Passages in a Genocidal Reordering: Macedonia-Thrace

Before 1912 geographical designations such as Macedonia or Thrace had no administrative meaning. The terms derived from the classical world. However, through an Ottoman lens they were no less than oxymoronic, the organisation of vilayets in Rumeli - the name the Porte gave the European part of the empire - cutting across a zone whose modern geogra­phical nomenclatures would only become commonplace through the erup­tion of violent conflict largely derived from external forces and factors.

This is where a modern sense of seeing the human landscape through clearly demarcated nationalities so destabilised what in practice was ‘a cultures area, inhabited by a plethora of ethnic groups tied together in a complex web of interactions'.^[653] Christians, Muslims, Jews, all living side by side in a plural multifaceted ‘mazemata', was not simply an affront to nationalist conscious­ness while proof of these regions' backwardness but all the more reason why they needed urgent homogenisation.

Up to this point we can see the trajectory of communal violence largely shaped by guerrilla bands or their local Ottoman army adversaries. What followed from 1912 was not just a scaling up of the violence, as state armies directly intervened, but the implementation of policies designed to suffocate or destroy those local populations now designated as alien and hence enemies of the national interest. The first key evidence of this acceleration was when Greek, Serb, Montenegrin and Bulgarian polities, in defiance of great power agendas, allied together to take matters into their own hands and unilaterally expel the Ottomans from Europe.

The ferocity of this second Balkan 1913 war was made plain through the ‘remarkably well-documented and impartial' report by the Carnegie interna­tional commission sent to investigate charges of atrocity.^[657] Over and above extensive atrocities committed by soldiers upon soldiers, it found that each and every party to the conflict had also repeatedly committed multitudinous atro­cities against supposed ‘enemy' non-combatants. The murder of un-uniformed battle-age men in the course of war has a long and vicious history.^[658] But these massacres went beyond vengeful blood lust. Rather Carnegie's findings sug­gested something more akin to a standard operating procedure which, alongside the systematic burning of villages and towns, was aimed at getting the greater mass of surviving terror-filled inhabitants to clear out at speed.

Certainly, there were variations on this theme. In the contested Greco- Bulgarian zone in western Thrace, around Serres and Kukuch, for instance, leading members of Exarchist Slavophone congregations were intimidated by Greek soldiery with the words ‘If you want to be free; be Greeks.' Meanwhile, in the Rhodope mountains, thousands of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims - Pomaks - found themselves inducted into the Bulgarian Exarchist church in mass ceremonies.

But equally the destruction could be immediate and total, as took place in the south-east Thracian districts of Malgara, Rodosto and Airobol, close to the Sea of Marmara, where Carnegie reported the ‘men, women and children' of more than forty-five villages, mostly Bulgarian, some Pomak, ‘were separated, and all killed without exception'.^[660] But these genocidal massacres, which also included systematic mass rape, were mostly committed by Ottoman- organised bashi-bazouk irregulars, or by the embryonic Teskilat-i Mahsusa, or Special Organisation. This covert formation, as founded by the CUP leader­ship, appears to have played an instrumental role in the Armenian genocide two years later.^[661] The covert involvement of ‘violence specialists' aside, another reason why Malgara is significant is that it offers a reminder on the one hand of the provisionality of the new political map of Macedonia and Thrace as a result of the Balkan wars - the episode being part of a late CUP bid to take advantage of the intra-League struggle and recapture a smidgen of its European territories - and, on the other hand, of the ongoing vulnerability of communities who might fall prey to genocide as a consequence.

The immediate focus of these ongoing tensions was the Bulgarian grievance that it had been denied parts of Macedonia and Thrace which it believed were its by right of national composition and conquest.

One might argue, of course, that however severe such deportations, not­withstanding the uncompensated loss of homes, land and businesses, this did not of itself constitute genocide. It is also true that the relatively orderly post­Lausanne Muslim removals from places such as Salonika to Turkey were hardly equivalent to the genocidal CUP, and then Kemalist deportations mostly from Anatolia of Armenians, then Greeks, over preceding years.

The role of renewed general war thus represents the key contingent factor in the violent consolidation of land and people in our region. From 1923 to 1938 southern Balkan states were impeded from implementing mass removals by an Anglo-French-led international order which, ambivalent about population ‘transfers', nevertheless was adamantly against unilateral border changes. After Munich that writ was clearly defunct, opening up the possibilities of a territorial repartition of the rimlands, Macedonia-Thrace included. Paradoxically, that initially suggested, yet again, that the process of creeping nation-state consolidation in the interests of one dominant society could simply be overturned in favour of another. Bulgaria's partisanship to the Axis­led sweep into the Balkans in April 1941 reaped its reward thus, in Berlin's sanctioning of its annexation of much of previously Greek Thrace and Eastern Macedonia. In its wake came Sofia's massive effort to disgorge recent Greek settlers in what it now called Belomorie and replace them with Bulgarians, the majority of the latter previously displaced in the 1910s and 1920s by the Greeks. Some distance to the north, ultra-nationalist Serb Chetniks attempted to counter the emergent Croat Ustasha state by scoping a post-Yugoslav Greater Serbia whose forcible absorption of Croats and complete erasure of Muslims would take place after the war when other countries would be too busy with their own problems to care about whether an unwanted population was being annihilated somewhere else.^[665] Meanwhile, during the war, just as Zagreb was doing exactly such things to Serbs and Jews, Sofia was doing the same to Greeks and Jews. The Bulgarian aspect of wider Axis occupation (Katochi) of 1941-4, as remembered by its Greek inhabitants, is one of extreme barbarity and atrocity.^[666] Yet it was based on a Bulgarian foreign ministry blueprint whose transparent aim was to intimidate, suffocate or starve its Greek and other non-Slavophone elements to a point where those elements would fall apart or flee.^[667] On the latter score, refugee deaths from the area were disproportionately high among the hundreds of thousands of fatalities in the war-induced Greek famine of winter 1941/ 2.^[668]

Yet while the Bulgarian occupation is treated in contemporary Greece as genocidal, its most optimal feature was the assault not on the region's Greeks but on its Jews. This finally brings us back to the Bloodlands element in the Macedonia-Thrace, geography-genocide equation. The rounding up and depor­tation to Auschwitz of nearly all of Salonika's 50,000 Jews, the most significant concentration of Sephardim in Jewry's global diaspora, is the single most egregious act both in the Nazi ‘final solution' in Greece and of the Katochi.^[669] The Nazi descent on the Balkans may be seen as a complete bolt from the blue, or alternatively as consistent with competing European great power efforts to fill or control a weak political vacuum created by the Ottoman retreat from before 1912. Yet either way, it cannot be entirely divorced from the nation-state building of Nazi Germany's regional clients, or victims. The Bulgarian willingness to round up the entirety of some 11,400 ‘Belomorie' Jews just before the Salonika transports began to roll in March 1943 was not just compliance with Nazi demands: it was consistent with Sofia's own ethno-national homogenising goals. Local Greek complicity with the destruction of Salonika Jewry was the same: the sequestration or outright theft of its private and communal assets not simply a case of rampant venality but identical nationalising objectives.^[670]

What is equally striking is the way bigger postwar geopolitical contests continued to intermesh with and feed such lethal nationalising trajectories. Where the Germans and Italians retreated, the British and then Americans entered the fray, ostensibly to forestall a Soviet communist drive into the Aegean. That meant in Greece either disarming or liquidating the Greek Communist Party (KKE)-led national liberation movement, ELAS, which in 1944 effectively controlled most of the country outside of Athens. This task could only be accomplished by supporting, arming and directing ultra­nationalist forces many of whom had previously fought as fascist proxies.⁴⁰ This emerging confrontation is recognised as representing the first shots in the superpower Cold War. The tragedy for Macedonia, however, is that it became a cover and pretext through which the ultra-nationalists could turn a merciless civil war into a wholesale, genocidal assault on what remained of the country's non-Greek, primarily Slavophone communities.

During the war, Bulgarians had cynically mobilised many of these commu­nities under their jurisdiction as armed proxies, just as the Italians had attempted to do with the Albanian-speaking Chams of Epirus. The fact that other Chams had sided with ELAS only compounded the grounds for the Greek rightist, Colonel Zervas, to carry (British-aided) fire and sword into the district aimed at forcing the entire 15,000-20,000 surviving Chams across the Albanian border.⁴¹ But the remaining Slavophone communities, mostly concentrated in eastern Macedonia where the Bulgarian writ had not run, numbered many hundreds of thousands. Here their logical alignment was to the KKE, as the only Greek political party which - albeit shifting its emphasis many times between equal rights and actual independence - had recognised their ‘national' existence. Given that at World War II's end the Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Soviet communist parties were all vying to create a ‘Slavic' Balkan federation with Macedonia as one of its constituent parts, that was enough to brand all Slavophones, regardless of political allegiance, as ‘Slavo- communist' enemies of Greece. Indeed, as the nationalist noose tightened around the residual KKE strongholds in this now Macedonian-centred strug­gle, it is telling the degree to which it regurgitated toxic historic alignments, elements of the longstanding Bulgarian-backed Internal Macedonian

a Regional History ofMass Violence,' in Giorgos Antoniou and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), The Holocaust in Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 36-57.

40 Tim Jones, ‘The British Army and Counter-Guerrilla Warfare in Greece, 1945-49', Small Wars and Insurgencies 8.1 (1997), 88-106.

41 Mark Mazower, ‘Three Forms of Political Justice: Greece, 1944-1945', in Mark Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2000), pp. 25-6.

Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO), among the violence specialists on the ‘communist' side, many formerly Anatolian Greek refugees, a significant ele­ment among the grass-roots, right-wing bands loosely coordinated by ‘govern­ment' forces. The result was counterinsurgency, terror, starvation, forcible mass displacement and finally ethnic cleansing leading to a mass Slavophone excision from Aegean - Greek - Macedonia-Thrace.^[671] In this sense the govern­ment victory was not so much against communism but for a genocidally implemented national homogenisation. But what is significant is that it could not have been achieved ultimately without great power intervention. Just as the Bulgarian script for cultural homogenisation of the region piggybacked on the Nazis, so the alternative Greek one - as founded on a cartographically inspired vision of expansion to and ethnic consolidation of its Aegean frontiers - was dependent for its full realisation on the British and Americans.

This was not the complete end of the story. The previous signature of the great powers to the treaty of Lausanne meant that a return to the pre-1941 territorial status quo ante did not carry with it an imprimatur for a further cleansing of the Muslim (including Pomak) communities of western Thrace. They continued to survive in a sort of no man's land between Greek acceptance and Turkish exit.^[672] Residual Slavophone communities, as with other minorities, the surviving Jews included, necessarily kept their heads down, the very concept of cultural difference more or less expunged from Greek consciousness.^[673] Only when another cross-border issue - the declara­tion of an independent Macedonia following the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991 - presented Athens with a neighbouring state whose very constitution harked back to the struggles for the autonomy of ‘the whole of the Macedonian people' was there reason to believe that sacro egoismo was about to resurface in violent conflict.^[674] In fact, despite inflamed denunciations of ‘the other' on both sides of the border, that conflict, dampened by international intermediaries, has never come to pass. Instead, with the 1949 culmination of the Greek civil war on the napalm-soaked slopes of Mount Gramos, Macedonia-Thrace, as a microcosm of the broader geography of the genocidal rimlands, arrived through the extirpation of its plurality at its dysfunctional, contemporary ‘normality'.