Sunday, August 25, 2013

Bulgar Atrocities Described By Loti.

New York Times 100 years ago today, August 25, 1913:
Massacres and Violation of Mussulmans and Greeks in Adrianople.
WHOLE TOWNS WIPED OUT
Thousands of Prisoners Starved to Death — Warns Against Restoring Adrianople.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
    LONDON, Monday, Aug. 25.— Pierre Loti in a long dispatch to The Daily Telegraph from Constantinople embodies his impressions of recent events in the district of Adrianople, which he has just visited.
    "I wish," he says, "simply to tell in all sincerity what I have seen with my own eyes — seen in the desert which the Bulgarians have made of Thrace. Oh, how it surpasses in abomination everything I have been told, all I imagined! With what fury have these Christian liberators worked in order to accomplish so much destruction in a few months!
    "In a military motor car which carried me at full speed I was able to travel miles and miles without perceiving a human being. Here and there were carcasses of beasts, flocks of crows in the distance, heaps of stones, and ruins of little walls — all that was left of villages. If one approaches, sometimes a timorous face, contracted with pain, rises from the débris. It is that of some one who has escaped the great massacres sheltering himself under a roof of branches in what was his house."
    Choosing at random, Loti takes the village of Haouza as an example, and describes the work of ruin wrought by the Bulgarians, who, he says, committed unbelievable acts of horror. "Here is the well of the village. A sinister odor arises from it. Into it have been thrown the bodies of the women and children violated by the soldiers, and on top of them, to make them sink, have been heaped stones torn from the graves. Out of a little more than a thousand inhabitants there remain about forty who escaped the massacre. Somebody has told them my name, and they come and surround me, rising from behind the ruins like spectres. Poor, brave people! How is it that even in this lost village they know I am making an attempt to proclaim the truth to so-called Christian Europe? But, yes, they all know and come to press my hand and then describe their martyrdom.
    "One says: 'I have neither wife nor children, house nor flocks. Why am I not dead?' Another, a bent old man, tells me: 'I had a little granddaughter 10 years old; she was my joy. Four Bulgarian soldiers came in to violate her and nearly killed me with their fists because I wanted to defend her. When I recovered consciousness I could not find her.'"
    Speaking of Adrianople and its re-occupation by the Turks, Loti writes: "It is known by what a miracle she was saved. The Bulgarians had everything ready for the final slaughter. As soon as the Turks returned they were to massacre the Mussulmans, while the Armenians, armed by the Bulgarians, were to be summoned to massacre the Greeks. Each man had been assigned to his task. Moreover, guns had been trained upon the beautiful chief mosque to destroy it. This last night of the Bulgarian occupation was particularly terrible. It was then that Greeks, tied four-and-four, were thrown into the river. The only survivor of this noyade described it to me in detail, which made me shiver.
    "On this last night, then, there was slaughter, pillage, and violation practically all over the place. I will give one example from a thousand. In one house which I knew lived the widow of a Turkish officer and her two young daughters. A band of Bulgarian soldiers entered by violence and remained until morning. All through the night the neighbors heard the harrowing cries of these three women."
    After referring to the joy of the people of all nationalities at the timely arrival of the Turks, Loti continues:
    "I was taken to see 'The Island of Anguish' — that island in the river where four or five thousand Turkish prisoners of war were herded together in order that they might die of hunger. There I saw trees just up to a man's height, naked and white, despoiled of their bark, which the famished prisoners had devoured, it is known that at the end of a fortnight of this torture the Bulgarians came and cut the throats of those who persisted in living.
    "If I collected only Turkish testimony I should risk being charged with exaggeration, but the most overwhelming evidence is that which was supplied me by Greeks and Jews."
    Loti concludes with an earnest appeal to Europe not to permit the Bulgarians to repossess themselves of Adrianople.
    "After what the barbarians have done once and have not had time to finish, one can easily imagine what their return would be when they were maddened by hiving been driven away. Alas! at this very serious moment I can see the press sold or muzzled as at the worst times. I can see my protestations placed on the Index, even in France; but I still have hope. What a crime impossible to qualify would it be to hand over these splendid sanctuaries to merciless destroyers, and particularly to condemn this population to torture and horrible death! Europe warned will hesitate to commit it, if only in order to avoid creating an abyss of hatred between the Christian and Mussulman world."

    LONDON, Monday, Aug. 25.— The Sublime Porte has opened direct negotiations with the Bulgarian delegate, M. Nochevitch, who has remained in Constantinople since he went there at the outbreak of the second war, to arrange an understanding with Turkey. It is understood that the Porte remains firm with regard to Adrianople and Kirk-Kilisseh, but is prepared to make concessions in other quarters.

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