Notes on Minorities in the Balkans.

Since 1878 the frontiers of States south of the Danube have changed so often that the creation of numerous minorities in Yugoslavia, Roumania and Greece has been inevitable and the Minorities Treaties have not proved to be an unmixed blessing in dealing with them. There is this to be said, however, at once: that any proven grievance raised at the League in the proper way by such minorities has been listened to and examined impartially by the Council.

The existence of Bulgarian minorities in Roumania and Greece has never been denied, but there has been, since the war, more loose talk about Bulgarian minorities in Yugoslavia than the circumstances warrant. Most of this talk has centred round that part of southern Serbia and northern Greece known in the past as Macedonia. A useful summary on the Macedonian question will be found in the attached print, a glance at which will show that the present frontiers of Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria correspond pretty well to political realities as they existed in 1918. It will also show that the claims of certain agencies in Bulgaria to an interest in the fate of certain so-called Bulgarian minorities in Macedonia has since 1870 been largely manufactured and is at present more than a little artificial. Too much stress cannot be laid on the fact that an autonomous Macedonia would be anachronism, not to say an impossibility. The 25,000 square miles known in the past as Macedonia, will, if only for economic reasons, always be partitioned between Yugoslavia, Greece and Bulgaria in varying proportions. The controversy between the countries concerned has always raged around the Slav element in Macedonia which forms about half of the total population. There are no very clear and definite claims to the possession of Macedonia by the various contestants, and the Peace Treaties of 1918 merely confirm the results of the conquests made by Greece and Yugoslavia as a result of the second Balkan War. Nothing short of another war will ever change them. Since the war the Serbs have claimed the Slav element in Macedonia as Serbs and this claim, when examined, is no more fictitious than the claim of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation that they are Bulbars.