the Balkan wars

The lecture will be divided into two parts. The first part will be about the Balkan wars in general and different truths from different historiographies with special emphasis on Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian historiography. The second part will be related to changes in population, migration and war crimes. Balkan wars have been experienced and remembered in various Balkan states in completely different and very often diametrically opposed ways. What has been experienced in Serbia, Greece and Montenegro as the liberation of their (Christian) brothers, in Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo has been perceived as a division of the ethnic territory, in Turkey as the defeat and loss of the Balkans, in Bulgaria as a loss of much of Macedonia which would be the reason to later enter two world wars on the losing side. The preparation of the war was associated with the IMRO terrorist actions which caused punishing of Christian population and later very successful mobilization in all the Balkan states. The first Balkan war led to the rapid defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the second one was the war in which the winners fought for the division of the conquered territory. The results are known. In the first part of the lecture, I will be concentrated on the different interpretations of the war, providing chronology of events only to the extent that is necessary. In the second part of the lecture, I will present various population statistics and personal testimonies of people. I will talk about war crimes and expulsions of the population. It is unquestionable that the winning countries wanted the widest and the most ethnicly cleansed territory possible. Here, I will focus also on the image of Balkans in western countries during and after the wars. These misperceptions culminated in the preface of the Carnegie Commission's edition in 1990s where the Yugoslav wars were perceived as the logical sequence of the first two Balkan wars and where the Balkans people were perceived as barbarians. Final thoughts will lead us to the genocide committed against the Armenians and the Turkish justification - why Turkey considers it not as a genocide but as an ethnic crime.

Balkan Wars, atrocities, migrations

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