Balkan Massacres Cost 35,000 Lives.

New York Times 100 years ago today, January 29, 1913:
London Times Correspondent Says That Moslems Suffered Worse Than Christians.
BOTH FOES EQUALLY GUILTY
Nameless Atrocities Perpetrated by Albanians — Neither Women nor Children Spared.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
    LONDON, Jan. 28.— The Times correspondent in Constantinople, discussing the massacres in Turkey, says:
    "The number of non-combatants who perished is not easily ascertained, but on such data as I have been able to procure I estimate it at a maximum of 20,000 Moslems and 15,000 Christians in the whole of European Turkey.
    The Moslems were mostly killed by irregulars or in the peasant Jacquerie, which followed the defeat of the Turkish troops. Massacres took place at Seres, where 800 were killed, mostly by followers of Sandansky, a former protégé of the Young Turks, and in the Strumitza region, between Gumuldjina and Keshan, where it is believed that over 1,500 were killed and many women outraged.
    "The Christians suffered most in Drama Novrokop, where over 800 Bulgarians were killed on Nov. 4, without distinction of age or sex; at the village of Plevna, where 182 were burned in barracks; near Demir-Hissar, where many more were slain; in Djuma and Bela in the Novrokop region, where a number of villages, variously estimated from ten to fourteen, were burned and from 20 to 50 per cent, of the inhabitants killed, and in Epirus, where statistics of the loss of life are lacking. "The massacres of Moslems which have taken place in the Strumitza district, for the most part after trial by a revolutionary court-martial, cannot be described as reprisals, since less than fifty Christians had been killed in that region before the advent of the forces of the Balkan League.
    "If a quarter of the information received be true, the Albanian irregulars committed crimes, especially upon women and children, for the description of which the dead languages must be used, and the Serbs behaved as did the British troops under similar provocation at Cawnpore and elsewhere in 1857. Taking it all in all. I am reluctantly compelled to admit that it is a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other, and it would seem that Europe would be better employed in relieving the suffering of the survivors than in attempting to fix the responsibility for these horrors, which ultimately falls upon the heads of certain of her deceased statesmen."