Report of the International Commission on the Balkan Wars
The Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars is a document published in Washington D.C. in 1914 by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The International Commission consisted of university professors and other prominent individuals from France, Great Britain, United States, Germany, Austria and Russia. Among the members of the Commission there were three Nobel Prize winners.[1]
The Commission went to the participating countries at the beginning of August 1913 and remained until the end of September. After returning to Paris all the material was processed and released in the form of a detailed report. The report speaks of the numerous violations of international conventions and war crimes committed during the Balkan Wars.[2][3] The information collected was published by the Endowment in the early summer of 1914, but was soon overshadowed by the beginning of the First World War.[4]
According to Mark Levene in 2020, the report is "thoroughly documented and still highly regarded".[5]
The Carnegie Endowment reissued the report uncritically in 1993, leading some to criticise the decision for anachronism and reinforcing the stereotype of 'Balkan violence'. Maria Todorova has discussed the reissued report (and its introduction by George Kennan) as an example of 'Balkanism'.[6]
Members of the Commission
[edit]- Josef Redlich (Austria-Hungary, professor of law at the University of Vienna)
- Walther Schücking (Germany, professor of public international law, the first German judge at the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague)
- Francis Wrigley Hirst (United Kingdom, editor of The Economist)
- Henry Noel Brailsford (United Kingdom, journalist)
- Paul-Henri-Benjamin Balluet d'Estournelles (France, senator, winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize for Peace)
- Justin Godart (France, politician, French National Assembly)
- Pavel Milyukov (Russia, historian, member of State Duma)
- Samuel Train Dutton (Columbia University, United States).
References
[edit]- ^ Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: a modern history (p. 72)
- ^ "GREEK AND BULGAR BOTH HELD GUILTY; Balkan Combatants Denounced by Carnegie Commission for Their Atrocities; All Laws of War Broken; Turkish Influence Held Responsible: Nations' Duty to the Balkans Outlined". The New York Times: 3. 18 May 1914.
- ^ "Greeks Denounce Carnegie Board: Commission's Report on Balkan War Atrocities Grossly Unfair, Legation Declares; Greeks Alone Condemned; Hellenic Government Takes Exception to Excuse That Bulgarians Had Provocation for Their Butcheries". The New York Times: 3. 8 June 1914.
- ^ The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with A New Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict by George F. Kennan. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 1993 – via Internet Archive.
- ^ Levene, Mark (2020). "Through a Glass Darkly: The Resurrection of Religious Fanaticism as First Cause of Ottoman Catastrophe: The thirty-year genocide. Turkey's destruction of its Christian minorities, 1894–1924, by Benny Morris and Dror Ze'evi, Cambridge, MA, and London, Harvard University Press, 2019, 672 pp., USD$35.00 (hardcover), ISBN 9780674916456". Journal of Genocide Research. 22 (4): 553–560. doi:10.1080/14623528.2020.1735560.
- ^ Todorova, Maria (2009-04-15). Imagining the Balkans (1st ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 4–5. ISBN 9780195387865.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
External links
[edit]- (in English) Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 1914. Retrieved 25 September 2018 – via Internet Archive.