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Draft:Massacres of Turks and Muslims during the Russo-Turkish War

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During the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), coalition forces, namely those of the Russian Empire, Bulgarian Legion, Cossacks as well as Bulgarian rebels, insurgents, irregulars, and armed peasants engaged in a series of coordinated mass extermination, torture, rape, deportation, and ethnic cleansing against the Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans; mainly against Turks and Pomaks.[1][2][3]

Massacres of Muslims and Turks during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-78)
Part of Persecution of Muslims during the Ottoman contraction
Turkish refugees fleeing coalition armies, September 1877
LocationBalkan Peninsula and the South Caucasuses
Date1877-78
Attack type
Mass murder, mass rape, ethnic cleansing, torture, religious persecution
DeathsUp to 400,000
Victims500,000-1.5 million displaced or deported
PerpetratorsMostly the Russian Empire, Bulgarian Volunteer Corps, Cossacks, as well as Bulgarian rebels, irregulars, and armed peasants
MotiveIslamophobia, racism, Christian nationalism, anti-Turkish sentiment, Bulgarian irredentism, Russian imperialism

In April 1877, following the suppression of a Bulgarian revolt in 1876, Russia declared war on the Ottomans, leading a coalition that consisted of itself, the Bulgarian Legion, Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, as well as the Guard of Finland. Despite some initial resistance, the Ottoman forces were ultimately heavily defeated and lost ground rapidly. By March 1878, the Ottoman military collapsed and was forced to sue for peace.

As coalition forces advanced, they began to commit large-scale atrocities against the Muslim population in the areas they operated in. As a result, it is estimated that up to 400,000 Muslim civilians were massacred from 1877 to 1878, and up to 500,000-1.5 million were displaced and/or became refugees.[1][2]

Atrocities edit

As the coalition armies advanced southward, they began to commit a wide range of atrocities against the Turks and Muslims of the area.

British reports from the period contain information on the massacres. According to these reports, 96 of the 170 houses and schools in the Turkish village of Issova Bâlâ (Upper Isssova) were burned.[4] It is stated that the Muslims of the village of Upper Sofular were massacred, before that, the school and the mosque of the town were burned. [5][6]

18 Turks were killed and their bodies were burned in the village of Kozluca.[7]

According to Ottoman reports, Muslims were also massacred in the town of Kızanlık, 400 of them were murdered by a group of Russians and Bulgarians. [8] The Cossacks killed around 300 Muslim men after torturing them in various ways. As elsewhere, the Russians first collected the weapons of Muslims. Then they distributed these weapons to the Bulgarians. The Bulgarians also massacred Muslims with these weapons.

The Russian soldiers, who entered the houses under the pretext of searching in the first days of the occupation, took whatever they found valuable. Especially after the Russian army withdrew, the city was completely left to Cossacks and Bulgarians. They brutally killed the Muslims in the Taşköy and Topraklık villages.

Although it is worth noting that in several instances, the Russians, under pressure from foreign generals, would not directly carry out massacres themselves, but rather would leave that to the battle-hardened Cossacks and Bulgarian militia.

The towns of Tulça, Ishakça and Mecidiye were occupied by the coalition army in late June. Weapons were distributed to the Bulgarian villagers, who then began to mass murder the Muslims. People were killed, houses, villages were looted and burned. The situation was also no different in Ruscuk and Tırnova.

According to the information given by the British consuls and journalists in the region, the Cossacks surrounded the villages and took the weapons of the people, then distributed those weapons to the Bulgarians, who then murdered and raped the Muslim-Turkish inhabitants of the area. Those who tried to escape were throw into the fire of the burning villages. Again men, women and children were not spared.

In the village of Balvan, for example, 1,900 Muslims were killed in this way. As the Russians entered Eski Zagora on July 22. They killed 1,100 Muslims in 11 days. British Consul Blunt set off from Edirne on September 26, visited the Turkish villages in the region and came to Yeni Zağra on September 28, and then moved to Kızanlık. He wrote that all the villages except a Bulgarian village on his way were burned and emptied. For example, the entire village of Kadirbey, with 400-500 Muslim people, was laid waste to by the Bulgarians. In his report dated July 25, 1877, the British deputy consul Dupuis reported that the Russians and Bulgarians killed the entire Muslim people of Kalofer and Karlova, old people, women and children alike in cold blood.

Russians and Bulgarians not only killed Muslims in the places they occupied, they raped women and young girls and looted their property. They also burned down their houses and destroyed them. For example, when Old Zagora was occupied, the city's shops and houses belonging to Muslims and Jews were first looted, then destroyed. When Plovdiv was occupied, of the 15,000 Muslims that inhabited it previously, only 100 remained.

When Burgas was occupied, the Turkish neighborhood of the city consisted of 400 houses, it was completely destroyed. When Sofia was occupied, there were less than 50 Turkish families left in the city. Turkish houses were systematically annihilated. Tatar Pazarcık was destroyed in the same way.[9]

It is reported that the first step in the atrocities was generally to disarm all Turks and Muslims that were found, and then arm Bulgarian gangs and irregulars who were following the main coalition vanguard.[10] In this way, the Bulgarians started to massacre Muslims and Jews, including women and children, in a brutal fashion. [11] It is also reported that the persecution and brutality of the Bulgarians against the Muslim people was even many times higher than the expectations of the Russian generals. [12]

Bulgarian peasants were promised the lands, houses and goods owned by the Muslim-Turkish people’s. As a matter of fact, as a result of this, in a very short time, hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians were systematically settled in Turkish houses, evicting their previous owners without mercy. The Russians and Bulgarians also began to relentlessly persecute Muslims and Turks on the religious level. Qu’rans were ripped up, mosques were closed down and demolished, and Muslim dress of both men and women was violated and suppressed.[13]

Muslim and Turkish women and girls were also sexually violated and raped by the Russians and Bulgarians on a large scale, with some being sent to brothels.[14] In the report sent to the Ottoman Government by the Tırnova memorandum about the murders and destruction committed by the Russians and Bulgarians during the occupation of Rumelia, it is stated that in the years when the war continued, around 4,770 Turks were massacred in the villages around Tırnova, and 2,120 Turkish houses were burned. The Daily Telegraph newspaper also corroborated this information. According to the paper; “We saw about 3,000 bodies around the Yeni Zağra station, they were all Turkish. It was said that dogs and pigs gnawed spoiled corpses...it was a horrible sight...” The Governor of Plovdiv also reports that all Muslims: men, women and children, were shut in the mosque in the Serhadli and surrounding villages by the Bulgarians, and all of them were massacred by having their throats cut. [15][16][17]

All of the Muslim and Greek villages, from the village of Çürük around Edirne to Koşukavak, were completely destroyed by the Bulgarians and the vast majority of the people, especially Muslims, were brutally massacred. This demonstrated that the Bulgarians not only targeted Muslims and Turks, but non-Bulgarians as a whole.[18]

The Russians and Bulgarians who occupied Plovdiv on January 15, 1878, plundered the city completely, raped Muslim women and massacred many.[19] Meanwhile, the Bulgarians killed the Ottoman soldiers they captured with brutal methods of torture, such as cutting off their noses, arms and ears. [20]

Even after the war was over, it is reported that from 1879 to 1890, in the former Ottoman Rumelia Eyalet, the Bulgarians continued to systematically ”destroy” the Turkish people in the region. In these years, local administrations stood idly by as Muslims were assaulted, and as armed Bulgarians, who took advantage of this situation, began to commit rape against Muslim-Turkish women and girls on a massive scale. [9]

Bulgarians gathered Turkish youth and women from their homes at night in many villages, stripped them of their abayas, drank alcohol and sexually violated them. As a matter of fact, many women who could not accept this situation preferred to jump into water wells in order not to be raped.[21]

Aftermath edit

As a result of the influx of refugees and the mass murder of Ottoman civilians in the European territories, hatred of minorities increased within the Ottoman population. As a result, the Ottoman Empire perpetrated multiple genocides, namely the Armenian genocide and the Sayfo during the First World War.[22]

References edit

  1. ^ a b The Middle East, Abstracts and Index. Northumberland Press. 1999. p. 493. 1999.
  2. ^ a b Karpat, Kemal. Ottoman Population. pp. 72–75.
  3. ^ McCarthy, Justin (2 February 2001). McCarthy, Justin Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9780340706572.
  4. ^ David Gillard, Kenneth Bourne, Donald Cameron Watt, Great Britain. Foreign Office. British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print (1984), University Publications of America, p. 150 was archived on the Wayback Machine on 10 November 2013. University Publications of America. 1984. ISBN 9780890936023.
  5. ^ David Gillard, Kenneth Bourne, Donald Cameron Watt, Great Britain. Foreign Office. British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print (1984), University Publications of America, p. 197 Archived November 10, 2013 at the Wayback Machine. University Publications of America. 1984. ISBN 9780890936023.
  6. ^ British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print, sf. 152 Archived November 10, 2013 at Wayback Machine. University Publications of America. 1984. ISBN 9780890936023.
  7. ^ British documents on foreign affairs--reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print, sf. 163 Archived November 10, 2013 at the Wayback Machine. University Publications of America. 1984. ISBN 9780890936023.
  8. ^ "Russian Attrocities in Asia and Europe Archived at the Wayback Machine on March 15, 2012. (1877), Istanbul, No. 51" (PDF). {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. ^ a b "Turan, Omer. TURKISH MIGRATION FROM BULGARIA IN THE 1877-78 OTTOMAN-RUSSIAN WAR. Bursa Research Center".
  10. ^ "Nedim İpek, a.g.e., p. 15 v. d." 15 October 2017. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  11. ^ "Nedim İpek, a.g.e., p. 16; L. Bernhard, Les Atrocites Russes en Bulgarie et en Armenie Pendant la Guerre de 1877, Berlin 1878, p. 29". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  12. ^ "Nedim İpek, a.g.e., p. 17". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  13. ^ "Bilal Şimşir, Turkish Migrations from Rumelia". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  14. ^ "Nedim İpek, a.g.e., p. 21. See also in this regard. İlker Alp, Bulgarian Mezâlimi, p. 22 v. d". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  15. ^ "Atrocites Russes en Asie et en Roumelie Pendant Les Mois Juin-Juillet et Août 1877". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  16. ^ "Zeynep Kerman, June-July and August 1877". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  17. ^ "The Mezâlim Made by the Russians in Asia and Rumelia, Turkish World Research Foundation, Istanbul 1987, p. 228-56". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  18. ^ "ATASE Archive, K. 587, D. 43, F. 1-42/45". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  19. ^ "Nedim İpek, a.g.e., p. 27". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  20. ^ "Zeynep Kerman, a.g.e., p. 14". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  21. ^ "Nedim İpek, a.g.e., p. 133 v. d.". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  22. ^ Kieser, Hans-Lukas; Öktem, Kerem; Reinkowski, Maurus (2015). World War I and the end of the Ottomans from the Balkan Wars to the Armenian genocide (1st ed.). London. ISBN 978-0-75560-909-3.

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