Zum Scheitern verurteilt:: Die Carnegie-Kommission in Griechenland

Abstract

This paper examines the Greek attitude towards the Carnegie inquiry on the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars of 1912/13. At first, the study shows that the Greek government had launched long before the setup of the Carnegie inquiry a propaganda campaign accusing mainly Bulgaria of committing terrible massacres against both combatants and civilians. Furthermore, Athens was requesting that the Great Powers allow for an investigation of the Bulgarian war crimes by an international expert commission. Nevertheless, this alleged willingness to shed light on the horrors of the Balkan Wars turned into reluctance when the Carnegie men arrived in Thessaloniki. Before the arrival in Greece, the commission had visited Belgrade where the Serbian government refused cooperation by accusing two commission members, namely Pavel Miliukov and Henry Brailsford, of being pro-Bulgarian. The Greek government as well as the Greek media followed closely how Belgrade turned down the commission and expelled it from Serbia. They did this by showing a complete understanding for the Serbian position. Thus, not surprisingly, the Greek authorities also refused to work with the Carnegie commission when its members reached Thessaloniki at the end of August 1913. Like the Serbs, the Greeks claimed that the objective criteria of the inquiry could not be guaranteed because of Miljukov’s and Brailsford’s pro-Bulgarian bias. The other two members, Samuel Dutton and Justin Godart, were offered individual permission to conduct research, but they both turned the offer down. The Carnegie Report, published in 1914, charged the Greek army and irregulars with war crimes and other violations of humanitarian international law. The Greek reaction was either to completely ignore the report, or, if not so, to dismiss it as a “Bulgarian pamphlet”. The Greek historiography has until now showed little interest in the Carnegie commission and its report, but in the cases it has, the focus has been on the “false” ethnological data on Ottoman Macedonia being introduced into the report by the “Bulgarophile” Miljukov. On the other hand, the Macedonian historiography has in the last years “rediscovered” the Carnegie Report in writing a history of the Balkan Wars as a history of “ethnic cleansing”, even “genocide” against the Macedonian people.