Turkey Balking At Autonomy Plans.

New York Times 100 years ago today, September 8, 1912:
But Powers Are Seriously Studying Austrian Minister's Proposal to End Old Evils.
BORDER TROUBLES MENACING
Turkish Guards Make Sport of Sniping Innocent Christians Across the Frontier.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
    LONDON. Sept. 7.— The great powers are examining the proposals made by Count von Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, with a view to insuring peace in the Balkans. Reduced to a minimum so as to avoid as far as may be international jealousy, they call upon Turkey to grant her European subjects a measure of home rule, provincial recruiting, popular education, and other reforms that, in the main, have already been promised by the Sublime Porte.
    Turkey has already declared that she can brook no outside interference, but Austria persists in hoping that Count von Berchthold's scheme may be found so satisfactory by the other powers that they will use their best influence to bring the Porte to accept it.
    Meanwhile, reports continue to paint the situation in the Balkans in menacing colors. The Bulgarian Cabinet finds difficulty in keeping its "dogs of war" in leash, and Montenegro is boiling over at the indignities perpetrated on the Christian tribes just over the frontier.
    Even allowing for exaggeration, life in these districts is not cast in pleasant places. Some details of the Berani atrocities have already been given in The New York Times dispatches, and another lurid picture is painted by the special correspondent of The Manchester Guardian, who writes as follows from Andvijevitza, Montenegro:
    "One day during a lull in the firing between the Serbs of Berani and the Nizams I rode over the frontier, visiting, first, the remains of the newly burned Turkish Kula, the frontier post on the cliff above Masanitza. This Montenegrin village is almost directly below Kula. and from it the Nizams were in the habit of taking pot shots at Montenegrin peasants below.
    "Here, as in other places, the swift bullets of long-range rifles pass clean through the wooden walls of the houses, and people may thus be shot for fun by their own firesides.
    "For the last four years this sniping process across the frontier by the Nizams had been growing more and more intolerable. Women with crippled arms are witnesses of this sport, although the Turkish Government denied its possibility. In this case I saw a loophole that commanded the houses below. It had evidently been made for the purpose.
    "Among the ruins sat a rugged wild-eyed 'papa,' or orthodox priest, of Budinalje, one of the burned villages. He recounted the names of the villages burned — seventeen in all — but the number killed it is as yet impossible to know, for the population is scattered over the mountains and it is not known who are dead and who are alive. Just before we crossed the frontier a wounded man. Brother Kaimakam of Berani, carried in on a rude bier made of two saplings laced together with red sashes such as the men here all wear. Ho asked for water, which we gave him, but a bullet had passed through him lengthwise, and he died of internal hemorrhage almost at once.
    "We passed on through the upper part of the village of Urzhanitza. The lower part was the scene of a terrible massacre on the nights of Aug. 14 and 15, but my guide would not take me there, as it was under Turkish guns and they might open fire at any moment. Owing to this the ruins had not been properly searched.
    "The first time they were visited two girls were found, both with their breasts terribly cut. One was still living after three days, but she died soon in great pain. Of their injuries a military doctor remarked fiercely that only officers carry swords.
    "In upper Urzhanitza only one house was burned. It was the house of my guide's two uncles. They and their son were all three beheaded. He told me how he had buried the headless bodies, and at the cottage door above was the daughter of one of the dead men, her head bound in black. She was rocking to and fro, weeping."