Henri Pozzi, 1935
The Bulgarian Scene - II. The Macedonian Question << Contents >> The Bulgarian Scene - IV. Behind the Barbed Wires
ORIM. What innumerable legends surround it!
"Organisation of bandits," say the Serbs.
"Union for a sacred aim of liberation of a people atrociously oppressed," say the Macedonians.
"The heroic personification of a great idea," wrote Stephan Raditch on 19th June, 1928, the eve of his assassination at Belgrade.
What is this ORIM--this Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation? Let us go back forty years.
In 1893 Serbia and Bulgaria were still very small. The Red Sultan pressed his yoke upon the lands of Macedonia which extend from Ochrida in Albania to Adrianople in Thrace; from Mount Char, which is south of Nisch, to Salonika at the mouth of the Vardar.
Three Macedonians, the oldest of whom was not thirty years of age: Dane Groueff, a teacher, Dr. Tatcheff, a young doctor and a professor, Pere Tocheff, gathered one winter evening at the village of Ressene, near Bitolj, to decide that the hour had come to put an end to it. Macedonia had suffered enough. If she were organised, if she were armed, if she had chieftains, the Turks would be thrown out.
Alone, these three were going to organise her and arm her. They swore on sacred icons to consecrate their lives to that task.
Their programme, from which the ORIM has not deviated one iota in forty years, was: Prepare the Macedonian populations for armed combat against the oppressor; obtain security for the people and guarantees of order and justice in the administration.
Less than three months afterwards hundreds of Macedonians, young and old, had taken the oath of the ORIM. Rich and poor, great poets such as Christo Matoff, university men like Gouchtanoff, doctors of law like Todor Saeff, professors of science, merchants, bankers, officials, doctors, celebrated officers like Boris Drangoff, and also obscure peasants, poor mountain shepherds, artisans and village teachers, all had taken the oath which bound them for ever to incessant propaganda, to supreme devotion, without pity for traitors, without excuse for the cowardly.
They were subjected to an iron discipline. Courage, integrity, purity of morals, defence of the oppressed and the weak, total abnegation--they must always set the example! Any failure on the part of members the ORIM punished as mercilessly as she strikes the enemies of the country.
Soon they were a thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand-all Macedonia!
Any Macedonian, whatever his official nationality, whether he were Bulgarian, Roumanian or Albanian, provided he were Christian and morally above reproach, could be a member of the organisation. It was sub-divided into groups of ten members, each one of whom obeyed a chief or voivode elected by secret vote. All the groups of a locality constituted the local organisation, directed by an elected committee. The local committee was subordinate to a central committee,
which was placed under the absolute authority of the chief, chosen from among its members to be the supreme voivode of the ORIM.
Immediately the ORIM set to work. In the solitudes of the mountains old soldiers trained volunteers. Soon the first shots echoed in the defiles, the first fires were lighted, the first bombs exploded in the garrisons, the stations and the official buildings. The Venitza affair in 1896; Valandovo in 1897; Enidje-Vardar in 1900; devastation and terror sown in Salonika the following year, then at Seres, then at Skoplje, then at Veles. They fought every day, everywhere, from one end to the other of Macedonia.
The Macedonian falcon was soaring!
On August 2nd, 1903, fires lighted on the mountain peaks from Kostom to Ochrida, signalled the 30,000 volunteers of the ORIM that the hour had sounded to chase the Turk. All Macedonia rose en bloc.
The struggle was fearful; and when at last the ORIM, outnumbered, crushed, had to admit defeat, the slaughter was unimaginable. Seven thousand heads fell, 5,000 prisoners were impaled, hanged, or burned alive; 3.000 children were mutilated or eviscerated, all the women and young girls in the regions of the insurrection were violated.
But Europe was affected. The Great Powers demanded autonomy for the martyrised provinces, and liberty, thanks to the ORIM, began to dawn over Macedonia.
But the long-awaited sun did not appear. The Young Turks had just replaced Abdul-Hamid. Hardly installed in power, they tried to settle for good their accounts with Macedonia. The massacre recommenced. The resistance of the ORIM recommenced also. Four years of struggle followed, without mercy on one side or the other ; ambushes, terrorist attacks, mass executions and insurrections without cease. Conquered in their turn by the Balkan allies, the Turks left in 1912. The volunteers of the ORIM had their large part in the victory. They had guided, informed, supported the Serbo-Bulgarian armies. They had fallen by thousands on the battlefield. They had been sacrified in vain.
Macedonia, abandoned by the Turks, was dismembered by the conquerors who had turned against their Bulgarian ally after the Ottoman defeat. The Great War ended the disaster. The heart of Macedonia, Chtip, Skoplje, Bitolj, Veles, Ochrida, Guevgueli, became Serb. The rest, Xanthi, Seres, Salonika, Florina was Greek. A little corner was left to Bulgaria.
And while 500,000 Macedonians, an entire people, fled the domination of the Greeks and the Serbs, still more merciless even than that of the Turks, the ORIM resumed the struggle, but this time against Belgrade and Athens.
To the hangings of prisoners, the massacres of suspects, to the fearful persecutions of the people, they replied with the execution of hangmen and judges; rendering violence for violence, they matched the administrative terror by guerilla warfare, and by their infernal machines.
In the last fourteen years, hundreds of Serb stations, trains, gendarmeries, public buildings, warehouses, and munition depots have been burnt or dynamited in annexed Macedonia. The ORIM has not disarmed.
Installed in Bulgaria, where it can count on the absolute support of all the Macedonian exiles, the ORIM negotiates with the enemies of Yugoslavia, concludes alliances with the revolutionary organisations of Croatia and of Slovenia, perfects her means of action, and awaits patiently the hour of the great interior crisis of Yugoslavia which, by war or revolution, will permit the liberation of Macedonia.
She has her representatives in all the great European capitals, her diplomatic delegates, and her secret codes.
Her chief is Ivan Mikhailoff, whom the bullet of a traitor eight years ago made the successor of the great Todor Alexandroff. He is the adversary Belgrade dreads most. By the sharpness of his political sense, by his inflexible will, by the devoted fanaticism which he inspires, he has made of the ORIM, as for all men of Macedonian blood, the very incarnation of his country.
A legend persistently broadcast by the Pan-Serb propagandists declares that Ivan Mikhailoff ("Vrantche" as his faithfuls call him) lives surrounded by armed guards, never sleeps twice under the same roof, never shows himself in public for fear of the reprisals of those whose parents or friends he has assassinated. This legend I heard defended at Sofia even, at the Union Club, and in diplomatic circles by men from whom one had the right to expect authentic information.
One evening, whilst dining at the Union Club, a friend called me on the telephone.
"Are you free to-morrow?"
"Yes."
"Then a car will come to get you at your hotel."
Next day the car arrived and took me away from Sofia. We stopped in the heart of a little village surrounded by mountains of reddish tobacco leaves drying in the sun.
"Dobar-den, Gospodine!"
Before the rhododendrons of a near-by cafe ten men were waiting in an oasis of cool shade. Young men wearing light-coloured waistcoats and correct ties, and with small clipped moustaches. Two or three spoke French.
"The ride must have given you an appetite. Let's have lunch."
The table was placed in an angle of the hall, near a veranda half covered with a curtain of fragrant honeysuckle. A simple menu; a clear wine with which we make a toast: "To liberty for all men!" An avalanche of flowers.
I was the guest of volunteers of the Macedonian Interior Revolutionary organisation--the ORIM--"Bandits of the Orient."
I listened to them laughing about the false stories of their bloody crimes promulgated by an untiring propaganda which creates the horror and the aversion that they inspire across the world.
So these were the "comitadjis," these young men who looked like clerks or peasants in Sunday clothes?
Yes? These were the "comitadjis"!
"Bandits?" asked my table companion, a college professor of French who had just finished translating Clemenceau's In the Evening of My Thought," Professional terrorists? Oh, yes, we are all that, as they always will be who fight against the oppressor.
"What stupefies us, though, is the bad faith on the part of most of your French journalists when they speak of us."
Why are they so set on distorting our actions? You can be the friends of the Serbs if you like, but don't lie about us. Your journalists are not slaves like those of Belgrade. They have the right to tell the truth. They can write freely. Yet the truth, which when they are here they say is so clear that it dazzles them, they replace with lies when they return to their own country. Can you explain that to us?"
I explained nothing. Could I tell them how difficult it is, if not impossible, to publish the truth in the French "free" Press? Could I reveal to them all the crooked business that is placed between the reality and the public, as soon as important political and financial interests intervene?
Are they aware, these young enthusiasts who surround me, that if their country, in 1915, after interminable negotiations, ended by joining the Austro-Germans, the reason for it was that a powerful Paris newspaper, subsidised by the Serbian Government, used its influence to have the demands of Sofia rejected--the demand, that is, to have Macedonia restored to it.
The War might have ended two years sooner, 300,000 dead at the Salonika front might still be living, if the Bulgarian Government in 1915 had offered that Paris newspaper a bigger bribe than Pasitch had offered to save Macedonia for Serbia.
And what was true then is even more true to-day.
Only the newspapers of the extreme Left speak the truth on foreign political problems, and even this truth is too often mitigated by considerations of doctrine and party prejudice.
If the National Committee of the ORIM were richer than the Government of Belgrade and more generous, their cause would be supported to-day by all those who attack them at so much per line.
My neighbour continued:
"Our organisation is represented in France as a mafia of assassins and thieves living comfortably from the terror which they inspire. But, believe me, the only obscurity which surrounds us is that in which our enemies seek to hide its true character.
"For twenty years our organisation fought against Turkey. Without her incessant attacks, which discouraged and exhausted the armies of the
Sultan, the Balkan allies would not have been able to win in 1912. They didn't treat our comrades as the 'plague of the Balkans' then. Then a-day we were absolute heroes in Belgrade and Athens!
"The ORIM, sir, has not changed. She is to-day what she was when her voivodes, at Skoplje, Bitolj, Veles, Valandovo, dealt with the Bashi-Bazouks of the Red Sultan. Her volunteers have always the same discipline and the same ideal. It is the enemy who has changed!
"The enemy is no longer the Turk but the Serb. Yet the ORIM remains as firm and as loyal as ever.
"The comitadji who has been charged to execute the sentence of the ORIM and who knows that on executing it he also will die, goes straight ahead to his objective. Not one has flinched. Not one has betrayed."
I interrupted him: "You struggle to free Macedonia from the Serbs. But are you sure that all your compatriots in annexed Macedonia are in accord with you? Thousands among them, I know, have demanded arms and munition of the Yugoslav authorities to defend themselves against the ORIM. On the other hand, even here in Bulgaria, the protoguerovists, who are Macedonians like you, accuse you of betraying the real national interests, and implacable battles, in which the dead accumulate, continue between you and them. Why?"
All the faces turned towards me. The French professor translated my words, and when he had finished all remained dumb. Had I then touched the weak spot in their defence?
Finally my neighbour spoke:
"You have asked me two questions. I am going to reply first to your second.
"Do you know of any great national movement that has not had its traitors? The Sinn Fein had theirs; the Rhine autonomists who worked with General Mangin for the liberation of the left bank of the Rhine, had theirs, and the Polish patriots, also, under the Czarist regime had theirs. The Macedonian cause has its traitors also, and they are called the protoguerovists.
"They were a part of the ORIM. Personal ambition separated them from her. Disavowed by all our organisations, abandoned by the personalities whom they had succeeded in detaching for a short time from the ORIM, such as Pop Hristoff and Kiril Parlitcheff, the protoguerovists have placed themselves at the service of the oppressors of Macedonia.
"The struggle which they wage against us, by assassinating our chiefs, is directed and paid for by Belgrade. What the Serbs cannot do directly, the protoguerovists do for them. By whom have our best men been attacked? By the protoguerovists! Where do our investigations or the confessions of culprits lead us after each attack? Always, without a single exception, to the Yugoslav Legation!
"The protoguerovist, Todor Petroff, came to us six months ago, full of remorse, to tell us that he had been ordered to assassinate Professor Guiocheff. Who pushed him to this crime? Who had given him the money? Who had given him the revolver which he was to use? Colonel Sketchitch, Yugoslav military attach? at Sofia!
"You would have the ORIM save these miserable wretches? But she has been only too lenient with them. If she had struck more quickly and more harshly all those whom we mourn to-day would still be here. Not a court, sir, as long as Bulgaria is free, Will condemn the slayer of a protoguerovist, not a citizen in the street will raise his hand to defend the traitor!" *
* The accusations which my hosts made against the protoguerovists, sold to Belgrade were still more justified than they themselves thought. "With a few thousand levas, we shall have the hides of all those fellows who fight us here," said Voutchevitch, the Yugoslav minister, to me the evening before at the Legation. "All is fair in war! The diplomacy here at Sofia is not that of Paris. Are the Macedonians ready to sell themselves? Why I find them by the shovelful! "And when I asked him what he thought of the Bulgarian propaganda which advocates the entry of their country into an integral Yugoslavia, and notably of the author-representative Petko Rossene-Tchorbadjieff the Yugoslav minister replied: "Him? The revolver which is to shut his mouth is already in the hand of the ORIM! "A Macedonian, Stefan Petroff; confessed to the representatives of the National Committee, that he had been charged by the Yugoslav Legation to kill Rossene-Tchorbadjieff. In addition to a revolver (bearing the number 1885), Stefan Petroff had received 3,500 levas. The Serbs explained to the wretch that he must commit the murder in such a fashion that everyone would believe it to be the work of the ORIM. No denial has been made of the miserable Petroff's statement.
A muffled murmur of approbation arose from the table.
"And now," the young professor continued, "let us consider your first question: is it true that thousands of Macedonians have entreated Belgrade to arm them in order that they might defend themselves against us?
"It is true! But what they forget to say is that those Macedonians are Serb colonists from Old Serbia, whom the Serb administration has installed on the lands and in the homes of our compatriots. Macedonians? They are about as much so as the Prussian immigrants to Alsace after 1871 were Alsatians. We make them pay dearly for their violences against our unhappy brothers of Macedonia. They have a reason for not loving us!
"But the others! There is little danger of them distributing rifles and cartridges there! The Serbs know only too well how they would use them! To-day, just as yesterday, there is not a peasant in Macedonia, not a woman, not a child who is not ready to shelter, to hide, to aid with all their means the men of the ORIM. I know! Belgrade pretends that they do it only because we terrorise them. But thousands of Macedonians have been tortured, imprisoned, and executed during the last fourteen years, for having received, guided, and assisted our comrades. What about them?" *
* "Your young revolutionary was right," said a French diplomatic agent to me a few days later at Belgrade.
"The mass of the non-immigrant population in annexed Macedonia is heart and soul with the ORIM. If Belgrade told the truth, how is it that the ORIM can still accomplish what she does in a country which barbed wire walls have transformed into a prison and which is occupied by more than fifty thousand soldiers, police and gendarmes.
"Who will believe that the infernal machines which still daily devastate stations, gendarmeries, railroad bridges, and munition depots after fourteen years of occupation and in spite of the hermetically-closed frontiers, could have been introduced into Macedonia, transported, placed and exploded by agents of the ORIM without the active complicity of the population? What about the revolutionary tchetas who are in continual conflict with the Yugoslav troops? Who then hides them? Who feeds them? Who permits them to escape by secret roads when the blow has been struck?
"To be sure, according to the Yugoslavs, order and tranquillity reign in Macedonia, the Serbianisation of the Bulgar inhabitants has succeeded beyond their fondest dreams. I know all that the Agence Avala recounts. But wait until you are on the spot and see what really is, as I have seen it. Wait until you have verified only half the information you possess. It will open your eyes."
Said a young lawyer, who boasts a law diploma of the Faculty of Lausanne: "They reproach us for the means which we employ. Dynamiting trains, burning garrisons, shooting down lying judges or police executioners, denouncing to the civilised world the abuse of power, the pillaging, the abominable atrocities of which our enslaved compatriots are victims. They call these the deeds of bandits, but why does the French Press present only one side of the medal in France, when it is a question of things Serbian? They blame us for what we do. They never tell what the Serbs do.
"For those of our people who do not obey, who dare to protest, who dare to defend themselves, there is the prison, bastinado, and tortures so cruel, so odious that they are inconceivable to the Occidentals to whom we recount them. Soldiers and irregulars conduct themselves in our villages as conquerors. If the women refuse they are beaten as beasts and are violated. If they complain about it then fifty or a hundred blows of a horsewhip are added to those already received. If a peasant cannot pay his taxes the day they are due, his property is seized and given to the Serb immigrants. If a suspect does not wish to confess the crime of which he is innocent, then he is imprisoned, deprived of food every other day, awakened during the night to be beaten on the soles of the feet until he falls down unconscious. Our folk suffer tortures that even the Bashi-Bazouks did not know.
"You think I exaggerate? You will see, sir, when you are over there! No court will listen to the complaints of the victims. Fortunately for them, too, for if it listened to them, if it pretended to give them justice, their victory would be paid later with blood and tears!
"Well, sir, the ORIM charges itself with this vengeance. And, even then, how many times does she succeed? Not once out of a hundred! Twenty times in the last six years our comrades have sacrificed themselves in an effort to execute Jika Lasitch who is the paragon of cruelty and human ignominy. This brute made a hell of Macedonia, yet he has always escaped. And you would have us show consideration or pity for such!
"They took me then "to see the dead" as they call it. I entered a low building upon the walls of which are hung photographs which the veil of time has rendered almost indistinct. In an angle, over a skull and cross-bones, a great peregrine falcon, wings outspread, beak open, seems to fly out of the wall where it is hung. An inscription, near the door, reads, "Young Macedonia, come to us! It is not painful to die for your country!
"Here are found the photographs of all the great men of the ORIM forty years ago: Gouchtanoff, Bane Koucheff, director of the schools of Veles; Boris Drangoff, who abandoned his regiment to become the chief of a band; Christo Matoff, the poet; Mihail Dareff, doctor of law of the University of Lausanne; Lubomir Vessof, lawyer and journalist; Krsto Assenoff, college professor; Todor Saeff, master of science.
"Dead for the liberty of Macedonia," says my guide after each name.
Lawyer, professor, doctor, journalist, author--the faces look down at me. These, then, are the "bloody brutes," the sinister comitadjis, whose "atrocities" horrified the European public opinion which I helped to form when, twenty years ago I directed the propaganda of Bulgaria's enemies.
Fine and proud faces, some thickly covered with whiskers, in fashion before the War, as those of Tocheff and Groueff. Some bearing only a light moustache like those of Vassoff, or Saeff. Here I find the gay eyes of young men whom a long life calls; here, too, the veiled eyes of mature men who have struggled along the hard path.
A last frame, dominating the others, occupies the centre of the hall. It contains an unforgettable face, after the fashion of Velasquez, with lips of bitterness and determination. This is Todor Alexandroff, the legendary voivode, he who was the chief of chiefs of the ORIM.
"Assassinated by a traitor," reads the inscription engraved on the black wood frame.
For a long time I looked on the face of him who never compromised nor flinched. Harsh he was without a doubt. Implacable, and recklessly brave on the battlefield and in the prison where he still defied his judges. Insensible to all that was not for his country, his shade, after the lapse of so many years, hovers still over the youth who have flocked to the ORIM, to guide them towards battle and the supreme sacrifice. Hard! Cruel! Excessive! It may be so. But were the men of France less so when in order to suppress treason and wrest victory from an appalled Europe, they instituted the Reign of Terror?
For hours the terrible roads over which we returned shook us to pieces. Twice we skirted the frontier where the Yugoslav blockhouses, on high, rocky summits along an interminable stretch of barbed wires, were dressed like beads of a monstrous rosary.
Great shadows already were filling the silent valleys at the foot of mountains inflamed by the setting sun, when we came to a halt. Under very old walnut-trees peopled with chattering rooks, a village raised its brown tiled roofs. For a moment, smoking Makedonija cigarettes, which leave a taste of iris and honey on the lips, we rested under the green freshness of branches.
The great man of the ORIM waited for us there. I put my questions to him bluntly: "Of all the accusations made against the ORIM, the one which really impresses France is that which represents the organisation as being in the service and the pay of Italy. Details have been published in France of the sums paid, of the place of payment, and of the beneficiaries. Yesterday in a Parisian illustrated paper, a friend of the Yugoslav dictatorship affirmed that in June 1931 when he found himself in Bulgaria, the supreme chief of the ORIM had just left for Italy to receive the lires placed at his disposal."
He replied: "The ORIM knows only Macedonia, and will liberate Macedonia for Macedonians. Her money is Macedonian. Not a lev comes from foreign hands. Let them lie who have sold their consciences."
I said to him: "What is the objective of the ORIM? As powerful as she may be, as disciplined and ready for sacrifice as are her volunteers, she alone cannot hope to conquer Yugoslavia. What good then to keep up an agitation in Macedonia which only results in augmenting the suffering of your people?"
He replied: "The Turks were much more powerful than the Serbs and the ORIM weaker than to-day. However, she ended in stirring up the Balkans. The Turks were chased out. They say we have spilled blood. We have, a little. But the Serbs have spilt torrents. In comparison to the thousands of men, women and children who have been assassinated, hanged, beaten to death, tortured to death, outraged to death by the Serbs in the last fourteen years, what are the few hangmen, the few torturers, the few Serbian terrorists who have been executed by the ORIM? As for the suffering of our annexed brothers--they would bear it a hundred fold to be delivered."
"I observed during my stay at Belgrade," I said to him, "to what an extent official circles are irritated by the persistent activity of the ORIM in annexed Macedonia. They did not hide from me that they were at the end of their patience and that they would have acted already had it not been for the formal opposition of France. They accuse Bulgaria of being the secret ally of the ORIM. The hospitality which Bulgaria accords to the ORIM alone makes possible the growing aggressiveness which it manifests. I am certain that the day is nearer when Yugoslavia, because of the ORIM, will resort to some violent
action against Sofia. We French do not wish at any price to be dragged by Belgrade into another World War."
He replied: "If Belgrade makes Bulgaria responsible for the acts of the ORIM (which demands nothing of Bulgaria, is not at her service, and receives nothing from her but the shelter which she accords all Macedonians on her territory) what can we do about it? If the Serbs, under the pretext of destroying the ORIM, are mad enough to attack Bulgaria, so much the worse for the Serbs, and so much the worse for those who have not been able to stop them.
"When that day comes, France, which counts for her security on the Yugoslav alliance, will discover to her cost that it is Yugoslavia which has not ceased to use France for the realisation of her designs of conquest and oppression.
"And if the Macedonian people, in their legitimate efforts to free themselves, set fire to Europe, it is not we, but Europe who will have wished it on themselves."
"Under what conditions will the ORIM lay down her arms?" I asked him.
He replied: "That Macedonia be free!"
I said to him: "He who directs the ORIM to-day, and whom Belgrade has sworn to destroy, he will fall as Todor Alexandroff fell."
"What does one man matter?" he responded. "The traitor who killed Todor made the ORIM more powerful with the hatred inspired by his crime. Leaders may go, but the ORIM will remain until Macedonia is free."
The Bulgarian Scene - II. The Macedonian Question << Contents >> The Bulgarian Scene - IV. Behind the Barbed Wires