The Murzsteg Reform Plan: Great Powers sought to keep Kosovo under Muslim domination despite gross persecution of Serbs.
By Carl Savich
Introduction: Crisis in the Kosovo Vilayet, 1903
By 1903, “the international community”, the Great Powers, sought to maintain the status quo in the Kosovo vilayet, a district or province of Ottoman Turkey, known as Turkey in Europe, by organizing an international intervention. An international peacekeeping force was set up in the Kosovo vilayet to implement the Murzsteg Plan, an international agreement intended to bring peace and stability to the province. The Murzsteg Plan merely perpetuated the status quo, however, as the Great Powers sought to advance their interests in the Balkans. The international intervention was an abject failure that only exacerbated the conflict. The “international community”, the Great Powers, used international intervention and humanitarianism as a guise and a smokescreen to secure and advance their economic, military, political, and strategic interests in the Balkan peninsula. The Great Power rivalry in the Balkans would only increase and intensify until it engulfed the region, the continent, and the world in a global conflict, in World War I. The Murzsteg Reform Plan
On August 2, 1903, Macedonian insurgents began the Ilinden insurrection or uprising in the vilayets of Monastir, Salonika, and Kosovo. The Turks had amassed 150,000 troops in the vilayets, in 175 battalions, in anticipation of a rebellion. Krushevo was attacked and subsequently taken by the Macedonian insurgents who proclaimed a republic, the “Krushevo Republic”. On August 12, the Turkish forces retook the town, reportedly killing over a hundred civilians. Turkish forces were accused of committing atrocities against Orthodox Christian civilians. They were accused of burning 366 houses and 203 stores. Over 700 houses were pillaged and looted. Women were raped and their fingers and ears were cut off to retrieve the jewelry. In the revolt, 201 villages were burned down, 12,400 houses were pillaged, while 4,694 people were killed, 70,835 people were without shelter, and there were 30,000 refugees who fled to Bulgaria.
Turkish forces burned and destroyed villages and towns in Macedonia during the insurgency. This is how John Booth described a visit he made to the destroyed and burned village of Kremen:
“Three miles further some strange heaps of rubble lay piled on each side of the path, and we were riding on a thickness of smashed tiles. This was Kremen.
Scrambling to the top of a heap of earth and stones one got the full effect.
Shapeless wall-shoulders stood out of the mass, and the end of a charred beam pointed drunkenly into the sky; all down the hillside below the loose piles bulged and the empty, shorn walls gaped; no sound came up from the crushed houses – no figure moved in the choked streets, hardly traceable in the general level of rubbish; everywhere was desolation and black ruin. …
A year before, it seemed, a band of insurgents from Bulgaria had been lurking in the neighbourhood and no doubt had come to Kremen for food. The people were accused of having harboured revolutionaries, and a body of troops arrived to execute vengeance on the village, which was not done in any haphazard fashion, but deliberately and with fore-thought. The troops brought with them ponies carrying tins of petroleum lashed to their packsaddles, which were unloaded, and the soldiers, producing squirts, soon covered the walls and roofs with the spirit. After each house had been thoroughly sacked the tins were emptied upon piles of bedding and the whole village was fired at a given signal. Lurid descriptions of the usual horrible scenes followed – old men brained whilst trying to protect their daughters; women’s hands cut off and their children murdered before their eyes; outrage, pillage, and massacre let loose. Truly the Turkish soldier – quiet enough in peace time – is a demon out of hell when the lust of blood is on him. The police-officer and the escort had the decency to look ashamed of their countrymen’s work, and made no effort to hide the worst evidences of it.
Kremen is only a sample. The countryside is thick with the ruins of Christian villages stamped out in the same way, with the same old weary details in every case. There is nothing new in it all – it did not happen for the first time that year nor fifty years before. It has been going on for centuries, and always will go on until the Christians in Macedonia are given the right to live a freeman’s life and the power to uphold that right by the only people who can give it – the Powers of Europe.”
The French ambassador to Russia in St. Petersburg, M. Maurice Bompard, stressed that France wanted “to take a more active part” in Balkan affairs in the aftermath of the insurgency. The British Foreign Ministry stated that “the moment has arrived when Europe cannot remain indifferent” to the events in the three vilayets. British Foreign Secretary from 1900-1905, Lord Landsdowne, the 5th Marquess, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, called for the establishment of international military control in Macedonia, sending foreign soldiers to assist Hilmi Pasha.
To prevent France and Britain from gaining the diplomatic initiative in Macedonia, Austria-Hungary and Russia sent Turkey a note on September 24, 1903 declaring that they “insist on the program approved by all the Powers”, referring to the Vienna Plan. Landsdowne proposed in a September 29 letter to the British ambassador in Vienna that a Christian government be nominated for Macedonia without attachment to the Balkans or the signatory powers to the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. An alternative proposal was for an Ottoman Turkish governor with European assessors or advisors. He also wanted a reorganization of the gendarmerie with an increase in the number of officers.
The Murzsteg Reform Plan was an Austro-Hungarian and Russian reaction to these initiatives by Britain and France.
On September 30, 1903, the Emperor Franz Joseph I and the Czar Nicholas II met at the hunting-lodge of Murzsteg, near Vienna. The second Austro-Hungarian-Russian Reform Scheme was the result of their deliberations, the Murzsteg Reform Plan or Programme. They met ostensibly to ensure that the February reforms, the Vienna Plan reforms, were adequately followed. What resulted, however, were new reforms that incorporated the recommendations of the other powers. On October 22, they submitted the new reforms to the Turkish government. On November 25, the Turks reluctantly accepted the nine points of what came to be known as the Murzsteg program.
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