Protestna nota Srbije Skoplju zbog granice « Result #9 on Apr 2, 2008, 12:17pm »
Makedonskom ministarstvu spoljnih poslova danas je uručena protestna nota Srbije zbog formiranja zajedničke tehničke komisije za demarkaciju granice između Makedonije i Kosova.
U noti Beograda se ističe da odluka o početku demarkacija granice sa pretstavnicima Prištine znači nepoštovanje teritorijalnog suvereniteta i integritet Republike Srbije. Zamenik šefa makedonske diplomatije Zoran Petrov, koji je primio notu od ambasadora Srbije u Makedoniji Zorana Popovića, rekao je da ono što je navedeno u noti Beograda neprihvatljivo. Petrov je rekao da Makedonija ostaje na opredeljenju za očuvavanje i unapređivanje dobrosusedskih odnosa, ali da pritom vodi računa o svojim nacionalnim interesima. Legitimno pravo Makedonije, rekao je Petrov, je da izvrši obeležavaje granice sa svojim susedima, što je u ovom slučaju precizno navedeno u planu Martija Ahtisarija, koji je prihvatila međunarodna zajednica, tvrdi se u saopštenju Ministarstva spoljnih poslova Bivše jugoslovenske republike Makedonije.
Re: The principles of Ottoman rule in the Balkans « Result #10 on Mar 30, 2008, 8:10am »
The Ottomans: From Frontier Warriors To Empire Builders Author: Robert Guisepi Date: 1992 Part Three Ottoman Empire, Islamic Heartlands, And Qing China Author: Schwartz, Stuart B. Date: 1992
Between The Western Powers: The Struggle Of The Ottoman Empire For Survival
By the early 18th century, the days of the Ottoman Empire appeared numbered. In part the crisis was brought on by a succession of weak rulers within a political and social order that was centered on the sultan at the top. Inactive or inept sultans opened the way for seemingly endless power struggles between rival ministers, religious experts, and the commanders of the Janissary corps. Competition between factions of the elite further eroded effective leadership within the empire, exposing it to external assaults by its European enemies and weakening its control over the population and resources it claimed to rule. Provincial officials colluded with the local landowning classes, the ayan, to cheat the sultan of a good portion of the taxes due him, and they skimmed all the revenue they could from the already impoverished peasantry in the countryside. As in other preindustrial civilizations, the peasants responded to these threats to their livelihood with flight (if open lands or less exacting landlords were within reach), banditry, and outright rebellions in various parts of the empire.
At the same time, the position of the artisan workers in the towns deteriorated due to competition from imported manufactures from Europe. This led, particularly in the 18th and early 19th centuries, to urban riots in which members of artisan guilds or young mens' associations often took a leading role. Merchants within the empire, especially those who belonged to minority religious communities, such as the Jews and Christians, grew more and more dependent on commercial dealings with their European counterparts. This pattern accelerated the influx of Western manufactured goods that was steadily undermining handicraft industries within the empire, thereby increasing Ottoman economic dependence on some of its most threatening European political rivals.
With the Ottoman leaders embroiled in internal squabbles and their armies deprived of the resources needed to match the great advances in weaponry and training made by European rivals, the far-flung Ottoman possessions proved an irresistible temptation for their neighbors. In the early decades of the 18th century, the Austrian Habsburg dynasty was the main beneficiary of Ottoman decadence. The long-standing threat to Vienna was forever vanquished, and the Ottomans were pushed out of Hungary and the northern Balkans.
In the later 1700s, the Russian Empire, strengthened by Peter the Great's forced Westernization (see Chapter 24), became the main threat to the Ottomans' survival. As military setbacks mounted and the Russians advanced across the steppes toward warm water ports in the Black Sea, the Ottomans' weakness was underscored by their attempts to forge alliances with other Christian powers. As the Russians gobbled up poorly defended Ottoman lands in the Caucasus and Crimea, the subject Christian peoples of the Balkans grew more and more restive under Ottoman rule. In 1804 a major uprising broke out in Serbia that was repressed after years of difficult and costly military campaigns. Military force could not quell the Greek revolt that broke out in the early 1820s, and by 1830 the Greeks had regained their independence after centuries of Ottoman rule. By 1867 Serbia was also free, and by the late 1870s the Ottomans had been driven from virtually the whole of the Balkans and thus most of the European provinces of their empire. In the following decades Istanbul itself was repeatedly threatened by Russian armies or those of the smaller Balkan States.
Reform And Survival
Despite almost two centuries of unrelieved defeats on the battlefield and steady losses of territory, the Ottoman Empire somehow managed to survive into the 20th century. In part this was due to divisions between the European powers, each of which feared that the others would gain more from the total dismemberment of the empire. In fact the British concern to prevent the Russians from controlling Istanbul - thus gaining direct access to and threatening British naval dominance in the Mediterranean - led them to prop up the tottering Ottoman regime repeatedly in the last half of the 19th century. Ultimately, the Ottomans' survival depended on reforms from within - reforms initiated by the sultans and their advisors at the top of the imperial system and carried out in stages over most of the 19th century. At each stage, reform initiatives intensified tensions within the ruling elite: Some advocated far-reaching change along European lines; others argued for reforms based on precedents from the early Ottoman period; and still others had a vested interest in blocking change of any sort.
These deep divisions within the Ottoman elite rendered reform a dangerous enterprise. Though modest innovations, including the introduction of the first printing press in 1727, had been enacted in the 18th century, Sultan Selim III (1789-1807) believed that bolder initiatives were required if the dynasty and empire were to survive. But his reform efforts, which were aimed at improving administrative efficiency and building a new army and navy capable of reversing a century of defeats at the hands of the European powers, angered powerful factions within the bureaucracy. They were also viewed by the Janissary corps, which had long been the dominant force within the Ottoman military (see Chapter 26), as a direct and vital threat. Selim's modest initiatives cost him his throne - he was toppled by a Janissary revolt in 1807 - and his life.
Two decades later, a more skillful sultan, Mahmud II, succeeded where Selim III had failed. After secretly building a small professional army with the help of European advisors, in 1826 Mahmud II ordered his agents to incite a mutiny of the Janissaries. This began when the angry Janissaries overturned the huge soup kettles in their mess area. With little thought of preparation, the Janissaries poured into the streets of Istanbul, more a mob than a military force, where they were shocked to be confronted by the sultan's well-trained new army. The confrontation ended in the slaughter of the Janissaries, their families, and the Janissaries' religious allies.
After cowing the ayan or provincial notables into at least formal submission to the throne, Mahmud II launched a program of much more far-reaching reforms than Selim III had attempted. Though the ulama, or religious experts, and some of Mahmud's advisors argued for self-strengthening through a return to the Ottoman and Islamic past, Mahmud II patterned his reform program on Western precedents. After all, the Western powers had made a shambles of his empire. He established a diplomatic corps on Western lines and exchanged ambassadors with the European powers. The Westernization of the army was expanded from Mahmud's secret force to the whole military establishment. European military advisors, both army and navy, were imported to supervise the overhaul of Ottoman training, armament, and officers' education.
In the following decades, Western influences were pervasive at the upper levels of Ottoman society, particularly during the period of the Tanzimat reforms between 1839 and 1876. University education was reorganized on Western lines, including the introduction of training in the European sciences and mathematics. State-run postal and telegraph systems were introduced in the 1830s and railways were begun in the 1860s. Newspapers were established in the major towns of the empire, extensive legal reforms were enacted, and in 1876 a constitution, based heavily on European prototypes, was promulgated. These legal reforms greatly improved the position of minority religious groups, whose role in the Ottoman economy increased steadily.
Some groups were adversely affected by these changes that opened the empire more and more to Western influences. This was especially true of the artisans, whose position was gravely weakened by an 1838 treaty with the British that removed import taxes and other barriers to foreign trade that had protected indigenous producers from competition from the West. Other social groups gained little from the Tanzimat reforms. This was particularly true of women. Though proposals for women's education and the end to seclusion, polygamy, and veiling were debated in Ottoman intellectual circles from the 1860s onward, few improvements in the position of women - even among the elite classes - were won until after the fall of the dynasty in 1908.
Repression And Revolt
Though the reforms initiated by the sultans and their advisors did improve somewhat the Ottomans' ability to fend off, or at least deflect, the assaults of foreign aggressors, they increasingly threatened the dynasty responsible for them. Western-educated bureaucrats, military officers, and professionals came increasingly to view the sultanate as a major barrier to even more radical reforms - some of which involved proposals for constitutional checks on the rulers' authority - and the full transformation of society. The new elites also clashed with conservative but powerful groups, such as the ulama and ayan, who had a vested interest in preserving as much as possible of the old order. There were also divisions within the new elite between those who had derived great benefit from the early reforms and were wary of further changes, and those who saw the reforms already enacted as the entering wedge for a much more radical restructuring of Ottoman institutions and society.
The Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid responded to the growing threat from Westernized officers and civilians by attempting to return to despotic absolutism during his long reign from 1878 to 1908. He nullified the constitution, restricted civil liberties, particularly the freedom of the press, and deprived Westernized elite groups of the considerable initiative they had gained in the formulation of imperial policies. Legal safeguards were flaunted as dissidents or even suspected troublemakers were summarily imprisoned, and sometimes tortured and killed. But the deep impact that decades of reform had made upon the empire was demonstrated by the fact that even Abdul Hamid continued to push for Westernization in certain areas. The military continued to adopt European arms and techniques, increasingly under the instruction of German advisors. In addition, railways, including the famed line that linked Berlin to Baghdad, and telegraph lines were constructed between the main population centers, more often than not under the aegis of German investors and supervisors. Western-style educational institutions continued to grow, and judicial reforms continued. Under Abdul Hamid the old bureaucratic apparatus remained largely in place and social reforms were minimal, but the military and communications infrastructure for a modern state was established.
The despotism of Abdul Hamid came to an abrupt end in the nearly bloodless coup of 1908. Resistance to his authoritarian rule had led exiled Turkish intellectuals and political agitators to found an organization, the Ottoman Society for Union and Progress, in Paris in 1889. Though professing their loyalty to the Ottoman regime, the Young Turks, as members of the society came to be known, were determined to restore the 1876 constitution and resume far-reaching reforms within the empire. Clandestine printing presses operated by the Young Turks turned out tracts denouncing the regime and outlining the further steps to be taken to modernize and thus save the empire. Assassinations were attempted and coups plotted, but until 1908 all were undone by a combination of divisions within the ranks of the Westernized dissidents and police countermeasures.
Sympathy within the military for the 1908 coup had much to do with its success, as did the fact that only a handful of the sultan's supporters were willing to die defending the regime. Though a group of officers came to power, they restored the constitution and press freedoms and promised reforms in education, administration, and even the status of women. The sultan was retained as a political figurehead and the highest religious authority in Islam.
Unfortunately, the officers soon became embroiled in factional fights that took up much of the limited time remaining before the outbreak of World War I. In addition, their hold on power was shaken as they lost a new round of wars in the Balkans and against Italy over the Ottomans' last remaining possession in North Africa, Libya. Just as the sultans had before them, however, the Young Turk officers managed to stave off the collapse of the empire with last-gasp military victories and by playing the hostile European powers against each other.
Though it is difficult to know how the Young Turks would have fared if it had not been for the outbreak of the First World War, their failure to resolve a number of critical issues did not bode well for the future. They had overthrown the sultan, but they could not bring themselves to give up the empire ruled by Turks for over 600 years. The peoples most affected by their decision to salvage what was left of the empire were the Arabs of the Fertile Crescent and coastal Arabia who still remained under Ottoman control. Arab leaders in Beirut and Damascus had initially favored the 1908 coup because they believed it would bring about the end of their long domination by the Turks. To their dismay, the Arabs discovered that the Young Turks not only meant to continue their subjugation, but that they were determined to enforce state control to a degree unthinkable to the later Ottoman sultans. The quarrels between the leaders of the Young Turk coalition and the growing resistance in the Arab portions of what was left of the Ottoman Empire were quite suddenly cut short by a much larger global crisis brought on by the outbreak of general war in Europe in August 1914. Turkish entry into and defeat in the First World War brought about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. This also gave rise to the leader, Mustafa Kemal or Ataturk, and some of the forces that proved critical in the emergence of the modern nation of Turkey from the ruins of the empire. However able a military commander he might have been, Ataturk's successes would not have been possible without the struggles and reforms of the last century and a half of the Ottoman Empire.
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