Balkan Wars · War Crimes & Atrocities

The Darkest Hours

The Balkan Wars were accompanied by systematic atrocities against civilian populations that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — which sent an international commission to investigate — documented in a landmark 1914 report. The commission found that all parties to the conflict — Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, and Ottoman forces — engaged in deliberate killing of civilians, destruction of villages, and forced expulsion of populations judged to belong to rival ethnic or religious groups. These were not merely the incidental violence of war but deliberate policies designed to alter the demographic character of contested territories. The Carnegie Commission's report was the first systematic international documentation of what the twentieth century would later call ethnic cleansing, and it was republished in 1993 — at the height of the Yugoslav Wars — because its findings were directly applicable to what was then happening in the same territories. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 80,000 to 150,000, with an additional 400,000–600,000 Muslims displaced from their homes in the former Ottoman territories, many of whom died of disease, cold, and starvation during flight.