Terrorists and Freedom Fighters | Page 7

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,