Les possibilités pour la réconciliation

The novel comment tuer apostol (how to kill apostol) by the macedonian writer slobodan micković (1935-2002) first appeared in 1994. Anyone familiar with the cliché image of the ottoman empire as dominated by asian despotism, obscurantism and corruption will be surprised: alongside time-worn veterans of the sublime porte, there are the so-called young turks, innovators who fought to modernize and, if you will, europeanize their country. The young turks included ouvaïs-bey, an army colonel, the novel's protagonist. The story is set in 1908 when, under the pressure of new forces within turkish society, the sultan was forced to accept reform. In keeping with the ideas that were infiltrating what we now call turkey, ouvaïs-bey is haunted by his past: he was still a child when his father was murdered. The culprit was supposedly apostol, who belonged to a group of rebel macedonians who resisted the power of the ottomans. Raised with a taste for vengeance, ouvaïs-bey led numerous campaigns to capture the legendary chief of the 'comitadji'. He finally managed to arrest him, in order to find, just as the wounded rebel is dying in agony, that apostol is innocent and that his father's killers were actually turkish bandits. Thus all the hatred toward this man that he harboured, all his dreams of revenge, suddenly lose their meaning. Whether or not there'd been any chance of reconciliation, he lost it once and for all, he now realized. It was all a terrible misunderstanding. And then the rebel chief reveals a bomb and they all die in the explosion. The author's idea is thus clarified: the two peoples — the oppressors and the oppressed — could have peacefully coexisted, with equal rights, in a reformed society. But dawn broke too late. The moral of the story ? Multiethnicity is all about burying hatchets