The Daily News. MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 1911. THE ALBANIAN REVOLT.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 325, 12 June 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 1911. THE ALBANIAN REVOLT.

The colonial reader who attempts to decipher the obscure news of the fighting in the .Albanian Highlands is conscious as he scans the news of the skirmishes and panics of a certain boredom and bewilderment. What does it mean, save that certain clans whose life is battle, whose whole tradition is a tide of feuds and forays, are once more renewing the habits of the hills? Once already since the revolution, and thrice in the latter years of Abdul Hamid, the Albanians of the same northern mountains massed their forces, took a town or two, drove l»ck the first line of the Turkish troops, and scattered sullenly when at last the railways brought up the whole weight of a disciplined army against them. These are tribes which have kept alive the superstitions, the ignorance, the bloodiness, and the chivalry of the middle ages on the white-capped mountains from which one may dimly see the train that meanders up the valleys towards Europe and Vienna, or the liners that ply between Brindisi and Trieste. Empires and conquests have gone over them and left behind hardly the memory of a civilisation. They were obstinate against Hellenism; they learned nothing from Rome; they rejected in turn the influence of Servian tsars and Byzantine emperors. They are to-day what they | must have been when Dodona was an orncle, save only that some are Catholics and filled with the hate of other churches, and some are Moslems while they loathe the Turks. Their life is regulated by an antique code of customary law whiclr prescribes the savage etiquette of their blood-feuds. They speak a language banned alike in mosque and clmrch, and forbidden in the schools. Barren mountains, roadless valleys, difficult ports, the blood-feud and the plague of brigandage, have checked not only commerce and industry, but even the common intercourse of neighboring tribes. They were the scourge which their Ottoman masters had used from time-immemorial to harry the Serb's inthe north, the Bulgars in the centre, and the Creeks in the south. It was policy as well as inertia which kept them ignorant and wild. As The Nation points out, if this were the whole truth about the Albanians, one might see in their revolt only the natural restlessness of savage frontier tribes under a rule which aims at a certain aggressive uniformity. But there is a new fact about the Albanians. Twenty years ago a few pioneers began the work of reducing their curious dialects to writing. Helped in the north mainly by Franciscan priests, and in the south chiefly by the agents of the Bible Society, the movement grew until it has become in recent years a passionate propaganda. Persecuted alike by the Turkish officials and by the flreek hierarchy, it counts its martyrs, its prisoners, and its exiles. It offended the Creeks, who saw in it a revolt against the exotic Hellenic patriotism which they have striven to cultivate in the Orthodox Albanians of the south. It alarmed the Turks, because it formed a link between all the branches of this I

divided race. In their neglected language Moslems and Christians found a comm'% bond, the material of n national sentiment, their backwardness, they are a singularly gifted and attractive race. The greater number of educated Albanians were content to demand liberty for tiie teaching of their onee proscribed language, some sham in the expenditure of the taxes levied in Albania, which hitherto were spent almost wholly outside it, and the nomination of Albanians to official posts in place of the strangers who arc commonly sent among them from Constantinople or Asiatic Turkey. The attitude of the Turks in face of such demands as these has furnished a disastrous example of their failure to govern a race of alien blood and traditions. Their only policy has been that of the gendarme. They have tried to complete their census lists, to perfect their conscription, and to add new taxes to the old. Tliey have rashly ignored tribal customs and tribal autonomy. They have turned a deaf ear to tlift 1 demands that' the taxes levied in Albania should be spent on roads and schools. Worst of all, they have closed the vernacular schools, smashed the printing presses, and attempted by a childish obscurantism to impose the I Arabic script upon Albanian pupils of Moslem parentage. They arc reaping the penalty to-day in a revolt which, as, :,yet, they seem impotent to suppress. The failure of the Young Turks in Albania is only one instance of their failure to conciliate the non-Turkish races of the Empire. Two years ago their volunteers were marching in step with the soldiers of the Committee to retake Constantinople from the reaction. Today we read only of the formation of outlaw bands on the old plan, and with the old programme, while the Bulgarian conscripts who had been enrolled in the Ottoman army are deserting by whole companies at a time. But the real portent of the hour is the close understanding which has been reached between Greeks and Bulgarians. The old regime had the wisdom to persecute one race at a time. While the harrow went over the Bulgarians, the Greeks, were encouraged to expand. The young Turks have at least been impartial. They organised a boycott of Greek commerce, while they oppressed the peasants of the Bulgarian villages, At the Autonomy of both churches, and the independence of both groups of schools, they struck with an even hand. The result has been the growth of a certain fraternity in suffering. The old struggles for pre-eminence, the old disputes over the exact geographical pretensions of the one race or the other, have utterly disappeared. Men who four years, ago were organising murderous bands to prey upon the villages of the other race are now extolling its statesmanship, and boasting the solidity of the understanding which unitcs/them. However firmly united the Balkan races may be, we question whether they would be permitted to work out their own salvation. Beyond them lie the appetites of greater Powers. A united revolt would only avail to make for Austria, and perhaps for Russia, the occasion for an intervention that would be fatal to the liberties of this corner of Europe. The young Turks arc gambling, not with their destinies alone, but with those of the whole of Soutli-Easteru ' Europe. The fair treatment of the nonTurkish races is not as yet even a subject of serious debate and division within the Committee. If it continues in this mood, it is preparing for all the peoples I of its. European inheritance a sombre tragedy, and for the Turkish Empire cither the humiliation of intervention or the certainty of an eventual dismem- < bennent.