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Terrorists and Freedom Fighters

S >> Sam Vaknin >> Terrorists and Freedom Fighters



Terrorists and Freedom Fighters


1st EDITION


Sam Vaknin, Ph.D.


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Lidija Rangelovska


Lidija Rangelovska
A Narcissus Publications Imprint, Skopje 2002

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C O N T E N T S


I. Terrorists and Freedom Fighters
II. Macedonia to the Macedonians
III. The Black Hand
IV. The Insurgents and the Swastika
V. KLA - The Army of Liberation
VI. Appendix: Pathological Narcissism, Group Behaviour and
Terrorism
VII. Appendix: The Crescent and the Cross
VIII. The Author
IX. About "After the Rain"




Terrorists and Freedom Fighters



"'Unbounded' morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even
in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of
diminishing returns applies to morality."

Thomas Sowell

There's a story about Robespierre that has the preeminent
rabble-rouser of the French Revolution leaping up from his chair
as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside.

"I must see which way the crowd is headed," he is reputed to
have said: "For I am their leader."
http://www.salon.com/tech/books/1999/11/04/new_optimism/

People who exercise violence in the pursuit of what they hold to
be just causes are alternately known as "terrorists" or "freedom
fighters".

They all share a few common characteristics:

1. A hard core of idealists adopt a cause (in most cases, the
freedom of a group of people). They base their claims on
history - real or hastily concocted, on a common heritage,
on a language shared by the members of the group and, most
important, on hate and contempt directed at an "enemy". The
latter is, almost invariably, the physical or cultural
occupier of space the idealists claim as their own.

2. The loyalties and alliances of these people shift
effortlessly as ever escalating means justify an ever
shrinking cause. The initial burst of grandiosity inherent
in every such undertaking gives way to cynical and bitter
pragmatism as both enemy and people tire of the conflict.

3. An inevitable result of the realpolitik of terrorism is the
collaboration with the less savoury elements of society.
Relegated to the fringes by the inexorable march of common
sense, the freedom fighters naturally gravitate towards
like minded non-conformists and outcasts. The organization
is criminalized. Drug dealing, bank robbing and other
manner of organized and contumacious criminality become
integral extensions of the struggle. A criminal corporatism
emerges, structured but volatile and given to internecine
donnybrooks.

4. Very often an un-holy co-dependence develops between the
organization and its prey. It is the interest of the
freedom fighters to have a contemptible and tyrannical
regime as their opponent. If not prone to suppression and
convulsive massacres by nature - acts of terror will
deliberately provoke even the most benign rule to abhorrent
ebullition.

5. The terrorist organization will tend to emulate the very
characteristics of its enemy it fulminates against the
most. Thus, all such groups are rebarbatively
authoritarian, execrably violent, devoid of human empathy
or emotions, suppressive, ostentatious, trenchant and often
murderous.

6. It is often the freedom fighters who compromise their
freedom and the freedom of their people in the most
egregious manner. This is usually done either by
collaborating with the derided enemy against another,
competing set of freedom fighters - or by inviting a
foreign power to arbiter. Thus, they often catalyse the
replacement of one regime of oppressive horror with
another, more terrible and entrenched.

7. Most freedom fighters are assimilated and digested by the
very establishment they fought against or as the founders
of new, privileged nomenklaturas. It is then that their
true nature is exposed, mired in gulosity and
superciliousness as they become. Inveterate violators of
basic human rights, they often transform into the very
demons they helped to exorcise.

8. Most freedom fighters are disgruntled members of the middle
classes or the intelligentsia. They bring to their affairs the
merciless ruthlessness of sheltered lives. Mistaking compassion
for weakness, they show none as they unscrupulously pursue their
self-aggrandizement, the ego trip of sending others to their
death. They are the stuff martyrs are made of. Borne on the
crests of circumstantial waves, they lever their unbalanced
personalities and project them to great effect. They are the
footnotes of history that assume the role of text. And they
rarely enjoy the unmitigated support of the very people they
proffer to liberate. Even the most harangued and subjugated
people find it hard to follow or accept the vicissitudinal
behaviour of their self-appointed liberators, their shifting
friendships and enmities and their pasilaly of violence.


In this series of articles, I will attempt to study four such
groups which operated in the tortured region of the Balkans. I
will start with the IMRO (VMRO) in Macedonia and Bulgaria,
proceed to Serbia and its union with death ("Union or Death",
aka the Black Hand), study the Ustasha in detail and end with
the current mutation of Balkan spasms, the KLA (UCK).


Macedonia to the Macedonians


"Two hundred and forty five bands were in the mountains. Serbian
and Bulgarian comitadjis, Greek andartes, Albanians and
Vlachs... all waging a terrorist war"

Leon Sciaky in "Farewell to Salonica: Portrait of an Era"

"(Goce Delcev died) cloak flung over his left shoulder, his
white fez, wrapped in a bluish scarf, pulled down and his gun
slung across his left elbow"

Mihail Chakov, who was nearby Delcev at the moment of his death,
quoted in "Balkan Ghosts" by Robert D. Kaplan

"I will try and tell this story coldly, calmly, dispassionately
... one must tone the horrors down, for in their nakedness, they
are unprintable..."

A.G. Hales reporting about the Illinden Uprising in the London
"Daily News" of October 21, 1903





"The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization directs its
eyes neither to the West, nor to the East,nor to anywhere else;
it relies primarily on its own powers, does not turn into
anybody's weapon, and will not allow anybody to use its name and
prestige for personal and other purposes. It has demonstrated
till now and will prove in the future that it establishes its
activities on the interests and works for the ideals of
struggling Macedonia and the Bulgarian race."

TODOR ALEXANDROV, The Leader of the IMRO from 1911 to 1924


The Treaty of Berlin killed Peter Lazov. A Turkish soldier first
gouged his eyes out, some say with a spoon, others insist it was
a knife. As the scream-imbued blood trickled down his face, the
Turk cut both his ears and the entirety of his nose with his
sword. Thus maimed and in debilitating agony, he was left to die
for a few days. When he failed to do so, the Turks disembowelled
him to death and decapitated the writhing rump.





The Ottomans granted independence to Bulgaria in the 1878 Treaty
of San Stefano unwillingly, following a terminal defeat at the
hands of a wrathful Russian army. The newly re-invented nation
incorporated a huge swathe of Macedonia, not including
Thessaloniki and the Chalcidice Peninsula. Another treaty
followed, in Berlin, restoring the "balance" by returning
Macedonia to Turkish rule. Turkey obligingly accepted a "one
country, two systems" approach by agreeing to a Christian
administration of the region and by permitting education in
foreign languages, by foreign powers in foreign-run and owned
schools. Then they set about a typical infandous Ottoman orgy of
shredded entrails, gang raped corpses of young girls and maiming
and decapitation. The horrors this time transcended anything
before. In Ohrid, they buried people in pigsty mud for "not
paying taxes". Joined by Turks who escaped the advancing Russian
armies in North Bulgaria and by Bosnian Moslems, who fled the
pincer movement of the forces of Austro-Hungary, they embarked
on the faithful recreation of a Bosch-like hell. Feeble attempts
at resistance (really, self defence) - such as the one organized
by Natanail, the Bishop of Ohrid - ended in the ever escalating
ferocity of the occupiers. A collaboration emerged between the
Church and the less than holy members of society. Natanail
himself provided "Chetis" (guerilla bands) with weapons and
supplies. In October 1878, an uprising took place in Kresna. It
was duly suppressed by the Turks, though with some difficulty.
It was not the first one, having been preceded by the Razlovci
uprising in 1876. But it was more well organized and explicit in
its goals.

But no one - with the exception of the Turks - was content with
the situation and even they were paranoid and anxious. The flip-
flop policies of the Great Powers turned Macedonia into the
focus of shattered national aspirations grounded in some
historical precedent of at least three nations: the Greeks, the
Bulgarians, and the Serbs. Each invoked ethnicity and history
and all conjured up the apparition of the defunct Treaty of San
Stefano. Serbia colluded with the Habsburgs: Bosnia to the
latter in return for a free hand in Macedonia to the former. The
wily Austro-Hungarians regarded the Serbs as cannon fodder in
the attrition war against the Russians and the Turks. In 1885,
Bulgaria was at last united - north and formerly Turk-occupied
south - under the Kremlin's pressure. The Turks switched sides
and allied with the Serbs against the spectre of a Great
Bulgaria. Again, the battleground was Macedonia and its
Bulgarian-leaning (and to many, pure Bulgarian) inhabitants.
Further confusion awaited. In 1897, following the Crete uprising
against the Ottoman rule and in favour of Greek enosis
(unification), Turkey (to prevent Bulgaria from joining its
Greek enemy) encouraged King Ferdinand to help the Serbs fight
the Greeks. Thus, the Balkanian kaleidoscope of loyalties,
alliances and everlasting friendship was tilted more savagely
than ever before by the paranoia and the whims of nationalism
gone berserk.





In this world of self reflecting looking glasses, in this bedlam
of geopolitics, in this seamless and fluid universe, devoid of
any certainty but the certainty of void, an anomie inside an
abnormality - a Macedonian self identity, tentative and merely
cultural at first, began to emerge. Voivode Gorgija Pulevski
published a poem "Macedonian Fairy" in 1878. The Young
Macedonian Literary Society was established in 1891 and started
publishing "Loza", its journal a year thereafter. Krste
Misirkov, Dimitrija Cupovski, the Vardar Society and the
Macedonian Club in Belgrade founded the Macedonian Scholarly-
Literary Society in 1902 (in Russia). Their "Macedonian National
Program" demanded a recognition of a Macedonian nation with its
own language and culture. They stopped short of insisting on an
independent state, settling instead for an autonomy and an
independent church. Misirkov went on to publish his seminal
work, "On Macedonian Matters" in 1903 in Sofia. It was a
scathing critique of the numbing and off-handed mind games
Macedonia was subjected to by the Big Powers. Misirkov believed
in culture as an identity preserving force. And the purveyors
and conveyors of culture were the teachers.

"So the teacher in Yugoslavia is often a hero and fanatic as
well as a servant of the mind; but as they walked along the
Belgrade streets it could easily be seen that none of them had
quite enough to eat or warm enough clothing or handsome lodgings
or all the books they needed" - wrote Dame Rebecca West in her
eternal "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" in 1940.

Goce Delcev (Gotse Deltchev) was a teacher. He was born in 1872
in Kukush (the Bulgarian name of the town), north of
Thessaloniki (Salonica, Solun, Saloniki). There is no doubt
about his cultural background (as opposed to his convictions
later in life) - it was Bulgarian to the core. He studied at a
Bulgarian gymnasium in Saloniki. He furthered his education at a
military academy in Sofia. He was a schoolteacher and a guerilla
fighter and in both capacities he operated in the areas that are
today North-Central Greece, Southwestern Bulgaria and the
Republic of Macedonia. He felt equally comfortable in all three
regions. He was shot to death by the Turks in Banitsa, then a
Bulgarian village, today, a Greek one. It was in a spring day in
May 1903.

The death of this sad but steely eyed, heavily moustached youth
was sufficient to ignite the Illinden uprising three months
later. It erupted on the feast of Saint Illiya (Sveti Ilija).
Peasants sold their sacrificial bulls - the fruits of months of
labour - and bought guns with the proceeds. It started rather
innocuously in the hotbed of ethnic unrest, Western Macedonia -
telegraph wires were cut, some tax registers incinerated. The
IMRO collaborated in this with the pro-Bulgarian organization
Vzhovits. In Krusevo (Krushevo) a republic was proclaimed,
replete with "Rules of the Macedonian Uprising Committee" (aka
the "Constitution of the Uprising").





This document dealt with the liberation of Macedonia and the
establishment of a Macedonian State. A special chapter was
dedicated to foreign affairs and neighbourly relationships. It
was all heart-achingly naive and it lasted 10 bloody days.
Crushed by 2000 trained soldiers and horse bound artillery, the
outnumbered 1200 rebels surrendered. Forty of them kissed each
other goodbye and blew their brains out. The usual raping and
blood thick massacres ensued. According to Turkish records,
these ill-planned and irresponsible moments of glory and freedom
cost the lives of 4,694 civilians, 994 "terrorists". The rape of
3,000 women was not documented. In Northwestern Macedonia, an
adolescent girl was raped by 50 soldiers and murdered
afterwards. In another village, they cut a girl's arm to secure
her bracelets. The more one is exposed to these atrocities, the
more one is prone to subscribe to the view that the Ottoman
Empire - its halting and half hearted efforts at reform
notwithstanding - was the single most important agent of
retardation and putrid stagnation in its colonies, a stifling
influence of traumatic proportions, the cause of mass mental
sickness amongst its subjects.

As is usually the case in the bloodied geopolitical sandbox
known as the Balkans, an international peacekeeping force
intervened. Yet it was - again, habitually - too late, too
little.





What made Delcev, rather his death, the trigger of such an
outpouring of emotions was the IMRO (VMRO in Macedonian and in
Bulgarian). The Illinden uprising was the funeral of a man who
was a hope. It was the ululating grieving of a collective
deprived of vengeance or recourse. It was a spasmodic breath
taken in the most suffocating of environments. This is not to
say that IMRO was monolithic or that Delcev was an Apostle (as
some of his hagiographers would have him). It was not and he was
far from it. But he and his two comrades, Jane (Yane) Sandanski
and Damyan (Dame) Gruev had a vision. They had a dream. The IMRO
is the story of a dream turned nightmare, of the absolute
corruption of absolute power and of the dangers of inviting the
fox to fight the wolf.

The original "Macedonian Revolutionary Organization" (MRO) was
established in Sofia. The distinction between being a Macedonian
and being a Macedonian-Bulgarian was not sharp, to use a polite
understatement. The Bulgarians "proper" regarded the Macedonians
as second class, primitive and uncultured Bulgarian relatives
who inhabit a part of Bulgaria to the east. The Macedonians
themselves were divided. Some wished to be incorporated in
Bulgaria, the civilized and advanced society and culture. Others
wanted an independent state - though they, too, believed that
the salvation of such an entity - both demographic and financial
- lies abroad, with the diaspora and benevolent foreign powers.
A third group (and Delcev was, for a time, among them) wanted a
federation of all states Balkan with an equal standing for a
Macedonian polity (autonomy).





The original MRO opted for the Bulgarian option and restricted
its aims to the liberation and immediate annexation of what they
solemnly considered to be a Turkish-occupied Bulgarian
territory. To distinguish themselves from this MRO, the 6
founders of the Macedonian version - all members of the
intelligentsia - added the word "Internal" to their name. Thus,
they became, in November 1893, IMRO.

A measure of the disputatiousness of all matters Balkanian can
be found in the widely and wildly differing versions about the
circumstances of the establishment of IMRO. Some say it was
established in Thessaloniki (this is the official version, thus
supporting its "Macedonian"-ness). Others - like Robert Kaplan -
say it was in Stip (Shtip) and the Encyclopaedia Britannica
claims it was in ... Resen (Resana).

Let it be clear: this author harbours no sympathy towards the
Ottoman Empire. The IMRO was fighting for lofty ideals
(Balkanian federation) and worthy goals (liberation from
asphyxiating Turkish rule). But to many outside observers (with
the exception of journalists like John Sonixen or John smith),
the IMRO was indistinguishable in its methods of operation from
the general landscape of mayhem, crime, disintegration of the
social fabric, collapse of authority, social anomie, terror and
banditry.





From Steven Sowards' "Twenty Five Lectures on Modern Balkan
History, The Balkans in an Age of Nationalism", 1996 available
HERE: http://www.lib.msu.edu/sowards/balkan/lect11.htm

"Meanwhile, the Tanzimat reforms remained unfulfilled under
Abdul Hamid's reactionary regime. How effective had all these
reforms been by the turn of the century? How bad was life for
Christian peasants in the Balkans? In a 1904 book called
'Macedonia: Its Races and Their Future', H. N. Brailsford, an
English relief worker, describes lawless conditions in
Macedonia, the central Balkan district between Greece, Serbia,
Albania and Bulgaria. In the areas Brailsford knew, the
authorities had little power. He writes:

'An Albanian went by night into a Bulgarian village and fired
into the house of a man whom he regarded as an enemy. ... The
prefect...endeavored to arrest the murderer, but [his Albanian]
village took up his cause, and the gendarmes returned empty-
handed. The prefect ... marched upon the offending village at
the head of three hundred regular troops. ... The village did
not resist, but it still refused to give evidence against the
guilty man. The prefect returned to Ochrida with forty or fifty
prisoners, kept them in gaol for three or four days, and then
released them all. ... To punish a simple outbreak of private
passion in which no political element was involved [the prefect]
had to mobilize the whole armed force of his district, and even
then he failed.'





Robbers and brigands operated with impunity: 'Riding one day
upon the high-road ..., I came upon a brigand seated on a
boulder ... in the middle of the road, smoking his cigarette,
with his rifle across his knees, and calmly levying tribute from
all the passers-by."

Extortionists, not police, were in control: "A wise village ...
[has] its own resident brigands. ... They are known as rural
guards. They are necessary because the Christian population is
absolutely unarmed and defenceless. To a certain extent they
guarantee the village against robbers from outside, and in
return they carry on a licensed and modified robbery of their
own.'

Self-defense by Orthodox peasants was dangerous: 'The Government
makes its presence felt ... when a 'flying column' saunters out
to hunt an elusive rebel band, or ... to punish some flagrant
act of defiance ... The village may have ... resented the
violence of the tax-collector ... [or] harboured an armed band
of insurgents ... or ... killed a neighbouring civilian Turk who
had assaulted some girl of the place ... At the very least all
the men who can be caught will be mercilessly beaten, at the
worst the village will be burned and some of its inhabitants
massacred.'





It was not surprising that peasants hated their rulers. 'One
enters some hovel ... something ... stirs or groans in the
gloomiest corner on the floor beneath a filthy blanket. Is it
fever, one asks, or smallpox? ... the answer comes ..., 'He is
ill with fear.' ... Looking back ... , a procession of ruined
minds comes before the memory--an old priest lying beside a
burning house speechless with terror ... a woman who had barked
like a dog since the day her village was burned; a maiden who
became an imbecile because her mother buried her in a hole under
the floor to save her from the soldiers ... children who flee in
terror at the sight of a stranger, crying 'Turks! Turks!' These
are the human wreckage of the hurricane which usurps the
functions of a Government.'

Four things are worth noting in Brailsford's account as we
consider the prospects for a reform solution to Balkan problems.
First, revolutionary politics was not the foremost issue for the
Christian population: nationalism addressed the immediate
problems in their daily lives only indirectly, by promising a
potential better state.

Second, loyalties were still local and based on the family and
the village, not on abstract national allegiances. If criminal
abuses ended, the Ottoman state might yet have invented an
Ottoman "nationalism" to compete with Serbian, Greek, Romanian,
or Bulgarian nationalism.

Third, villagers did not cry out for new government departments
or services, but only for relief from corruption and crime. The
creation of new national institutions was not necessary, only
the reform of existing institutions.

Fourth, and on the other hand, mistrust and violence between the
two sides was habitual. So many decades of reform had failed by
this time. The situation was so hopeless and extreme that few
people on either side can have thought of reform as a realistic
option."

During the 1890s, IMRO's main sources of income were voluntary
(and later, less voluntary) taxation of the rural population,
bank robberies, train robberies (which won handsome world media
coverage) and kidnapping for ransom (like the kidnapping of the
American Protestant Missionary Ellen Stone - quite a mysterious
affair). The IMRO developed along predictable lines into an
authoritarian and secretive organization - a necessity if it
were to fight the Turks effectively. It had its own tribunals
which exercised - often fatal - authority over civilians who
were deemed collaborators with the Turkish enemy. It must be
emphasized that this was NOT unusual or unique at that time.
This was the modus operandi of all military-organized
ideological and political groups. And, taking everything into
account, the IMRO was fighting a just war against an abhorrent
enemy.

Moreover, to some extent, its war was effective and resulted in
reforms imposed on the Sublime Port (the Turkish authorities) by
the Great Powers of the day. We mentioned the peacekeeping force
which replaced the local gendarmerie. But reforms were also
enacted in education, religious rights and tolerance,
construction, farm policy and other areas. The intractable and
resource-consuming Macedonian question led directly to the
reform of Turkey itself by the Macedonia-born officer Ataturk.
And it facilitated the disintegration of the Ottoman empire -
thus, ironically, leading to the independence of almost everyone
except its originators.

The radicalization of IMRO and its transformation into the
infamous organization it has come to be known as, started after
the Second Balkan war (1913) and, more so, after the First World
War (1918). It was then that disillusionment with Big Power
politics replaced the naive trust in the inevitable triumph of a
just claim. The Macedonians were never worse off politically,
having contributed no less - if not more - than any other nation
to the re-distribution of the Ottoman Empire. The cynicism, the
hypocrisy, the off-handedness, the ignorance, the vile
interests, the ulterior motives - all conspired to transform the
IMRO from a goal-orientated association to a power hungry
mostrosity.

In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece - former bitter foes -
formed the Balkan League to confront an even more bitter foe,
the Ottoman Empire on the thin pretext of an Albanian uprising.
The brotherhood strained in the Treaty of London (May 1913)
promptly deteriorated into internecine warfare over the spoils
of a successful campaign - namely, over Macedonia. Serbs,
Greeks, Montenegrins and Romanians subdued Bulgaria sufficiently
to force it to sign a treaty in August 1913 in Bucharest.
"Aegean Macedonia" went to Greece and "Vardar Macedonia"
(today's Republic of Macedonia) went to Serbia. The smaller
"Pirin Macedonia" remained Bulgarian. The Bulgarian gamble in
World War I went well for a while, as it occupied all three
parts of Macedonia. But the ensuing defeat and dismemberment of
its allies, led to a re-definition of even "Pirin Macedonia" so
as to minimize Bulgaria's share. Vardar Macedonia became part
of a new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later
renamed Yugoslavia).

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