SERVIANS MASSACRED.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 January 1919, Page 3

SERVIANS MASSACRED.

BULGARIAN ATROCITIES. i

ghastly. REVELATIONS.

ATTEMPT TO WIPE OUT RACE. "Here is a story of cold-blooded butchery without etjuai eveu in this war," writes Mr Ward Price from Vranya, Servia, under date October 20. "It is the tale of a deliberate systematic effort by tli© Bulgarians, extending over three months, to exterminate the national spirit of Servia by killing everyone in the parts of the country they occupied whom they thought capable of maintaining it. To my mind the facts which I am albout to relate are crimes which will earn for Bulgaria the odium of civilisation. During these massacres the Germans, by contrast with the Bulgarians, appeared to the inhabitants of Servia as protectors and agents of mercy.

"I have gathered during the last three days from many different sources information and evidence which establish the Bulgarian guilt 'beyond all doubting. Directly they had established themselves on Servian soil in this region the Bulgarians began to change the 'Servians by force into Bulgarians. After forbidding the use of the Servian language, closing the Servian schools, compelling every one to change the ending of his name from the Servian 'itch' to the Bulgarian 'off,' after installing Bulgarian mayors, bishops, tax-collectors, and military police, they arrested in every town and village all the men who belonged to what may be called the intellectual class. | They chose out the Parliamentary deputies, judges, teachers, lawyers, priests, and employers of labor, formed them into gangs, and marched them away. From that time until the defeated Bulgarians evacuated Servia the other day, the friends of these people heard nothing of their fate, but now the ghastly story is known in detail.

TIED TOGETHER AND STABBED.

"The men, numbering at least 3000 from tlie towns and villages of the Vranya region aloiw, were taken in detachments 61 about" 50 at a time to a place which the Bulgarians chose as their slaughterhouse, and there every night one party after anothfer, from December, 1915, to March, 191G, had their throats cut or were stabbed to death. Tlio village whose name the Bulgarians have thus made terrible is a small place called Surdulitza, 20 miles north-east of Vranya. near the Bulgarian frontier. I went there yesterday and saw the graves and the surviving relatives of the 2500 victims to Bulgarian savagery who there met their end.

"The doomed meu ,against whom the Bulgarians had no other charge whatever except that they were patriotic Servians and likely to keep up the national spirit among their fellow-country-men, would arrive almost every day at Surdulitza under strong Bulgar guard. They were locked up in houses which I saw, and then at night inarched down to a gully which I visited, there, tied lour or five together with ropes, they were bayoneted to death and 'buried where they lay. The peasants of Surdulitza offered to dig up the graves to let me see how the heads were severd from the bodies.

A HUMAN SLAUGHTERHOUSE,

"Not all the killing was carried out in lb is gully. On the other aide of the village is a little wood. Every night the peasants of Surdulitza, who were forbidden to leave their houses after sunset, heard men's screams coming from among those trees- They knew too well what was happening, but did not dare to go near. And the following morning the fierce village dogs would bring into the streets human arms and even heads which they had torn off the bodies' of the murdered men. Two thousand five hundred is the local estimate of the number of the Servians who at Surdulitza forfeited their lives to their nationality during the Arts three months of 1{)1(J. Among them was a Parliamentary deputy. I met his widow at Surdulitza, where she had come to look —in vain—for his grave. She told me how one of the Bulgar officers responsible for the long series of murders had at first lived in her house with herself and her husband. This did not prevent him later from sending the deputy to have his throat cut at the shambles of Surdulitza.

ROASTED OVER SLOW FIRES,

'Not more than 10 people were actually killed at Vranya itself, but once a fortnight all the surviving men were ordered out of the town while the Bulgarians ransacked and roibbed their houses under pretext of searching for arms, and sometimes also outraged their women. At Ushevtse, a hamlet to the north of Vranya, 120 men, women, and children, the entira population, were killed in one day. At Vladichi, all the were collected and some of them violated. The rest were tied up and left, until two days later the Bulgarians came back and completed the work of outrage. Last year at Yelashnitsa and Krivafaja, innocent peasants were stripped naked, tied down to braziers, and roasted over slow fires, to make them confess that they possessed hidden arms. Lebane and Lcskovatz were probably tha worst martyred towns of all. At the former place "20 people were beaten to death. "Information about these last townships comes from Servian municipal officials and the principal inhabitants of Vranya. lam personally entirely convinced of the sincerity of these men and of the truth of the terrible charges they bring. I spoke with them myself in French or German, and there was too much spontaneity in thc-ir answers and too much resemblance 'between the accounts which different individuals gave at different times for the idea of a faked up talc to be admissible.

PUNISHMENT FO3 THE GUILTY

"And r.0'.7 what is to bo done to punisli tlii s cynically-planned and brutallyexecuted policy of murder? The names of the officers directly responsible for the butchery are known. The ■peasants of Vranya and Surdulitza litter them with the same dread as that witli which men o£ the English West County must have spoken of Judge Jeffreys after the Bloody Assize. They .tell me at Vranya that the killiiig did «ot begin until a certain Bnlgar general fcid visited the town. As the only British witness who lias yet bad the opportunity to investigate crimes, I -would sincerely suggest that we owe it ■to'our iSevviaa allies, wlio have suffered so terribly in the common cause, that r w should immediately demand the apRsaranee before an inter-allied court-