The Longue Durée of Paramilitarism

Contents

1. Synopsis
2. Enduring Legacy and Complex Realities of Paramilitarism. An Introduction Dmitar Tasić and Aleksandar R. Miletić
3. 1. “To Undertake Police Duties in a Foreign Land”: Greek Macedonian Komitadjis Between Irredentism and Ottoman Paramilitarism (1904–1908) Tasos Kostopoulos
4. 2. “To Defend the Integrity of our Territory”: Paramilitarism and Anti-Diplomacy in the Greek-Albanian Borderlands, 1913–1914 Christopher Kinley
5. 3. Resilience and Rupture of Paramilitarism in the Balkans and Caucasus Tetsuya Sahara
6. 4. Protecting the Empire in the Borderlands: The Case of the Mitrovica Battalions (1917–1918) Jovo Miladinović
7. 5. Exploding Patriotism? Quasi-State Paramilitary Formations and the Wave of Terrorism in Hungary in the First Years of the Horthy-Era, 1922–1924 Balázs Kántás
8. 6. Soldiers Remobilized in the East European Borderlands: The Green Partisans, 1918–1925 Aleksandra Pomiecko
9. 7. Paramilitarism in Silesia 1918–1947 Ivana Kolářová and Ondřej Kolář
10. 8. Paramilitarism as a Way of Knowing: Second World War Yugoslav Chetniks as Case Study Stevan Bozanich
11. 9. Quasi-State Paramilitarism in Georgia in the Early 1990’s Shukuko Koyama
12. 10. Bitter Herbs on Bitter Wounds: The Use of Felons in State Security and Paramilitarism Maria Vivod
13. 11. Between Military and Paramilitary: Serbian Auxiliary Forces in Kosovo, 1998–1999 Aleksandar R. Miletić and Dmitar Tasić
14. Contributors
15. Index

Synopsis

Chapter 1

Tasos Kostopoulos, “To Undertake Police Duties In A Foreign Land”: Greek Macedonian Comitadjis Between Irredentism and Ottoman Paramilitarism (1904–1908)

Greece’s “Macedonian Struggle” (1904–1908), i.e. the dispatch of armed bands into Ottoman Macedonia in order to suppress the pro-Bulgarian Macedonian guerrillas of IMRO, has been a very atypical case of paramilitary action. The “Macedonian Fighters” in question were in fact mostly confined to an informal “police duty” at the service of the Ottoman social order (“faire la police dans un pays étranger”, according to the expression used in 1904 by Prime Minister Theotokis himself). As a result of their counterinsurgency mission, traditional Greek irredentism was “temporarily” substituted by an emphasis on law and order and the short-lived vision of a “Greek-Ottoman Empire”, whereby Greek bankers and landlords would hold the reigns of the economy under the Sublime Porte’s protective wings. At a lower level, the mercenary mentality of professional fighters derived from the Greek Kingdom or Crete was politically redefined under the guidance of local Ottoman Greek landowners and factory owners. Chapter explores various aspects of this experience. First, the emergence of this peculiar paramilitary endeavour as a by-product of a broader militarist current developed in Greece after the 1893 default on the country’s sovereign debt. Second, the specific organizational structures that carried out this campaign, their local outlets and internal contradictions. Last but not least, it describes the patterns of violence that was applied by the Greek bands in order to smash the political structure of IMRO in the Macedonian hinterland and reconstruct the local Greek party that had been decimated by the Ilinden uprising.

Chapter 2

Christopher Kinley, “To Defend the Integrity of Our Territory”: Paramilitarism and Anti-Diplomacy in the Greek-Albanian Borderlands, 1913–1914

On 21 February 1914, the European Powers established the border between the inchoate Albanian state and the Kingdom of Greece. What was meant to mitigate the lingering conflict in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars had in fact created a paroxysm of religious and nationalist violence perpetrated by paramilitary bands composed of Albanian- and Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians who had sworn an oath to defend their territory from incorporation into the Muslim majority Albanian state. In their quest for diplomatic peace-making and border-creation, the European Powers had employed an ethnolinguistic understanding of national identity to inform their decisions, completely disregarding the central role of religion in local identity construction. The result was the emergence of the short-lived Republic of Northern Epirus, which was substantiated and expanded though paramilitarism. This chapter uses Greek and Albanian sources, from archives to personal accounts, as well as various Western European archives and ephemera to investigate the role of paramilitarism in the wake of the Greek-Albanian border decision. Through this investigation emerges a historical narrative that demonstrates how paramilitarism became a vector for state-building and anti-diplomacy used to deconstruct the border decision of the European Powers. These Orthodox Christian paramilitaries, called “sacred bands”, targeted Muslim and self-proclaimed Albanian communities in destructive and eradicative acts of violence, using the European Powers’ own diplomatic methodology of substantiating territory through statistical majority to construct and establish their own Orthodox Christian state. In addition to highlighting a new understanding of paramilitarism as a form of anti-diplomacy, this essay also disentangles the Northern Epirote movement from the national narratives that have dominated its study.

Chapter 3

Tetsuya Sahara, Resilience and Rupture of Paramilitarism in the Balkans and Caucasus

This chapter rebuts the popular thesis of the inherent violence culture of the Balkans and Caucasus by examining the behaviour of nationalist guerrillas of the late Ottoman era and the bandit-militias of the post-Yugoslav and Soviet wars. For all their disguise of traditional freedom fighters, each generation of guerrillas have introduced radical innovations. The use of violence of the late Ottoman revolutionaries was quite different from that of premodern bandits. In the same vein, the contemporary Serb and Chechen nationalists intimidated the host society in a quite different way from the late Ottoman revolutionaries. The IMRO fighters took advantage of the honour-based pre-modern village culture only to camouflage their predatory natures, and their violence transformed the multilingual and hetero- cultural communities into a new homogenous nationalist society. In contrast, the Caucasian rebels’ assertion of the age-old culture of mountain people is actually a product of national liberation theories forged by Soviet communist scholars. The betrayal of tradition by the contemporary paramilitaries is best exemplified by the case of Islamists. The Islamism championed by the Bosnian and Caucasian militants has nothing to do with the religious tradition in the regions but a variant of Salafism that is pure innovation of the modernity. As a conclusion, the chapter repudiates the cultural (pre-)determinism, and proposes to focus on the dialectical relations between the paramilitarism and the host societies.

Chapter 4

Jovo Miladinović, Protecting the Emipre in the Borderlands: The Case of the Mitrovica Battalions (1917–1918)

Instead of claiming that paramilitaries represented a constituent element of the imperializing Balkan nation-state, the chapter contends the opposite. By focusing on two battalions established by the Habsburg Monarchy during the occupation of the town of Mitrovica amid the First World War (1916/18), the paper seeks to explain the big questions at a small scale: Why did the Habsburg authorities establish this unit? Who were the bearers of these policies? And did the battalions yield the wanted result? The chapter relies on archival material kept in Belgrade, Vienna, and Istanbul, limited ego documents, and the literature. Scholars have already tacked upon the Habsburg paramilitary activities amid the First World War; however, this paper analyses the hybrid character of such units and the blurred line between regular and irregular warfare. Methodologically speaking, the chapter relies on histoire croisée. It claims that the broader area of Mitrovica enabled the setting in which the historical transfer process occurred (before and during the First World War) between ideas, institutions and peoples. Within this context, various players learn from each other. In addition, some people survived different imperial formations by becoming part and parcel of the future state apparatuses. In brief, the paper calls for studying the legacy and the entangled history of paramilitarism, all while focusing on the bearers, the character of warfare, and learning from imperial wars, which alleviated the encroachment of the state elites into contested spaces and enhanced the control of resources.