Terrorists and Freedom Fighters | Page 4

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. 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).
Return
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