The Foreign Office has forwarded to the Committee of the
Macedonian Relief Fund a despatch, with a covering letter from the British Ambassador at Constantinople, from Mr. R. W. Graves, the Consul-General at Salonica. The despatch, which describes the condition of the Southern district of the vilayet of Monastir, recently visited by Messrs. Nevinson and Harris, emphasises the urgent need of further funds to meet the dire distress now prevailing in the district, and to avert the serious danger of famine, very little ploughing and sowing having been done for want of cattle and seed. It is further added that the money distributed by the Turkish Government for rebuilding the villages—amounting to about 15s. per family—has in many cases been refused, the villagers being unable to undertake the obligation to rebuild with such utterly inadequate means. Corroborative evidence is fur- nished by the Times correspondent who, in Wednesday's issue, narrates his experiences during a month's travel in the interior. Of tbe hundred and fifty villages destroyed in the Monastir vilayet, he personally saw fifty in absolute ruins, all of them Bulgarian. While admitting that the Komitajia in the majority of cases gave cause for this devastation, he holds the terrible punishment meted out by the troops and Bashi- Bazouks to the innocent and guilty alike to be out of all pro- portion to the offence committed. The search for arms is 11E11 being actively prosecuted with the accompaniments of
flogging, extortion, and outrage, and "unless prompt steps are taken to put an end to this state of affairs, another rising in the spring is inevitable, and the execution of any reform scheme will be practically impossible."
Previous page
