Terrorists and Freedom Fighters | Page 5

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