Talk:Kumanovo uprising

Independent reference needed!

It's more than obvious that the article was written by some Serbian. Next time try to be more impartial and less witty. These stories about how people were begging king Milan "on their knees" or how this Stamenko Stošić Torovela (or whoever he was) barely fled to safe heaven after a meeting with Ignatiev is simply ridiculous. First of all, these beggars were Serbian merchants or people who had worked or studied in Serbia. Second, Macedonia was called "Old Serbia" only in Serbia. Nobody else called it like that. And third, these stories about "old Serbs" are mostly taken from Срби сви и свуда. Serbian officials and historians called in this way all kinds of people coming from the lands under Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian control - e.g. Bulgarians/Macedonians, Aromanians, Albanians, Montenegrans, Armenians, etc. - who worked or fought for Serbia at one point or another. Some non-Serbian old Serbs are Uzun-Mirko (of Montenegran origin), Jovan Karamata (a mathematician of Aromanian origin who lived most of his life in Serbia), Georgi Rakovski (one of the main proponents of the Bulgarian Liberation Movement), Vasil Levski (the main engine behind the Bulgarian Political Uprising in 19 cent.), Georgi Pulevski (one of the first Macedonists), and many many others.

Returning back to the Kumanovo uprising: It was a part of a much wider operation of the Serbian government to gain control of as much land from the collapsing Ottoman Empire as possible /for more info, check sr:Начертаније/. Similar things like that uprising were also tried in parts of present-day Bulgaria and Albania. During the Russo-Turkish war, there were many Serbian envoys, traversing the area from Northwestern Bulgaria (including the capital Sofia) up to the Aegean and the Adriatic seas who agitated (both with propaganda and with bribery) the local Christian population to join the Serbian army and to proclaim themselves as Serbs /see sr:Виктор Чолаковић/. The Kumanovo uprising is just the most prominent result of this propaganda. It's obviously not made-up. Locals really rebelled; however, most of the comments, the events, and the interpretations are distorted to serve the Serbian interests. If everything written here was true, then Kosovo, Macedonia and, in a similar line of logic, Western Bulgaria would have been Serbian nowadays... Which they are not! Bezimenen (talk) 23:43, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Article unnecessarily promotes Serbian nationalistic claims regarding the ethnic affiliation of the (christian) population of the wider region

Added POV template.

Article relies heavily on Serbian authors describing the events of the revolt. One of the cited authors wrote at the conclusion of the First World War in 1918, when the Kingdom of Serbia's academic institutions launched a state-sponsored effort to represent the wider region at the Paris Peace Conference as solely populated by Serbs, in order to keep old territorial acquisitions and obtain new ones without plebiscite.

An unnecessary and uncalled for emphasis is put not only on the ethnic characterization of the region's population, but also on singling out Bulgaria as an enemy worse than the Ottoman regime the rebels were fighting - even though Bulgaria would not be established as a state until the Congress of Berlin which concluded later that year, and even after which the administration of Bulgaria would be a temporary Russian one.

The article fails to represent the historical context in which the revolt occurred - a period of state-sponsored ethnic nationalism by the christian Balkan states, which exerted soft power on the christian population of the waning Ottoman Empire. A common practice of the time was for christian locals of an Ottoman province to receive stipends by either the Serbian or Greek government and get educated in the respective country, after which some of these people would return to their homeland and command bands of brigands in accordance with the sponsoring state's national aspirations for the region. Hence why a Serbian-led revolt or Serbian-sponsored activity, military or otherwise, does not equal a Serbian ethnic affiliation of the general populace. Such activities were even recorded in the western regions of what would become the Principality of Bulgaria (the Sandzhak of Sofia).

Numerous contemporary sources, including some earlier Serbian ones, paint a different demographic picture for the region. But it would be unnecessary to include them in this article, as the topic would shift from the revolt itself to the influence of state-sponsored Serbian nationalism in Macedonia and its clash with Bulgarian nationalism, promoted by the Macedonian revolutionary organization and the Bulgarian Exarchate. Instead, the language of the article should be adjusted to bear a more neutral tone and certain sections that deliberately seek to trigger an emotional response on the side of the reader should be dropped completely. IcoK97 (talk) 23:00, 9 February 2024 (UTC)