The Treatment of Prisoners of War Captured by the Greek Army during the Balkan Wars of 1912–13

In 1899 and 1907, international conventions providing for more humane treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) were signed at The Hague. But these new international norms seem to have done little to alleviate the mistreatment of POWs in the Balkan Wars in southeastern Europe in 1912–13. This article seeks to explain why this occurred by using the treatment of Ottoman and Bulgarian POWs held by the Greeks in the 1912–13 wars as a test case. Two intermingled factors seem to have led to the violation of the Hague Conventions: the inability of economically strapped Greece to cope successfully with such an urgent humanitarian situation and the negative stereotypes of the enemy, which were enhanced by combat brutalization. The participants in the two Balkan wars appropriated long extant European stereotypes of Balkan peoples as backward and uncivilized and applied them to their opponents.