|
Editing
and Design: Lidija Rangelovska | A Narcissus Publications Imprint,
Skopje 2003 (fonte
)
|
|
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." 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:
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). "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 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 monstrosity. 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). These political
Lego games led to enormous population shifts - the politically correct
term for refugees brutally deprived of their land and livelihood.
All of them were enshrined in solemn treaties. The Treaty of Lausanne
(1923) led to the expulsion of 375,000 Turks from Aegean Macedonia.
640,000 Greek refugees from Turkey replaced them. Each of the actual
occupiers and each of the potential ones opened its own schools
to indoctrinate the future generations of the populace. Conflicts
erupted over ecclesiastical matters, the construction of railways
and railway stations. Guerilla fighters soon realized that being
pawns on this mad hatter's chessboard could be a profitable vocation.
The transformation from freedom fighters to mercenaries with no
agenda was swift. And pecuniary considerations bred even more terror and terrorists where there were none before. In the meantime, Greece enacted a land reform legislation in "Aegean Macedonia" - in effect, the confiscation of arable land by thousands of Greek settlers, refugees from Turkey. Much of the land thus "re-distributed" was owned by Turkish absentees, now refugees themselves. But a lot of land was simply impounded from its rightful, very much present and very Macedonian owners. The Serb authorities coerced the population to speak the Serb language, changed Macedonian names to Serb ones in brutally carried campaigns and imposed a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy upon the suffering multitudes. IMRO never gave up its proclaimed goal to liberate both occupied parts of Macedonia - the Aegean and the Vardar ones. But, as time passed and as the nature of its organization and operation evolved, the perfunctoriness of its proclamations became more and more evident. The old idealists - the intellectuals and ideologues, the Goce Delcev types - were removed, died in battle, or left this mutation of their dream. The IMRO insignia - skull and crossbones - linked it firmly to the Italian Balckshirts and the Nazi brown ones. The IMRO has developed into a fascist organization. It traded opium. It hired out the services of its skilled assassins (for 20 dollars a contract). It recruited members among the Macedonian population in the slums of Sofia. Finally, they openly collaborated with the Fascists of Mussolini (who also supported them financially), with the Ustashe (similarly supported by Italy) and with the Nazis (under Ivan Mihailov, who became the nominal quisling ruler of Vardar Macedonia). It was an IMRO man ("Vlado the Chauffeur") who murdered King Alexander of Yugoslavia in 1934. All this period, the IMRO continued to pursue its original agenda. IMRO terrorists murdered staff and pupils in Yugoslav schools in Vardar Macedonia. In between 1924-34, it killed 1,000 people. Tourists of the period describe the Yugoslav-Bulgarian frontier as the most fortified in Europe with "entanglements, block houses, redoubts and searchlight posts". Throughout the twenties and the thirties, the IMRO maintained a presence in Europe, publishing propaganda incessantly and explaining its position eloquently (though not very convincingly). It was not very well liked by both Bulgarians and Macedonians who got increasingly agitated and exhausted by the extortion of ever increasing taxes and by the seemingly endless violence. But the IMRO was now a force to reckon with: organized, disciplined, lethal. Its influence grew by the day and more than one contemporary describes it as a "state within a state". In Bulgaria it collaborated with Todor Alexandrov in the overthrow and murder of the Prime Minister, Alexandur Stamboliyski (June 1923) and in the appointment of a right wing government headed by Alexandur Tsankov. Stamboliyski
tried to appease Yugoslavia and, in the process, sacrifice inconvenient
elements, such as the IMRO, as expediently as he could. He made
too many powerful enemies too fast: the army (by cutting their inflated
budget), the nationalists (by officially abandoning the goal of
military expansion), the professional officers (by making them redundant),
the Great Powers (by making THEM redundant as well) and the opposition
(by winning the elections handsomely despite all the above). By
signing the Treaty of Nis (allowing Serb forces the right of hot
pursuit within Bulgarian territory), he in effect sealed his own
death warrant. The IMRO teamed up with the Military League (an organization of disgruntled officers, both active duty and reserve) and with the tacit blessing of Tsar Boris and the forming National Alliance (later renamed the Democratic Alliance), they did away with the hated man. Following the murder, the IMRO was given full control of the region of Petric (Petrich). It used it as a launching pad of its hit and run attacks against Yugoslavia with the full - though clandestine - support of the Bulgarian Ministry of War and Fascist Italy. From Pirin, they attacked Greece as well. These were exactly the kind of international tensions the murdered Prime Minister was keen to terminate and the IMRO no less keen to foster. In the meanwhile, Alexandrov came to an end typical of many a Bulgarian politician and was assassinated only a year after the coup d'etat. The decade that
followed did not smile upon the IMRO. It fragmented and its shreds
fought each other in the streets of Sofia, Chicago-style. By 1934,
the IMRO was a full-fledged extortionist mafia organization. They
ran protection rackets ("protecting" small shop-owners
against other gangs and "insuring" them against their
own violence). Hotels in Sofia always had free rooms for the IMRO.
The tobacco industry paid the IMRO more than a million British pounds
of that time in six years of "taxation". Robberies and
assassinations were daily occurrences. So were street shoot-outs
and outright confiscation of goods. The IMRO had no support left
anywhere. In 1934, it was disbanded (together with other parties) by Colonel Kimron Georgiev, the new Prime Minister of Bulgaria and a senior figure in the Zveno association of disgruntled citizenry. His rule was brief (ended the next year) but the IMRO never recovered. It brought its own demise upon itself. Colonel Velcev (Velchev), the perpetrator of the coup, was swept to power on the promise to end all terrorist activities - a promise which he kept. The modern Republic
of Macedonia is today ruled by a party called VMRO-DPMNE. It is
one of a few political parties to carry this name and the biggest
and weightiest amongst them by far. It is founded on the vision
and ideals of Goce Delcev and has distanced itself from the "Terrorist-IMRO".
The picture of Delcev adorns every office in both Macedonia and
Bulgaria and he is the closest to a saint a secular regime can have.
In 1923, the Greeks transferred his bones to Bulgaria. Stalin, in
a last effort to placate Tito, ordered Bulgaria to transfer them
to Macedonia. Even in his death he knew no peace. Now he is buried
in his final resting place, in the tranquil inner yard of the Church
of Sveti Spas (Saint Saviour). A marble slab bearing a simple inscription
with his name under a tree, in a Macedonia which now belongs to
the Macedonians. "I live and shall die for federalism; it is the sole salvation for the monarchy, if anything can save it." Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
Serbia, Montenegro and Russia fought a war against Turkey in an effort to capitalize on a Serb peasants' revolt in Bosnia in 1875. The latter were mightily and rather inhumanly oppressed by the local Moslem nobility (enmity has long roots in the Balkans). It was a holy war for the protection of holy (Orthodox) mother church. It was this conflict that led to the Turkish capitulation embedded in the San Stefano Treaty of 1878. It was not the first time that Balkan borders were re-drawn but, with the creation of Bulgaria, extending all the way to lake Ohrid, a few taboos were broken. A new state was created, Russia was introduced as a major player and the Sick Man of Europe (the Ottoman Empire) was in death throes. It also generated a new problem, the Macedonian one. The treaty of Berlin sought to restore the balance but to no avail. The inexorable germination of the nationalistic ideal has commenced. When the Treaty placed Bosnia-Herzegovina under Austro-Hungarian administration and allowed Habsburg garrisons to camp inside Serbia (effectively severing it from Montenegro) - the seeds of discontent blossomed into the evil flowers of violence. No one cared
what the local populace had to say. The Austrian brought roads and
railways and modern mining and forestry and industry to this hitherto
European backwater. Reversing the Ottoman infliction was no mean
feat. Yet, the Austrians chose to rule by division, to motivate
through hate and to buy the love of their subjects rather than to
earn it. They befriended the Moslem landlords and pitted the Serbs against each across a denominational divide. This volatile state of affairs was only aggravated by the abolition in 1881 of the Military Frontier, which brought hundreds of thousands of Serbs into the remit of an increasingly and virulently nationalistic Croatia. The Hungarians used this to their advantage by fanning Croat-Serb hostility. After all, they had a historical account to settle with the Serbs who quashed an Hungarian rebellion not 40 years before (in 1848-9) and were awarded with the half autonomous Duchy of Vojvodina, an integral part of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Ausgleich of 1867 (which divided the loot between Austria and Hungary) deprived Vojvodina of its autonomy. The Magyars rushed back in with German and Austrian settlers and immediately embarked upon a massive campaign of forced assimilation. Thus, as Vojvodina prospered with roads and railways and large commercial farms ("the breadbasket of the empire") - it became more hate-riven and explosive. In the Balkans, affluence and commerce seem only to encourage envy and belligerence and neighbourly relations are no barrier to mutual slaughter. A self-appointed
"guardian of all Serbs", the Serbian state willingly engaged
in agitation and confronted both other ethnicities and the Dual
Monarchy in its quest to safeguard the well-being, welfare, prosperity
and equal treatment of the Serbs, all noble goals, no doubt. Yet instability is contagious, a lesson not learn by Serb politicians. Even as the Bosnian uprising was in progress, King Milan stuck an Austrian knife unto its back. He agreed to not foment rebellion in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in return for a free hand in Macedonia and some export concessions for some agricultural produce. In 1885, he acted upon his grandiosity to disastrous outcome. Four years later, he abdicated in disgrace. Not till 1893 was order restored in the person of King Alexander whose most important act was marrying his concubine, Draga Masin in 1900. They were both massacred in June 1903 by disgruntled officers in their own palace and that was the end of one dynasty (the Obrenovic's) and the beginning of another (the Karadjordjevic's). A young officer, a member of the general staff of the army, by the name of Dragutin Dimitrijevic ("Apis" - the "Holy Bull" was his endearing nickname, or, perhaps, the bee, from the Latin root, as Petrovic, the attache to the Serbia legation in London has it in "Black Hand Over Europe" by Heneri Pozzi) planned it all in 1901. Remember this name, his role in our history has only just begun. As is usually
the case, the honeymoon looked both passionate and auspicious. The
new King was of the reforming kind and keen on economic progress
and wealth formation. Regretfully, his implementation fell short
of his intentions. Serbian agriculture lagged behind its more commercialized
and industrialized competitors, the population grew relentlessly
and rural debts buried the semi-feudal rustic peasantry under its
increasing burden. It is against this background of mounting and mercurial discontent that the "Black Hand" was formed. Attesting to the spreading of the rot throughout the Karadjordjevicean state, was its cancerous metastasis through all levels of the army and the government. Apis the regicide was appointed chief of intelligence of the general staff, no less. He later confessed to planning the murders of King Nicholas of Montenegro, King Constantine of Greece, the German Kaiser and King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. How much of it was Balkan delusions and how much reality is still open to debate - but the man relished death and firmly believed in its transforming and catalysing powers. The Black Hand became a state within a state (a feat later emulated by the IMRO). Those bureaucrats and politicians not already members of the shady outfit, obeyed its express or perceived wishes out of terror, more imagined than exercised. The army was entirely in thrall. The accelerated advance of Dimitrijevic through the ranks serves proof of the growing influence of his cankerous outfit. He became professor of tactics at the Military Academy where he taught subversion and terror more than military strategy. By 1913, he was chief of intelligence, as we mentioned and by 1916 he was attained the rank of colonel at the age of 40. Though formally established only in 1911- the Black Hand cast its shadow long before. It engaged mostly in propaganda and in the seeding of armed bands in Macedonia prior to the two Balkan wars. Its biggest achievement was probably the inception of numerous revolutionary cells among the Serbs of Bosnia. The longer and more thorough the meddling, the more the languid relationship between Austria and Serbia deteriorated. The former imposed tariffs on the exports of the latter in an aptly named "Pig War". As Serb subversion intensified in Bosnia, Austria annexed it and Herzegovina outright discarding the pretence of autonomy it has maintained. Stymied in one border - the Serbs reverted to another. The Illinden uprising ignited Slav imagination. Serbia has long hungered after its slice of a dismembered Macedonia and Thrace in a banquet attended by both Bulgaria and Greece. But the fresh atrocities - not devoid of religious and ethnic dimensions - endowed the whole endeavour with an aura of a holy war. This delirium was further stoked by the apparent disintegration of the Ottoman Empire following the revolution of the Young Turks in 1908. Yet, in its drang nach suden, Serbia found itself once more entangled with the Austrians who had their own designs on Macedonia and Novi Pazar. The risk of losing Kosovo and Metohija was very real and the conflict assumed the robes of a crusade, both cultural and religious. To the Serbs the very maintenance of their self-identity and civilization was at stake. This was the
background to the onslaught of the Balkan Wars. Serbia collaborated
with the more potent of its potential enemies (Greece, Bulgaria)
in the Balkan League. To cleanse the Balkans of all Turks was the
explicit goals of hush-hush treaties and clandestine encounters.
The hidden agenda bespoke of Austria. The initial triumphs against
the Turkish army (reversing a trend three centuries old) lent an
air of inevitable invincibility and divine justice to the whole
endeavour. It is interesting to mention that it was little Montenegro
which was the first to declare war in almost all Balkan conflicts.
Whether as Serbian proxies or because of the contentious nature
of the Montenegrins remains unclear. Whatever the case may be, a
second war among the winners of the first left Serbia with its agenda
fulfilled and with its territory almost doubled. It gained part
of the Sandzak, all Kosovo and Metohija and the bulk of Macedonia.
Its tax paying population increased by half as much in less than
two years. Had it not been for Austria's minacious insistence, Albania
would have never been born on Serb occupied territory. The creation
of this (artificial, so the Serbs felt) Albanian state deprived
Serbia - alone among the victors - from access to the sea. It had
another cause for paranoid delusions and deepening sense of victimization
at the hands of vast conspiracies. Relegated to the geopolitical
sidelines, denuded of their conquests, coerced by a Big Power, the
Serbs felt humiliated, stabbed in the back, discriminated against,
inferior and wrathful. Frustration breeds aggression we are taught
and this true lesson was never more oft-repeated than in the Balkans. The raging rivalry between an eastward-bound Austria and a defiant Serbia was bound to boil over. The Black Hand was there to provoke the parties into a final test of strengths and willpower. Dame Rebecca West voices her doubts regarding the true intent of the Black Handers in their involvement (which she does not dispute) in the events that followed. Based on all manner of circumstantial evidence and the testimonies of mysterious friends of furtive conspirators she reaches the conclusion that they did not believe in the conspiracy to which they lent their support. The Black Hand went along with the planning and execution of the assassination of Archduke, heir to the throne Franz (Francis) Ferdinand in 1914, disbelieving all the way both the skills and the commitment of the youthful would be assassins. Perhaps so.
Yet there can be little doubt and, indeed, there is no dispute that
The Black Hand was introduced to a cabal of plotters called "Mlada
Bosna" (Young Bosnia), headed by one Illich and that this introduction
was effected by the 22 year old influential Bosnian revolutionary
Gacinovic (Gachinovich) who lived in Lausanne in Switzerland. The
Black Hander Ciganovic (Tsiganovitch) made contact with one Gavrilo
Princip and Chabrinovich and together with another Bosnian, Tankosic
(Tankosich). The latter - a self proclaimed sharpshooter - immediately
set about testing the sniping skills of his co-schemers in a secluded
wood. With the mild exception of Princip, they were no good. Despite this disheartening display of incompetence (Princip claimed at his trial to have aimed at a general sitting next to the Archduke), the Black Hand equipped them with bombs (of the wrong kind, points West correctly), pistols and suicidal Prussic acid (which didn't work). They were smuggled to Sarajevo by two collaborating border guards. As opposed to rumours, Gavrilo Princip was not a member of the Black Hand, nor was the Black Hand involved in his training. Moreover, the connection between Mlada Bosna and Crna Ruka (Black Hand) was made only a short time before the eventful June 28, 1914. It was a challenge and on Serbia's national day at that. The Austrians were elated having been handed the excuse to educate Serbia and cut it to size. They issued an ultimatum and the rest is the history of the first truly global conflict, the First World War. In 1917, in
a surprising turn of events, Alexander, the Commander in Chief of
the Expatriate Serbian Army in collusion with the Serb premier,
Nikola Pasic, arrested Apis and 200 of his collaborators, thus shattering
the Black Hand irreversibly. It is always surprising how really
brittle and vulnerable these apparently invincible organizations
of terror are. The IMRO, after having terrorized Bulgaria for decades
and decimated its political elite, was reduced to rubble, bloodlessly,
in a matter of a few weeks in 1934. The same happened with the omnipotent and all-pervasive Black Hand. It vanished in a whimper. In May 1917, Dragutin Dimitrijevic (Apis) was executed together with 2 or 6 of his Black Hand colleagues. Finally it was death, not union that caught up with them. The trial was closed to the public, opaque and hurried. The King apparently believed - or claimed he did - that the prisoners conspired on his life. West testifies in her great opus "Black Lamb Grey Falcon" that transcripts of the trial were banned and that it was forbidden to mention the mere historic fact either in speech or in print. The members of the Black Hand lived secretly and dies mysteriously and meaninglessly. But the Black
Hand - like the IMRO - was a child of the times. The Balkans was
perceived to be the gate to the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The coveted
prizes were not dirt poor Macedonia or Albania. It was the stepping
stone and the springboard that they represented to much vaster territories,
to the riches of the orient, to the exotic realms of Asia. All Big
Powers and would be Big Powers engaged in the pugilistics of self-positioning.
The demise of the Ottomans was imminent and this imminence exerted
subtle but verifiable pressure on all the participant in this grubby
grabbing game. Additionally, in this fin de siecle, all involved
felt doomed. The rumblings of counter-revolutionary Russia, the
drang nach Osten of Austria - all were attempts at self re-definition
and self-preservation. Perhaps this explains the outlandish and disproportionate reaction of Austria to the needling of Bosnian terrorism. assertive minorities constituted a direct threat to the very cohesion of Empire. And Serbia blocked the hitherto unhindered path to eastern territories - depriving Austria of lebensraum and raison d'etre. Faced with a limiting event horizon, Austria imploded like a black hole, unto itself. The driving
force behind it all was really Austria and its growing existential
angst. It struck a modus vivendi of mutual paralysis in the Balkan
with Russia as early as 1897. It lasted ten years in which only
Austria and Russia stood still but history defied them both. To
its horror, Austria discovered that in its pursuit of glorious and
condescending isolation, it was left only with Germany as an ally,
the very Germany whose Weltpolitik put it on a clear collusion course
with the moribund Sublime Port. Russia, on the other hand, teamed
up with a rising power, with Britain, at least implicitly. The abrupt
and involuntary departure of the pliable and easily corruptible
Obrenovic's in Serbia bode ill to the checks and balances Austria
so cultivated in its relationship with the recalcitrant Serbs. Karageorgevic
was much less enamoured with Austrian shenanigans. The final nail
in the ever more crowded coffin of Austrian foreign policy was hammered
in in 1908 when the Young Turks effectively re-opened the question
of the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria. These territories were always under Turkish sovereignty, the Austrians "discovered" to growing alarm. One solution was to annex the administered units, as Austria's Minister of Foreign affairs suggested. He further offered a trade-off: recognition of Russia's rights of passage through the Dardanelles. The Russians accepted only to be abandoned by the Austrians in the crucial vote. Austria annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina unilaterally - but Russia was still prevented from crossing into the warm waters, its ambition and obsession. Russia learned a lesson: always back your client (Serbia), never back down. Elsewhere, tensions between the Big Powers were growing and eroded their capability to institute a system of efficacious self-regulation. Armed conflict erupted between Germany and France in Morocco more than once. Britain and Germany were engaged in a naval arms race which depleted the coffers and the social cohesion of both. Italy declared war on Turkey in 1911 and even invaded the Dardanelles. Serbia and Bulgaria struck a bargain to expel the Ottomans from Europe (see above, the Balkan Wars). Thus, with the field narrowing and getting more crowded, an Austrian-Serb Armageddon was all but inevitable. The irony of
it all is that Austria presented the only viable solution to the
problem of multi-ethnicity and muti-culturalism. The history of
the Balkans in the 20th century can be effectively summed up in
terms of the contest between the Serb and Hungarian model of co-existence
and its Austrian anathema. The Serbs and Hungarians aspired to ethnically and culturally homogenous states and were willing to apply violence towards the achievement of this goal either by forced assimilation of minorities or by their expulsion or worse. The Austrians proposed federalism. They envisaged a federation of politically, culturally and religiously autonomous entities. This peaceful vision constituted a direct threat on the likes of the Black Hand. Peaceful, content citizens do not good rebels make. The Encyclopaedia Britannica says: "Such is the logic of terrorism: Its greatest enemies are the peacemakers". The Black Hand did not operate in empty space and was not alone. In 1908 Serbia formed "The National Defence". Its main function was to agitate against the Austrians and to conduct propaganda for the Serb cause. There were other organizations but all of them were contemptuously labelled "intellectual" by Apis, who craved violence. Ironically,
one of the original band of conspirators against King Alexander
in 1901-3 was Petar Zivkovic (Zhivkovitch). But he soon separated
himself from the Black Hand and joined the White Hand, another group
of officers, more moderate, though no less authoritarian. Another
King Alexander (who was also murdered but in 1934), King of the
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later renamed "Yugoslavia"),
appointed him Commander of the Palace Guards in 1921 and Prime Minister
eight years thereafter. Zivkovic lost no time in disbanding all political parties and (elected) municipalities. He embarked upon an endless string of show trials of opponents of his dictatorship, communists and anti-monarchists. He introduced a one-party, government-controlled electoral system. Thus, in an
ironic twist of history, the Black Hand came to its own, after all.
One of its former members a Prime Minister, a dictator, under a
king installed by its slaughterous coup. Black Hand or White Hand
- the means disputed, the ends were always in consensus. A Great
Serbia for the Great Serbian people. The Insurgents and the Swastika "Even going
back ten years it was easy to see something gripping Yugoslavia
by the throat. But in the years since then the grip has been tightened,
and tightened in my opinion by the dictatorship established by King
Alexander Karageorgevitch. This dictatorship, however much it may
claim a temporary success, must inevitably have the effect of poisoning
all the Yugoslav organism. Whether the poisoning is incurable or
not is the question for which I have sought an answer during two
months in Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and central Europe." "Black
Hand over Europe" by Henri Pozzi, 1935 Yugoslavia was
born in sin and in sin it perished. The King of Serbs, Croats and
Slovenes, Alexander I, a freshly self-proclaimed dictator, declared
it on October 1929. It was a union of East and West, the Orthodox
and the Catholic, Ottoman residues with Austro-Hungarian structures,
the heart and the mind. Inevitably, it stood no chance. The Croats
and the Slovenes - formerly fiery proponents of a Yugo (Southern)
Slav federation - were mortified to find themselves in a Serb-dominated
"Third World", Byzantine polity. This was especially galling to the Croats who fiercely denied both their geography and their race to cling to the delusion of being a part of "Europe" rather than the "Balkans". To this very day, they hold all things Eastern (Serbs, the Orthodox version of Christianity, Belgrade, the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia) with unmitigated contempt dipped in an all-pervasive feeling of superiority. This is a well known defence mechanism in nations peripheral. Many a suburban folk wish to belong to the city with such heat and conviction, with such ridiculous emulation, that they end up being caricatures of the original. And what original!
The bloated, bureaucracy-saddled, autocratic and sadistic Habsburg
empire. Hitler's Germany. Mussolini's Italy. Unable to ignore the
common ethnic roots of both Serbs and Croats - one tribe, one language
- the Croats chose to believe in a vast conspiracy imposed upon
the Serbs by corrupt and manipulative rulers. The gullible and self-delusional
Cardinal Stepinac of Zagreb wrote just before the Second World War
erupted, in a curious reversal of pan-Serbist beliefs: "If
there were more freedom... Serbia would be Catholic in twenty years.
The most ideal thing would be for the Serbs to return to the faith
of their fathers. That is, to bow the head before Christ's representative,
the Holy Father. Then we could at last breathe in this part of Europe,
for Byzantium has played a frightful role ... in connection with
the Turks." The same Turks that almost conquered Croatia and, met by fierce and brave resistance of the latter, were confined to Bosnia for 200 years. The Croats came to regard themselves as the last line of defence against an encroaching East - against the manifestations and transmutations of Byzantium, of the Turks, of a vile mix of Orthodoxy and Islam (though they collaborated with their Moslem minority during the Ustashe regime). Besieged by this siege mentality, the back to the literal wall, desperate and phobic, the Croats developed the paranoia typical of all small nations encircled by hostility and impending doom. It was impossible to reconcile their centrifugal tendency in favour of a weak central state in a federation of strong local entities - with the Serb propensity to create a centralist and bureaucratic court. When the Croat delegates of the Peasant Party withdrew from the fragmented Constituent Assembly in 1920 - Serbia and the Moslem members voted for the Vidovdan Constitution (June 1921) which was modelled on the pre-war Serbian one. While a minority
with limited popular appeal, the Ustashe did not materialize ex
nihilo. They were the logical and inescapable conclusion of a long
and convoluted historical process. They were both its culmination
and its mutation. And once formed, they were never exorcised by
the Croats, as the Germans exorcised their Nazi demon. In this,
again, the Croats, chose the path of unrepentant Austria. Croat fascism was not an isolated phenomenon. Fascism (and, less so, Nazism) were viable ideological alternatives in the 1930s and 1940s. Variants of fascist ideology sprang all over the world, from Iraq and Egypt to Norway and Britain. Even the Jews in Palestine had their own fascists (the Stern group). And while Croat fascism (such as it was, "tainted" by Catholic religiosity and pagan nationalism) lasted four tumultuous years - it persisted for a quarter of a century in Romania ("infected" by Orthodox clericalism and peasant lores). While both branches of fascism - the Croat and the Romanian - shared a virulent type of anti-Semitism and the constipated morality of the ascetic and the fanatic - Codreanu's was more ambitious, aiming at a wholesale reform of Romanian life and a re-definition of Romanianism. The Iron Guard and the Legion (of the Archangel Michael, no less) were, therefore and in their deranged way, a force for reform founded on blood-thirsty romanticism and masochistic sacrifices for the common good. Moreover, the Legion was crushed in 1941 by a military dictatorship which had nothing to do with fascism. It actually persecuted the fascists who found refuge in Hitler's Germany. Fascism in Hungary
developed similarly. It was based on reactionary ideologies pre-dating
fascism by centuries. Miklos Horty, the Austro-Hungarian Admiral
was consumed by grandiose fantasies of an Hungarian empire. He had
very little in common with the fascists of the "white terror"
of 1919 in Budapest (an anti-communist bloodshed). He did his best
to tame the Hungarian fascist government of Gyula Gombos (1932).
The untimely death of the latter brought about the meteoric rise
of Ferenc Szalasi and his brand of blood-pure racism. But all these
sub-species of fascism, the Romanian, the Slovakian (Tiso) and the
Hungarian (as opposed to the Italian and the Bulgarian) were atavistic,
pagan, primal and romanticist - as was the Croat. These were natural
- though nefarious - reactions to dislocation, globalization, economic
crisis and cultural pluralism. A set of compensatory mechanisms
and reactions to impossible, humiliating and degrading circumstances
of wrathful helplessness and frustration. "Native fascism"
attributed a divine mission or divine plan to the political unit
of the nation, a part of a grand design. The leader was the embodiment,
the conveyor, the conduit, the exclusive interpreter and the manifestation
of this design (the Fuhrerprinzip). Proof of the existence of such
a transcendental plan was the glorious past of the nation, its qualities
and conduct (hence the tedious moralizing and historical nitpicking).
The definition of the nation relied heavily of the existence of
a demonized and dehumanized enemy (Marxists, Jews, Serbs, Gypsies,
homosexuals, Hungarians in Romania, etc.). Means justified the end
and the end was stability and eternity ("the thousand years
Reich"). Thus, as opposed to the original blueprint, these
mutants of fascism were inert and aspired to a state of rest, to
an equilibrium after a spurt of cleansing and restoration of the
rightful balance. When Serb domination
(Serb ubiquitous military, Serbs in all senior government positions
even in Croatia) mushroomed into the "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes", it was only natural for dissenting and dissident
Croats to turn to their "roots". Unable to differentiate
themselves from the hated Serbs racially - they appealed to religious
heterogeneity. Immediately after the political hybrid was formed,
the Croats expressed their discontent by handing election victories
to the "Croatian Peasant Party" headed by Radic. The latter
was a dour and devout anti-Yugoslav. He openly agitated for an independent
- rustic and pastoral - Croatia. But Radic was a pragmatist. He
learned his lesson when - having boycotted the Constituent Assembly
in Belgrade - he facilitated the imposition of a pro-Serb, pro-central
government constitution. Radic moderated his demands, if not his
rhetoric. The goal was now a federated Yugoslavia with Croat autonomy
within it. There is poetic justice in that his death - at the hand
of a Montenegrin deputy on the floor of the Skupstina in 1928 -
brought about the dictatorship that was to give rise to Macek and
the Sporazum (Croat autonomy). The irony is that a peasant-favouring
land reform was being seriously implemented when a deadlock between
peasant parties led to King Alexander's fateful decision to abolish
the parliamentary system. King Alexander I was a good and worthy man forced by circumstances into the role of an abhorrent tyrant. He was a great believer in the power of symbols and education. He changed the name of his loose confederacy into a stricter "Yugoslavia". In an attempt to defuse internal divisions, he appealed to natural features (like rivers and mountains) as internal borders. Croatia vanished as a political entity, replaced by naturally-bounded districts and provinces. The majority of Croats still believed in a federal solution, albeit less Serb-biased. They believed in reform from the inside. The Ustashe and Pavelic were always a minority, the Bolsheviks of Croatia. But King Alexander's authoritarian rule was hard to ignore: the torture of political opponents and their execution, the closure of patriotic sports societies, the flagrant interference in the work of the ostensibly independent judiciary, the censorship. There was bad blood growing between the King and more of his subjects by the day. The Croats were not the only "minority" to be thus maltreated. The Serbs maintained an armed presence in Macedonia, Kosovo, the Sandzak and even in Slovenia. They deported thousands of "Turks" (actually, all manner of Muslims) under the guise of a "re-patriation" scheme. They confiscated land from religious institutions, from the deportees, from big landowners, from the Magyars in Vojvodina and "re-distributed" it to the Serbs. Ethnic homogenization (later to become known as "ethnic cleansing") was common practise in that era. The Turks, the Bulgars, the Germans, the Greeks were all busily purifying the ethnic composition of their lands. But it made the King and the Serbs no friends. The Serbs seemed to have been bent on isolating themselves from within and on transforming their Yugo Slav brethren into sworn adversaries. This was true in the economic sphere as well as in the political realm. Serbia declared a "Danubian orientation" (in lieu of the "Adriatic orientation") which benefited the economies of central and northern Serbia at the expense of Croatia and Slovenia. While Serbia was being industrialized and its agriculture reformed, Croatia and Slovenia did not share in the spoils of war, the reparations that Yugoslavia received from the Central Powers. Yugoslavia was protectionist which went against the interest of its trading compatriots. When war reparations ceased (1931) and Germany's economy evaporated, Yugoslavia was hurled into the economic crisis the world has been experiencing since 1929. The Nazi induced recovery of Germany drew in Yugoslavia and its firms. It was granted favourable export conditions by Hitler's Germany and many of its companies participated in cartels established by German corporate giants. King Alexander
I must have known he would be assassinated. Someone tried to kill
him as he was taking the oath to uphold the constitution on June
28, 1921. For 8 long years he had to endure a kaleidoscope of governments,
a revolving door of ministers, violence in the Assembly and ever-escalating
Croat demands for autonomy. After the hideous slaughter on the floor
of parliament, all its remaining Croat members withdrew. They refused to go back and parliament had to be dissolved. Alexander went further, taking advantage of the constitutional crisis. He abolished the constitution of 1921, outlawed all ethnically, religiously or nationally based political parties (which basically meant most political parties, especially the Croat ones), re-organized the state administration, standardized the legal system, school syllabi and curricula and the national holidays. He was moulding a nation single handedly, carving it from the slab of mutual hatred and animosity. The Croats regarded all this as yet another Serb ploy, proof of Serb power-madness and insatiable desire to dominate. In an effort to placate the bulk of his constituency, the peasantry, King Alexander established rural credit unions and provided credit lines to small farmers and rural processing plants. To no avail. The insecurity of this hastily foisted regime was felt, its hesitation, the cruelty that is the outcome of fear. The scavengers were gathering. It was this
basic shakiness that led the King to look for sustenance from neighbours.
In rapid succession, he made his state a friend of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia
and Romania (the last two in the frame of the Little Entente). Another
Entente followed (the Balkan one) with Greece, Turkey and Romania.
The King was frantically seeking to neutralize his enemies from
without while ignoring the dangers from within. His death lurked in Zagreb but he was travelling to Marseilles to meet it. A vicious secret police, a burgeoning military, a new constitution to legalize his sanguinous regime conspired with a global economic crisis to make him a hated figure, even by Serb Democrats. Days before his death, he earnestly considered to return to a parliamentary form of government. But it was too late and too little for those who sought his end. The Ustasha
movement ("insurgence" or "insurrection", officially
the "Croatian Ustasha Movement") was a product of the
personal rebellion of Ante Pavelic and like-minded others. Born
in Bosnia, he was a member of the Croat minority there, in a Serb-infused
environment. He practised as a lawyer in Zagreb and there joined
the Nationalist Croatian Party of Rights. He progressed rapidly
and by 1920 (at the age of 31), he was alderman of Zagreb City and
County. He was a member of the Skupstina when anti-Croat sentiment
peaked with the triple murder of the Croat deputies. When Alexander
the King dissolved parliament and assumed dictatorial powers, he
moved (or fled) to Italy, there to establish a Croat nationalist
movement, the Ustasha. Their motto was "Za Dom Spremny"
("Ready for Home" or "Ready for the Fatherland").
Italy the fascist was a natural choice - both because of its ideological
affinity and because it opposed Yugoslavia's gradual drift towards
Germany. Italy was worried about an ultimate anschluss ("unification
or incorporation") between the Reich and Austria - which will
have brought Hitler's Germany to Austria's doorstep. Thus, the Ustasha established training centres (more like refugee camps, as they included the family members of the would be "warriors") in Italy and Hungary (later to be expelled from the latter as a result of Yugoslav pressure). Having mainly engaged in the dissemination of printed propaganda, they failed at provoking a peasant rebellion in north Dalmatia (promised to Italy by the Ustasha). But they did better at assassinating their arch-foe, King Alexander in 1934 (having failed earlier, in 1933). In this the Ustasha was reputed to have collaborated with the fascist IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) under Ivan Mihailov in Bulgaria. By joining forces with the IMRO, the Ustasha has transformed itself into a link in the chain of terrorist organizations that engulfed the world in blood and flames prior to the onslaught of the greatest terrorist of all, of Hitler. While some versions of the unholy alliance between the Bulgarian-Macedonian outfit and the Croats are unsubstantiated (to put it gently), it is clear that some assistance was provided by both lower Italian ranks and the IMRO. The actual murderer of the King was Mihailov's Macedonian chauffeur, Vlado Georgiev-Kerin. The Ustasha was also known for blowing trains and for attempting to do so on more than one occasion both in Croatia and in Slovenia. King Alexander seemed to have ordered the systematic annihilation of the Ustasha just before his own untimely Ustasha-assisted annihilation. Lt. Colonel Stevo Duitch "committed suicide" in Karlsbad and there were attempts - some successful, some less - on Pavelic in Munich, Percevic in Vienna, Servaci (Servatsi) in Fiume and Percec in Budapest. It was made abundantly clear to the Ustasha that it was an all-out war with no prisoners taken. The King had to go. It was a strange movement, the Ustashe. Claiming the continuous "rights of state" of the Great Croatian Kingdom under Peter Kresimir and Zvonimir in the 11th century - they nonetheless gave up Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to Italy and, later, accepted a German occupation of eastern Croatia. Composed of frugal ascetics and avaricious operators, merciless romanticists and hard nosed pragmatists, murderous sadists and refined intellectuals, nationalist Croats and Serb-haters who had no coherent national agenda bar the mass slaughter of the Serbs. Thus, it was a social movement of the dispossessed, a cesspool of discontent and rage, of aggression too long suppressed but never sublimated, of justified social and political grievances irradiated by racism, national chauvinism, militarism and sadism. A grassroots reaction turned cancerous, led by a second hand, third rate Hitler-clone. A terrorist organization displaying the trappings of a state in the making. This is not to say that it lacked popular support. Tensions ran so high between Serbs and Croats that daily brawls broke in pubs and restaurants, trains and public places between Serb soldiers and Croat citizens in Croatia. The Ustashe fed on real friction, were charged by escalating tensions, mushroomed on growing violence. Prince Paul,
who acted as regent for 12 years old Peter II, permitted the operation
of political parties but did not reinstate parliament. All this
time, a Yugoslav opposition of democratic forces included Croat
as well as Serb intellectuals and wannabe politicians. Vladko Macek
himself - later, the epitome of Croat separatism and the most successful
promoter of this cause - was a member. In the 1938 elections, his
party - the Peasant Party - won an astounding 80% of the votes in
Croatia. The regent, now much humbled by years of strife and paralysis - bowed to popular opinion so eloquently and convincingly expressed. He backed negotiations with Macek which led to a declaration of Croat independence in everything but name. The Sporazum of August 1939, a few days before the outbreak of World War II, granted Croatia self-government except in matters of national defence and foreign affairs. The Serbs were now disgruntled. The Serb Democrats felt abandoned and betrayed by Macek and his Faustian deal with the dictatorship. All other Serbs felt humiliated by what they regarded as a capitulation to irredentism, bound to have a disintegrative domino effect on the rest of Serbia's possessions. It is a surrealistic thing, to read the transcripts of these vehement and sincere arguments just four days before the world as all the conversants knew it, came to a shrieking end. When German
planes were pulverizing Warsaw, Yugoslavia declared its mock-neutrality.
Everybody knew that Paul was pro-German. Even King Alexander before
him signed a few secret pacts with the rising, ignore at your peril,
Central European force. The Austrian national socialists who were
implicated in the murder of the Austrian prime minister, Dolfus,
in July 1934, escaped to Yugoslavia and resided openly (though disarmed
by the Yugoslav police) in army barracks in Varadzin. In 1935, a
fascist movement was established in Serbia ("Zbor"). Fascism
and Nazism were not without their attractions to Serbs and Croats
alike. This is the great theatre of the absurd called the Balkans. Pavelic and the Ustasha were actually closer in geopolitical orientation to the Yugoslav monarchy (until Paul was deposed by the Yugoslav army) - than to Mussolini's fascist Italy. They were worried by the latter's tendency to block German designs on Austria. In a region known for its indefinite historical memory and lack of statute of limitations, they recalled how the Italians treated Montenegrin refugees in 1923 (returning them to Yugoslavia in cattle cars). They wondered if the precedent might be repeated, this time with Croat passengers. The Italians did, after all, arrest "Longin" (Kvaternik), Jelic and others in Torino following the assassination of the King. In the paranoid twilight zone of European Big Power sponsored terrorism, these half hearted actions and dim memories were enough to cast a pall of suspicion and of guilt over the Italian regime. Mussolini called Pavelic his "Balkan Pawn" but in that he was mistaken. There are good reasons to believe that he was shocked by the murder of King Alexander. In any event, the free movement of Pavelic and the Ustasha was afterwards severely restricted. On March 1941,
the Crown Council of Yugoslavia decided to accede to the Tripartite
Pact of the Axis, though in a watered down form. Yugoslavia maintained
the prerogative to refuse the right of passage in its territory
to foreign powers. Yet, no one
believed this would be the case if confronted with such a predicament.
This decision - to give up Yugoslavia's main asset and only protection
- its neutrality - was taken under pressure from the Croats in power
at the time. The Pact was already joined by Romania, Bulgaria and
Hungary. Two days after the Yugoslav Prime Minister (Dragisa Cvetkovic)
and his foreign minister signed the Pact in Vienna - they were deposed
together with the Regent Paul. The precocious Peter was made King
of Yugoslavia by the rebellious officers, headed by General Dusan
Simovic. The generals now in charge reverted to Yugoslavia's neutrality
and refused to join the British-Greek naval treaty, for example.
But what appeared to be spontaneous demonstrations in favour of
the conspirators and against the Tripartite Pact erupted all over
Serbia. It was a challenge to Germany which it could not ignore.
The Supreme Command of the Wehrmact (OKW) issued "Undertaking
25" (against Yugoslavia) and "Case Marita" (against
Greece). The Yugoslavs mobilized (albeit with a surprising procrastination),
the Germans invaded (on April 6, 1941) and, within 10 days it was
all over. The Croats did their best to assist the new forces of
occupation, disrupting and sabotaging the best they could army operations
as well as civilian defence. It was clear that many of them (though
by no means the majority) regarded the Serbs as the real occupiers
and the Germans as long awaited liberators. On April 10,
1941, six days into the invasion, the Germans declared the Independent
State of Croatia (NDH, after the initials of its name in Croatian
- Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska). Vladimir Mecak, leader of the Peasant
Party and Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia called on the people
to collaborate with the new government. Overnight, a fringe terrorist
organization, (erroneously) considered to be more a puppet of Italy
that a true expression of Croat nationalism, found itself at the
helm of government in circumstances complicated by internecine rivalries,
inter-ethnic tensions, an history of hate and mutual resentment,
a paranoia stoked by sporadic violence. The Serbs were evidently
a fifth column and so were the Jews. Indeed, Croatia's Serbs wasted
no time in joining resistance movements against the Nazis and the
NDH. Anyhow, the vacuum created by Macek's surprising passivity
and by the Church's abstention - was filled by the Ustashe. The
new state included a part of Dalmatia (the rest went to Italy),
the region of Srem and the entirety of Bosnia Herzegovina. It was
the closest Croatia ever got to re-creating Great Croatia of a millennium
ago. Fearful of Croat encroachment, the Slovenes hurried to discuss
the declaration of their own state modelled after the NDH - only
to discover that their country was split between Italy and Germany.
In Zagreb, the enthusiasm was great. The 200 nor so returning Ustashe
were greeted back even by their political rivals. People thronged
the streets, throwing flowers and rice at the advancing former terrorist
and German convoys. The NDH existed for four years. It had 7 governments - only 5 of which were headed by Ante Pavelic. As opposed to popular opinion, the Ustashe were not a puppet regime, far from it. Both the Italians and the Germans express their continued frustration at being unable to control and manipulate the Ustashe. Despite their military presence and economic support - both Axis powers lacked real leverage over the ever more frantic activities of the Ustashe. Even when it was clear that the Croat NDH - in its genocidal activities - is alienating the Serbs and adding to the ranks of resistance movements throughout Yugoslavia, there was precious little the Germans or Italians could do. They held polite and less polite talks with the top echelons of their own creation but like the fabled Dr. Frankenstein found that the NDH had a life very much of its own and an agenda it pursued with vigour and conviction. It is impossible - nor is it desirable - to avoid the issue of the mass killings of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. Some Croats claim that "only" 60-70,000 were killed in Jasenovac and other camps. The very use of the word "only" in this context ought to send a frisson of repulsion down the spines of civilized men. The Serbs, Jewish scholars and many international scholars claim the number was between 300-600,000 people. The reason for the disparity in numbers is that - despite their "German" pretensions, the Croats acted like the least of the barbarous Balkanians in their mass slaughters. This was no industrial affairs, replete with bureaucracy and statistics. The massacres were atavistic, primitive, the call of blood and guts and scattered brains. It was an orgy, not an operation. There is nothing much to tell about the NDH. The regime was busy enacting laws against deadly sins and minor vices (such as pornography). The collaboration with the Catholic Church proceeded smoothly. Laws were passed against the Jews. The NDH army fought the partisans and the Allied Forces. When it tried to surrender to the British army in 1945 - it refused to accept their capitulation and turned them over to the partisans. In a series of death marches army soldiers and civilian collaborators with the Ustashe were deliberately exterminated. The Balkans knows no mercy. Victims become butchers and butchers victims in nauseating turns. By 1944, the NDH lost half its territory either to the Germans or to the partisans. The rump state survived somehow, its leaders deserting in droves. Pavelic himself escaped to Austria, from there to Italy and Argentina. He survived an attempt on his life in 1957 and then fled to Paraguay and Spain where he died in 1959. THE DEAD "After
all, if the Croat state wishes to be strong, a nationally intolerant
policy must be pursued for fifty years, because too much tolerance
on such issues can only do harm." Adolf Hitler to Ante
Pavelic in their meeting, June 6, 1941 "For the rest - Serbs, Jews and Gypsies - we have three million bullets. We shall kill one third of all Serbs. We shall deport another third, and the rest of them will be forced to become Roman Catholic." Mile Budak, Minister of Education of Croatia, July 22, 1941 "There are limits even to love... (It is) stupid and unworthy of Christ's disciples to think that the struggle against evil could be waged in a noble way and with gloves on." Archbishop of Sarajevo, Ivan Saric, 1941 "Croats
no longer think that German troops are present merely to provide
peace and security, but that they are here to support the Ustasha
regime [...] The Ustashas promote the impression that they act not
only in agreement with German instances, but actually on their orders.
[...] There is here today a deep mistrust of Germany, because it
is supporting a regime that has no moral or political right to exist,
which is regarded as the greatest calamity that could have happened
to the Croat people. That regime is based entirely on the recognition
by the Axis powers, it has no popular roots, and depends on the
bayonets of robbers who do more evil in a day than the Serbian regime
had done in twenty years." Captain Haffner to General
Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, Plenipotentiary of the Wehrmacht in
Zagreb, Croatia, 1941 "Our troops have to be mute witnesses of such events; it does not reflect well on their otherwise high reputation... I am frequently told that German occupation troops would finally have to intervene against Ustasha crimes. This may happen eventually. Right now, with the available forces, I could not ask for such action Ad hoc intervention in individual cases could make the German Army look responsible for countless crimes which it could not prevent in the past."General Edmund Glaise von Horstenau to the OKW, July 10, 1941 "The horrors
that the Ustashi have committed over the Serbian small girls is
beyond all words. There are hundreds of photographs confirming these
deeds because those of them who have survived the torture: bayonet
stabs, pulling of tongues and teeth, nails and breast tips - all
this after they were raped. Survivors were taken in by our officers
and transported to Italian hospitals where these documents and facts
were gathered."Commander of the Italian Sassari Division
in Croatia, 1941 "Increased activity of the bands is chiefly due to atrocities carried out by Ustasha units in Croatia against the Orthodox population. The Ustashas committed their deeds in a bestial manner not only against males of conscript age, but especially against helpless old people, women and children. The number of the Orthodox that the Croats have massacred and sadistically tortured to death is about three hundred thousand."Report to Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler from the Geheime Staatspolizei - GESTAPO - dated February 17, 1942 "From the founding [of the NDH] until now the persecution of Serbs has not stopped, and even cautious estimates indicate that at least several hundred thousand people have been killed. The irresponsible elements have committed such atrocities that could be expected only from a rabid Bolshevik horde."German foreign ministry plenipotentiary representative in Belgrade Felix Benzler to Joachim von Ribbentrop, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Reich " (In Croatia
under the Ustasha) ...over half a million [Serbs] were murdered,
about a quarter of a million were expelled from the country, and
another quarter of a million were forced to convert to Catholicism."Encyclopaedia
of the Holocaust (All quotes from "The Real Genocide in Yugoslavia: Independent Croatia of 1941 Revisited" by: Srdja Trifkovic, published in: www.rockfordinstitute.org and in: www.antiwar.com ) |
|
Il
freeware è riservato ai Cittadini di
 |
|
|
Se
non lo sei ancora, clikka per leggere i dettagli
|
Quando
esce il form, inserisci Id e Password
|
 |
 |
|
Ti
ricordiamo anche che nessuna comunita' vive se tutti i suoi membri
si limitano a prendere. Psicopolis si basa sullo scambio, quindi
ogni tanto dai un tuo contributo: NON SOLDI ma un intervento sulle
bacheche, oppure qualche materiale utile o una segnalazione interessante.
|
|
|
Attenzione,
se trovi il server occupato, riprova in orari diversi. Se hai difficoltà
a scaricare o ricevi un file corrotto,
.
Ogni programma è stato controllato con antivirus, ma Psicopolis
non risponde del funzionamento del software, che è reperito
in rete.
|
|
 |
|
|