Berlin (Self-Governed Province of Brandenburg):
Vorwärts, December 16th, 1920, p. 1:
EBERT FIRST TO FIND CLEAR WORDS FOR SERBIAN ATROCITIES
by Friedrich Stampfer [1]
To-day one year ago, Friedrich Ebert has been appointed as Federal High Commissioner for Refugees by the E.F.P.’s General Secretary, Aristide Briand. [2] Since then, comrade Ebert has overseen an admirably fast co-ordination of prior refugee relief administrations of various member states and their massive expansion under the new common administration. On this year’s Christmas Eve, the first refugees – from Königsberg [3] to Adana [4] – will be able to celebrate in warm, clean, and dry buildings instead of tents [5], and all of them can enjoy a good warm meal instead of fearing the spectre of starvation. Tens of thousands of orphans have received schooling in accordance with the new E.O.E.C.W. Charter, and instead of epidemics killing at will, there are doctors of the E.H.O. [6] looking after them.
Comrade Ebert’s institution is, if not the only one of the E.F.P.’s institutions created in Chantilly which works, then certainly the one which works most impressively. It has defined its mission quite clearly as one of immediate relief, and it acts vigorously upon it. Instead of lengthy negotiations with the immature institutions of the National Associations and the Cantonal Administrations, it has freed up direct money and support from the Western Yugoslavian Mandate. In exchange, it has abstained as unambiguously from helping where others are getting along well already, refusing any demands for the allocation of funds by Belgium’s, France’s, Poland’s, Greece’s, Ukraine’s and Russia’s governments for their own return programmes, directing them diplomatically towards the European Recovery Fund.
Now, as our continent faces another horror the likes of which we had thought overcome in the new era of peace, the Victorious Powers and the statesmen they have appointed to preside over the institutions of their covenant are either shamelessly silent, or half-hearted and pussy-footed – all of them, except for Friedrich Ebert and the helpless High Commissioner Jules Destrée {7]. Destrée, whose commission is self-blocked by Serbian vetoes, has repeatedly called on the other mandate powers to step up their presence and uphold the Statute. The EFP may be a toothless tiger without the engagement of its largest members, but over the past months, this tiger has not even roared. General Secretary Briand holds eloquent speeches on democratic principles and virtues, but looks the other way when the Unitarist dictatorship tramples these principles and virtues in the Kingdom of Serbia and the Western Yugoslav territories it occupies [8]. The Hague apparatus has not been tasked with apprehending and indicting Serbian officers and Chetniks responsible for the murder of innocent women and children under the eyes of a petrified continent. Nobody is even considering sending an intervention army to stop the horrors in Belgrade and Osijek, Goražde and Ohrid. [9]
Our upright comrade and honourable High Commissioner for Refugees, though, has found the necessary clarity: “Murder, rape, starvation, mutilation - this human catastrophe has only one culprit: Serbia’s military dictatorship. If it cannot be stopped, not only the poor wretched inhabitants of the Balkans, but our entire continent and its agreements on peace, liberty and co-operation for progress and prosperity will become its victims. The order of peace must hold, and the promises of Paris must not become dead letters. Our continued engagement in Western Yugoslavia is of vital importance to hundreds of thousands, but it only remains possible if the nations of the covenant honour their promises of protecting the free peoples of the Balkans from murderous aggression.” Not a single word needs to be added to this. To let chauvinism and violent oppression of the population triumph in one place means to let it triumph everywhere. It is the responsibility of the continental democracies with the necessary means at hand to prevent it from advancing another single step. Can it be true that a German social democrat has to remind them of this lesson? Comrades, let us help his voice be heard, and join in the marches this weekend to protest against the murdering of our Yugoslavic brethren and the war-mongering of the Serbian chauvinistic tyranny!
[1] An OTL supporter of Ebert’s policies who is, like IOTL, editor-in-chief of the SPD’s party newspaper.
[2] With Germany and Prussia both lacking central governments, Friedrich Ebert has not found his place in the new post-imperial German political landscape. Luxemburg’s council regime in the second half of 1919 looking for him as a “war criminal” because he had voted in favour of the war loans did not help, either. And so, Ebert gladly accepted when Briand extended a hand towards him, in a gesture aimed at reconciling Germans with the EFP and indicating the possibility of Germans participating in it.
[3] In Königsberg in the Self-Governed Province of East Prussia, almost a third of the approximately 60,000 Germans who have fled Latvia and Estonia are sheltered – some seeking to find a new home here, in relative proximity to the regions where they came from; but for most, this was planned as a merely provisional solution until a German, or at least Prussian, government could organise their allotment. Since no such government exists anymore, the provisional stopgap has become more permanent than planed.
[4] Adana is not only the capital of the "Provisional Government of the Free State of Cilicia" and the "Great Assembly of Cilicia", but also hosts a sizable French military presence. Since the former are, as the French high commissioner
Louis Franchet d`Espèrey puts it "mere squabbling messes", the French can (unfortunately! but it cannot be helped!) not leave the protectorate, ehm, free state to its own devices (just yet! ...). Here, thus, where the French are running the show, large camps of Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek refugees, some of whom have been on the move for half a decade now, have coalesced.
(Btw, Franchet d'Espèrey taking the place of OTL's French imperial face to the locals, Henri Gouraud, reacts to a suggestion by
@Falecius.)
[5] Ebert is interested in the “Atterbury System” (called after a US architect who built the first settlement area out of prefabricated concrete slabs (in Queens), and so his institution has begun experimenting with this possibility of erecting cheap new buildings very fast.
[6] EOECW is the European Organization for Education and Children’s Welfare, while EHO is the European Health Organization, two more institutions of the EFP we have already talked about in Update 52 and which by now have begun working seriously.
[7] If you remember, the Belgian socialist Jules Destrée got to implement his “personal statehood” concept as chairman of the EFP Mandate Commission for Western Yugoslavia.
[8] Time to spell out what happened in Serbia, and what on Earth “Unitarism” is!
So... there has been a coup d´état in Serbia in the spring of 1920, in which not only the elected Prime Minister Nikola Pašić is shot and replaced by his scheming and reckless party colleague
Puniša Račić, but also a group of anti-EFP military leaders around the old general
Stepa Stepanović and radically nationalist Chetniks led by
Kosta Pećanac have taken control of all key institutions, dissolved parliament, outlawed the IRSDLP and the Independent Radical Party, shut down their newspapers and begun dragging political opponents from their homes and shooting them without trial, all with the consent of Prince Regent (soon to be king) Alexander.
“Unitarism”, the new ideology to which many of the conspirators subscribe to some degree, is the brainchild of
Jovan Hadži-Vasiljević, leader of the ultra-nationalist
Society of Saint Sava, and
Jovan Dučić, the poet and leader of the equally ultra-nationalist N
arodna Odbrana. “Unitarism” or “Unificationism” - its Serbian name is “Ujedinjenizam” – plays on the double message of a) irredentistically “uniting” the Serbs in the Kingdom of Montenegro, the Vojvodina Plebiscite Zone, and the Western Yugoslavian Mandate into one state, i.e. into the current Kingdom and b) overcoming the internal differences in this state and sharing one will, one opinion, one culture. This culture is understood as Orthodox Christian – and indeed important figures in the church support the new regime – and purely Serbian, united behind its heroic monarchs in its perennial frontier fight against the heathen enemies of Christianity, which today are not only Muslim “Turks” (by which Bosnians and Albanians are also meant), but also secularists of liberal-radical or socialist persuasion, who have only sowed discord among the Serbs and thus brought about its weakening. (Well, in fact Serbia has never been as large and powerful as it was in 1919 since the 14th century, but you know...) As you can probably tell, this ideology owes deeply to Integralist nationalism.
@The Ghost of Danton has asked in post #970 already about the emergence of a new post-war “chauvinistic ideology” of the far right... well, here it is. The idea of having it take place in Serbia came to me when
@lukedalton reasoned in post #804 that “Mutilated Victory” would be a Serbian coinage ITTL. (“Unakažena pobeda”?)
Račić, as the new “marshall” in this dictatorial Serbia, has remobilised the army and marched a good part of it into Western Yugoslavia, where it ensures that nobody stops extremist Chetniks from inflicting a similar kind of terror to that which is already haunting Serbia onto the heterogenous population of the Serbian-controlled parts of Western Yugoslavia. The “Goražde Bulge” was the first intrusion of Serbian forces into a Western Yugoslav canton which was supposed to be controlled by another power: the UoE, who had but a few dozen soldiers around who quietly surrendered and were left to leave – Kerensky was foaming at the mouth after this incident, but with Volsky excluding any major new military commitment on the Balkans, things were left at political protest and unilateral trade sanctions, which did not impress the Serbs much, so new offensives are prepared.
This “victory” was celebrated e.g. by the new regime’s most prolific journalistic supporter,
Krsta Cicvarić of the yellow paper
Beogradski dnevnik owned by pro-Unitarist press tycoon Dušan Paranos (at least he is now a tycoon ITTL), who derided “Russia’s” Socialist-Revolutionary political leaders in the most obscene language, consistent with Dučić’s view that the Revolutionaries and Socialists have weakened Russia by allowing it to fall apart and alienating it from its Orthodox Christian character and natural monarchic form of government, so that Serbia must now pick up the orphaned banner of Panslavism.
The atrocities mentioned here and in the following are directed mostly against Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosnians, socialists, supporters of the old parliament-backed government like
Ljubomir Davidović, Hungarians, and Macedonians (“Southern Serbs”) who stubbornly refuse to denounce a “Bulgarian” identity and accept a Serb one.
While the system bears many parallels to various fascist regimes of OTL, one important particularity stands out: there is no unifying, all-encompassing and all-controlling state party here, and no cultically venerated leader yet. I believe that these elements, while certainly also connectable to older absolutist reminiscences, were to some extent also inspired by the victorious Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, which had turned the Soviet regime into a one-party state where Lenin (and later Stalin even more) enjoyed an almost divine status. Now, I have learned my Frankfurt School Sociology well at uni, and I do believe that the “Authoritarian Personality” tends to look to a strong male leader, but would that always mean one leader for the entire system? Serbia, at the moment, is experimenting with the King, the Marshall, and various generals and Chetnik leaders as such “Führer”. Its aggressively expansionist militancy is also a clear divergence from the Integralism of a Maurras, owing to the geopolitical situation in which little Serbia finds itself.
Thus, in spite of its name, the new Serbian regime still has various heterogeneous pillars of power, and potential rivalries between them are a predictable breaking line of the system. Likewise, there is of course still opposition: while socialist and liberal radical leaders might be killed, their underlying movements undoubtedly prepare underground resistance. Even in the military, there are clear rifts which can be traced back to preceding decades: right now, remnants of the
Black Hand network (which had suffered its decapitation in 1917) have gained the upper hand, but their formerly powerful
White Hand opponents cannot be entirely removed and eradicated (just like the other way round), so the army certainly isn’t a monolithic factor, either. But, so far, the new regime has pocketed a few easy triumphs, and the opposition is condemned to lie low or operate from a Bulgarian, Hungarian, or Romanian exile.
[9] While Belgrade as the capital is an evident place where violence against the opponents of the new regime takes place, Osijek sees not only Croats, but primarily IRSDLP members and affiliated general-striking unionised workers (which of course sometimes overlap with being ‘Croats’, too) targeted; Goražde has a Muslim majority which is massacred or convinced to flee, and in Ohrid, pro-Unitarist mayor
Temko Popov is organising violence against recalcitrant “Bulgarians”.
Alas, this has turned out more into an introduction of Serbian alt-fascism than an update on refugees - so... which refugees have not been mentioned?
There was only a very brief mention of refugees who are able to return home but need help in rebuilding it – that is most certainly the case within France and Belgium, Italy, the Baltic FRs, parts of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Then, there are other refugees whose displacement looks more permanent at the moment. That is probably the case of the Greek and Armenian refugees who did not come from areas which the Peace Treaty with the Ottoman Empire has assigned to Greece, the Armenian Federative Republic of the UoE, or French-controlled Cilicia, and also of Turks who have fled from territories now controlled by Greece (not so much in Thrace, where an international force is keeping peace for the moment, but along the Ionian and Pontic coasts) and Armenia. The fate of the Baltic Germans looks similar.
Compared to OTL, though, especially the lower number of displaced Greeks (including virtually no Greeks leaving the UoE as opposed to hundreds of thousands leaving the Soviet Union IOTL) makes for a lower total of this group.
And then there are refugees with which we’re accustomed from OTL’s post-WW1 era but who do not appear at all, or at least only marginal when comapred to OTL: Expelled or fled anti-Bolshevik Russians, Ukrainians etc. Even though Tsar Nikolai II. and his family, who by now have continued their journey and relocated from North America to Britain, are certainly not the only Russians in political exile – some opponents of the Revolutionary regime who have fled the VeCheKist suppression, some collaborators with the Markov regime fleeing from retribution will have joined them dispersed across various countries –, the face of the “immigrants from Russia” in developed Western countries ITTL is not going to be a White Russian political circle, nor the stereotypical “Russian countess”, but that of migrant workers seeking a better life in North America or elsewhere. On the other side of the spectrum, although that was a smaller number IOTL, there are no communists fleeing Hungary after the fall of the soviet regime there, and ending up everywhere from the United States (like
he or
he) over
Germany to, of course, the Soviet Union.
@Nuka1 has asked about Anatolia, and while some aspects of Anatolian developments have been touched upon by this update, others have not. I’ll have to address in a separate authorial update (next week?) the questions of
- Greece in 1920 and its definite borders in Anatolia
- Italy in Anatolia
- the collapse of the Turkish nationalist struggle, the fate of its leaders, and its legacy
- the Ottoman government
- and the status and dilemmas of the International Administration of the Straits.
I have a plan for an in-universe update on Anatolian matters, but it’s further down the line in the 1920s, so these questions need to be answered now more directly.
Kurdistan is missing from the list, but in my narrative plans I want to include it in a different in-universe update in which I’m planning to look at various local events and developments in Persia, Kurdistan, Central Asia, Arabia etc. from a specific angle. (One which does have a relation to Ottoman issues, but more as a consequence of what happened to it, not exactly a part of its partition.)
