MACEDONIAN PEOPLE’S RISE TO POWER AND THEIR FAILURE TO ACHIEVE INDEPENDENCE AN

MACEDONIAN PEOPLE’S RISE TO POWER AND THEIR FAILURE TO ACHIEVE INDEPENDENCE AND CREATE A MACEDONIAN STATE

When the Macedonian people along with their lands were handed back to the Ottomans in 1878 to be further abused and exploited, the Macedonian leadership came to the realization that no one was going to help the Macedonians so they had to organize and carry out a national struggle on their own. The 1878 Congress of Berlin also awakened the Muslim Rulers in the Balkans to the reality that their Empire came very close to being destroyed. So now we have the dynamics of the Macedonian people gearing up to free themselves and the Ottomans trying harder to stop them.

To maintain their state’s integrity the Ottomans had to raise taxes in order to pay the interest on the money they borrowed from the westerners and they also had to keep a close eye on potential insurrections and further loss of lands. To prevent further uprisings and rebellions, the Turks stepped up espionage activities and searches for weapons in the Macedonian villages. If by any chance weapons were found, the entire village was burned to the ground, even if the weapons belonged to thugs. By the time taxes were paid a Macedonian family would be left with 25 to 40 percent of their meager annual earnings to live on. To make ends meet Macedonian men were accustomed to taking on additional jobs within the Ottoman Empire or abroad to make enough to survive the winter. It has been said that after twenty-five years of achieving autonomy, Bulgaria was thriving economically thanks to the cheap labour provided by the Macedonian migrant workers. The West, including the USA and Canada, were to some extent also beneficiaries of the cheap Macedonian labour. Unable to pay their bills, Macedonian men ventured further and further from Macedonia looking for work. The further they ventured the longer they took to return home sometimes spending more than a couple of years before returning. It was never their intent to abandon their homeland, but as Macedonians found it more and more difficult to cope at home they began to settle in foreign lands like Bulgaria, Russia, Serbia and even the USA and Canada. Be they in Bulgaria, Russia, the USA, Canada or Macedonia, the Macedonia people’s preoccupation after 1878 was how to become free from the oppressive Ottomans. The answer came to them on October 23rd, 1893 when a number of Macedonian intellectuals met in Solun and decided to form a Macedonian Revolutionary Organization with aims of destroying the Ottoman social system and seeking autonomy for Macedonia. Gotse Delchev was chosen to lead the revolution. By 1896 the revolutionary movement was able to exert influence to a point where it acted like a state within a state, taking over administrative positions from the Ottomans, leading boycotts against Ottoman institutions and offering isolated villages protection from Greek and Bulgarian sponsored brigands. Besides preparing for an imminent uprising, the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization was able to organize cheti to defend the villages from marauding bands, Ottoman soldiers and from Greek, Serbian and Bulgarian hired armed bands.

However, before the failed Ilinden uprising the Macedonian leadership hardly concerned itself with the armed foreign bands or with the Greek, Bulgarian or Serbian nationalistic propaganda. Unfortunately as the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization became more and more successful at its job, Ottoman authorities began to clamp down on it. On January 31st, 1903 the Ottomans declared the organization illegal and sought ways to destroy it. One of the ways was to step up weapons searches in the villages, another was to capture and imprison its leadership. With villages being destroyed at a rapid rate and leaders being lost to the prisons, the Macedonians had to accelerate their plans to carry out this massive national insurrection they were planning. Unfortunately the Macedonians were finding it difficult to acquire the weapons, ammunition and supplies they needed for an all out strike and for a prolonged struggle. Some, including Gotse Delchev, believed more time was needed. Unfortunately with Dechev’s death on May 4, 1903 and with most of the leadership still divided, a rash decision was made to carry out the uprising on August 2, 1903 during the Ilinden celebration. According to newspaper reports from 1903, during the heat of the Illinden Uprising, Russia and Austria–Hungary urgently warned Macedonia’s neighbours, for the sake of peace, not to interfere in Macedonia. In other words, not to help the Macedonian people free themselves. (Hans Lothar Schteppan). As we all know, the uprising did not go well and ended in tragedy. All the villages suspected of helping the rebels were destroyed and many people were killed and displaced. In the aftermath people lost confidence in their ability to free themselves and for the first time began to look to their neighbours to save them.

ACTIONS OF MACEDONIA’S NEIGHBOURS IN MACEDONIA’S INVASION, OCCUPATION AND PARTITION

While the Macedonian people were preparing for an uprising, their neighbours had different plans. The Macedonian people’s loss of confidence in themselves coupled with the weakened defense of the villages, was a victory for Macedonia’s neighbours who wasted no time in stepping up their nationalistic propaganda campaigns.

Another little known fact is that after the failed rebellion, the Greek factions in Macedonia allied themselves with the Ottomans and became their eyes and ears in the villages. As long as they kept the rebels down, people like Karavangelis, the Greek Bishop of Kostur, were given authority to carry out armed attacks on the Macedonian people, such as the one in Zagorichani. Villages that refused to bend to the will of Karavangelis were viciously attacked and destroyed sometimes with the help of the Ottoman army. Unable to convince the Macedonian people to peacefully change their allegiance by declaring themselves to be Greeks, Serbians or Bulgarians, their neighbours use armed bands and terror tactics to force them. It was well known that there were no Greek, Bulgarian, or Serbian ethnicities living in Macedonia but that didn’t stop the new Balkan States from inventing them. The wheels of the protagonists were turning when they attempted to kill two birds with one stone by cleverly substituting “ethnicity” for “religious affiliation”. By the end of the 19th century the Christian Millet of Ottoman Macedonia was already divided into two millets (the Greek Patriarchist Millet and the Bulgarian Exarchist Millet). First, since there was no Macedonian Millet there was no “governing body” to represent a Macedonian religious denomination. Second, since all Christians in Macedonia already belonged to one millet or another, it was easy to make “ethnicity” claims on behalf of “religious affiliation”. In modern terms all Macedonians belonging to the Patriarchist fold were considered to be Greeks. Similarly all those Macedonians belonging to the Exarchist fold were considered to be Bulgarians. By introducing Serbian churches and schools, Serbia later used similar tactics to claim the existence of a Serbian ethnicity inside Macedonia. “Thus by the 1880s a vicious three-way struggle for Macedonia was under way. …, the antagonists sought control of Macedonia's cultural and spiritual life through domination of schools, churches the press, and communal organizations. They fought first with propaganda, political pressure, and enormous financial expenditures. Over time, however, and especially after Macedonia's Ilinden Uprising of 1903, they resorted to armed force. All three antagonists sought to terrorize the others and their followers and to win over the Macedonian, population, or rather terrorize it into submission. They aimed variously to annex the entire territory (Bulgaria's plan) or to partition it (Greece and Serbia's later hope).

The Ottoman administration tolerated and tacitly encouraged the competition, in total accord with the basic principle of its state divide and rule in order to survive. In such circumstances Macedonian national consciousness could hardly continue to awaken and grow. With strong pressure from every side -state authority and the other Balkan nationalisms -the young and weak Macedonian movement could barely function and lacked material means and institutional foundations. Even the new but impoverished middle class was vulnerable to the foreign propaganda. As well, the opposition was overwhelmingly strong. Consequently, Macedonian movements could operate only illegally an underground and, until the revolutionary organization emerged in the 1890s, in isolation from its population. In this post-1870 situation, the ethnically homogeneous, Orthodox Slavic Macedonians experienced an artificial division into three ‘faiths’ attending variously a Bulgarian (Exarchist), Greek (Patriarchist), or Serbian church. And such church affiliation split them into Bulgarian, Greek, and Serbian ‘nations,’ or rather ‘parties.’ This situation of course, did not necessarily represent assimilation, the acquisition of a particular national consciousness. It only reflected Macedonia's peculiar political reality. Most Macedonians attended religious services in a language they did not understand; as well, in the 1880s most were illiterate or semi-literate, and into the interwar years many Macedonians would remain so. The vast majority of students at foreign (propaganda) schools received only one to three years of elementary schooling -insufficient even to grasp Bulgarian and Serbian, let alone Greek. Macedonian dialects remained the language of home and everyday life for Macedonians, who continued to identify with them and with the rich folklore and the traditional ways of Macedonia.” (Andrew Rossos, “Macedonia and the Macedonians A History”, Studies of Nationalities, pages 88 & 89) All Macedonians belonging to the Patriarchist church were given Greek or “Hellenized” names. Similarly, all Macedonians belonging to the Exarchist church were given Bulgarian names. That is why to this day people who fled Macedonia at that time have names ending in “s”, “ff”, or “ch”. In many instances brothers, born of the same parents, were given different last names because they happened to go to different churches. Their choice of church had nothing to do with loyalty to one faction or the other, but rather with the church’s location relative to home. Each brother attended the church nearest to his house as he had always done. The sad part was that now with every spoonful of religion

came a dose of venomous propaganda. Brother was pitted against brother, one fighting for “Hellenism” and the other for “Bulgarism”. At the beginning of the Ilinden rebellion most Macedonian villages belonged to the Exarchate Church. With increased Greek activities through Karavangelis and others like him, the tide was turning. The Greek success was mainly due to the Ottoman-Greek alliance and the Ottoman militia’s assistance. Russia made it clear to all parties that they couldn’t invade Macedonia without Russian permission and only if the Ottomans became a threat to the Christian population. So plans to invade Macedonia were under way, now it was only a matter of time. Macedonia’s three neighbours, after forming a series of alliances, on June 1912, with Russian help, formed the “Balkan League of Nations” in preparation of an invasion. The League of Nations in fact was simply a device for synchronizing a military effort against the Ottomans. When Russia proposed the idea of a “Balkan League of Nations” it was welcome news for Britain, France and Italy. The League was viewed as an anti-German front, a way of ejecting the Ottoman regime from Europe and at the same time, safeguarding (British, French and Italian) interests and expansionary ambitions. The not so obvious Russian motive for sponsoring the League was to guarantee its own influence in the Balkans perhaps through Serbia or Bulgaria or both. On October 18th, 1912 Montenegro declared war on Turkey with the League following suit. The battles that ensued were fought almost entirely on Macedonian soil. The League’s plan was to surround the Turkish army in Macedonia and force it out to Constantinople. To everyone’s surprise, however, the League won a crushing and unexpected victory in just six weeks. With the exception of Sandanski and a force of 400 Macedonians who fought back and liberated Melnik and Nevrokop, the League received no opposition from the Macedonians. In fact the enthusiasm created by the “liberators” not only helped the League fight harder but also encouraged thousands of Macedonians to enlist in the League’s armies. However, as soon as the league armies evicted the Ottomans, the Macedonian people found themselves not liberated but occupied. “A great terror reigns in Macedonia now. The ‘freedom’ of the allies has no frontiers, no-one from Macedonia has the right to travel outside, to protest or complain before the European states. Whoever disturbs this order is either killed or imprisoned. The allies surround

Macedonia with a Chinese Wall…” (Page 145, Radin, IMRO and the Macedonian Question)