Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  Initially a genuine movement of national liberation, IMRO degenerated within the next decade into a gang of hired assassins and a tool of foreign powers. With the transfer of its activities to Bulgaria it specialized in bank robberies, drug traffic and extortion, not necessarily for political purposes. It still, in its declarations, invoked the liberation of Macedonia as the ultimate aim, but as an outside observer noted in the late 1920s, a full account of its activities would be to compile a dossier "which would make American gangsterdom look insignificant.'"70 Some of the elements of corruption had been present from the very beginning; patriotic robbery, smuggling and extreme cruelty had long been part of the tradition — to bury an opponent alive was by no means considered a particularly vicious way of expressing one's displeasure. IMRO had engaged from its earliest days in indiscriminate bomb throwing in Muslim bazaars and mosques. It was commonplace to kill rivals and enemies within its own ranks. Having no substantial funds and dependent on the outside for supplies, IMRO solicited, and received, both money and arms from Bulgaria, Austria (during World War I), and later from Fascist Italy; at one time there was also some cooperation with the Soviet Union. But there were usually strings attached; to get the Austrian subsidy, IMRO undertook military operations against its fellow Slavs, the Serbs, and this at the time when Serbia was fighting for its very survival. Bulgaria was to become IMRO's chief protector and paymaster; as a quid pro quo IMRO, in close cooperation with the Bulgarian police, set about the systematic liquidation of oppositionist politicians in Sofia and other Bulgarian cities.

  IMRO was beset by deep splits; the Mikhailovist faction, in the pay of Italy, spent far more time and effort in killing the Protogerovists than in fighting for an independent Macedonia. Occasionally IMRO would stage raids into Yugoslavia from its bases in Bulgaria; according to the official IMRO version, its headquarters were in Yugoslavia, but its leaders resided in Sofia and it is not certain whether they ever set foot on Yugoslav soil. Whenever the Yugoslavs lodged a diplomatic protest following an IMRO raid from across the border, the Bulgarians would indignantly deny any such imputation; as far as they were concerned, IMRO was a partisan army based in Yugoslavia, just as in later years Fatah was officially located in Israel, not in Lebanon. Such total dependence on Bulgarian goodwill had its drawbacks, as IMRO discovered to its detriment when relations between Sofia and Belgrade improved in 1933. IMRO was no longer needed by the Bulgarians and in July 1934 Mikhailov, again a fugitive, crossed the border into Turkey looking for political asylum with the archenemy of his people. Since then the Macedonian issue has cropped up whenever Bulgaria's relations with Yugoslavia have been at a low ebb as, for instance, after Tito's defection from the Cominform. But there has been no revival of IMRO. The tragic history of the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization is that of a small people which, given the geographical facts of life and the balance of political power in the region, had no chance of attaining full national independence. In its attempts to gain support, IMRO became subservient to alien interests and ultimately it lost its political identity altogether.

  Abd El-Kirm

  The biggest colonial war in the twentieth-century interwar period was fought in Spanish Morocco, an area which had seen much guerrilla fighting ever since Roman days. It was led by Abd el-Krim, the chief Qadi of the Melilla region, a Kabyle who despised the Spanish and hated the French. His slogan was, "The Rif is poor, we fight to make it rich." Abd el-Krim was an educated man; he had worked in the civil service, had acted as editor of the Arab supplement of the leading local Spanish newspaper and at one stage had served as the first professor of the Berber dialect.

  In 1919 Abd el-Krim left Melilla and joined his father in his native mountain village in order to prepare the rebellion. By the spring of 1921, following a cold winter and poor harvest, he had concentrated a little army (harka) of about three thousand men.71 Spanish forces under General Silvestre were ambushed and annihilated in July 1921, the native police and army auxiliaries mutinied and a general insurrection ensued. Within a few weeks the whole of eastern Morocco was in Abd el-Krim's hands. He could have taken Melilla, the capital, but his men were preoccupied with looting and he busied himself instead with the establishing of a Berber state, the Rif Emirate.

  All in all the Spanish lost more than ten thousand men in the disasters of 1921, and it was to take them five years, countless military setbacks and domestic crises before, with the help of a hundred and sixty thousand French soldiers and an even larger army of their own, they were able to subdue the Berbers. Abd el-Krim soon acquired the reputation of an inspired guerrilla strategist. But in actual fact, "the disaster was due more to Spanish demoralization than to Berber prowess."72 The Spanish officers facing Abd el-Krim (Franco, Sanjorjo, Mola, Queipo de Llano — all of civil war fame) had little guerrilla experience, and their army was in a state of advanced decay. General Weyler, the tough old soldier who had seen guerrilla action in Cuba many years before, bitterly attacked the inefficiency, cowardice and corruption which had come to light in Morocco. Lyautey and Pétain watched events from the sidelines in French Morocco with a mixture of concern and Schadenfreude; it was only toward the end of the Rif war that France and Spain decided to act in unison, the last thing Abd el-Krim would ever have credited.

  Abd el-Krim showed a good grasp of the essentials of guerrilla warfare, such as mobility, but his tactics were not particularly sophisticated; his soldiers would launch sneak attacks against enemy outposts and, if these failed, they would wait until the enemy ran out of food and water.73 Throughout most of the war the Riffi supply line to Tangiers was kept open. They received money from German, British and Dutch firms who were interested in mining concessions, they were assisted by some European military advisers, and their artillery (including some French 75 mm guns) was equal, if not superior, to the Spanish. Abd el-Krim was the first guerrilla leader in history with some aircraft of his own — though there is some doubt whether any of his planes actually ever took off. The whole conflict was deeply and increasingly unpopular in Spain where the abandonistas opposed any further major military effort. As it was, Abd el-Krim's assumption that time was working for him still almost came true. The Spanish government tried hard to find a face-saving formula in its negotiations with him. Had he not insisted on total independence and had he not attacked the French zone in 1925, it is doubtful whether the two European governments would have made common cause to dislodge him. In September 1925, in one last determined offensive, a Spanish force led by Lieutenant-Colonel Francisco Franco landed at Albucamas, in Abd el Krim's rear, and by early 1926 it was obvious that his defeat could no longer be far distant. He surrendered to the French in May 1926 and was exiled to Reunion. Released in 1947, he died in 1963.

  Looking back in later years, Abd el-Krim blamed his defeat on the marabouts, the Muslim preachers who, he claimed, had thwarted his plans for national unity. But Abd el-Krim had done little to counteract them while he was in a position to do so. He established a theocracy in which everyone was obliged to pray five times a day. His regime was tyrannical; his men committed atrocities not only against their European enemies but also against other tribes. With all his talents as a guerrilla leader, his great enterprise and energy, Abd el-Krim's ambitions grew beyond any reasonable hope of fulfillment; in effect, his downfall was caused by his own hubris. When Spanish Morocco became part of Morocco in 1957, Abd el-Krim was still alive in his Cairo exile. The year after, his own tribe, the Beni Urriaguel, revolted against the Moroccan government, but their rebellion was put down by Rabat with short shrift.

  The Palestine Rebellion

  Between the two world wars British forces faced armed resistance in various parts of the empire. But these outbreaks of violence were either short-lived (Amritsar in 1919, the Moplar [Malabar] rebellion in 1921, Cyprus in 1931), militarily insignificant (the Burmese rebellion in 1930-1932), or nonviolent in character, such as Gandhi's Swaraj movement. A British authority noted that even in the Burmese insurrection, which lasted fo
r eighteen months, a military police force should have been able to cope with the situation and would in all probability have nipped it in the bud.74 The army had to be called in only because the police were not strong enough and lacked experience.

  Palestine was the one major blot on an otherwise almost idyllic landscape. There had been two previous Arab outbreaks in Palestine, albeit on a minor scale, in 1919 and 1929, directed almost exclusively against the Jews. The third, far more extensive revolt was directed both against British Mandatory rule and the Jewish community. Following the rise of Hitler, Jewish immigration to Palestine had risen by 1935 to over sixty thousand. The number of Jews was still less than half that of the Arabs, nor was it true, as some Arab leaders asserted, that the Arabs had suffered economically from Jewish immigration. Arab resistance was political, or more precisely, national and religious in character; the fact that it was led by the Mufti (chief religious dignitary), Haj Amin el-Husseini, was perhaps not altogether accidental. The Arabs resented the steady influx of foreigners, who, they feared, would one day make them a minority in their own land and whom they in any case considered an undesirable element. Arab spokesmen accused the Zionists of Bolshevism in the 1920s; four decades later they were to be charged with Fascism. The Zionists had not changed, but intellectual fashions certainly had. That Palestine's neighbors had attained independence, or were about to gain it, acted as a spur to the Palestinian Arabs.75

  The insurrection began with a general strike and some sporadic acts of violence. It had been preceded by increased brigandage, some of it political in nature. The band of Sheikh Izzed Din Kas-sem, pursued by the French, had infiltrated northern Palestine; Kassem was a religious leader who had apparently taken to brigandage for patriotic reasons, and became a national hero. Shot in a clash with the Palestine police, his funeral in Haifa turned into a great national occasion. Something of glamour had for long attached to those indulging in brigandage; Abu Gilda's exploits in the 1920s have remained proverbial to this day. Not that the heroically selfless reputation of these brigands was always warranted. What is worthy of remark is that some of them — Abu Durra, Aref Abdul Razek, for instance — took a leading part in the rebellion.76

  Its first phase witnessed small-scale attacks directed chiefly against the country's rail and road network. The British Mandatory administration lost control over Palestine's hilly regions (Galilee, Samaria, and part of Judaea) and this although the guerrillas numbered no more than five thousand at the time. But the police, largely composed of Arabs, could not be trusted, and anyway had no orders to intervene. There were only a few British army units in the country; military command was, in fact, in the hands of the Royal Air Force, and there was no officer of general rank. The civil administration dragged its feet for about a year without taking any drastic action. The Jews, with a few exceptions, did not engage in counterterror but limited themselves to purely passive resistance.

  As the months went by with no sign of the rebellion abating, the British government looked for a political solution to the crisis; Jewish immigration was to be drastically restricted and other measures introduced to allay the fears of the Arabs. But these conciliatory steps did not go far enough to placate the Arabs and in November!937 the rebellion entered a new and more dangerous phase. By that time the rebel bands numbered some fifteen thousand members, supplemented by a still larger host of villagers mobilized as required for special undertakings. The rebel units were mainly concentrated in the north but some operated in the Mount Carmel region, in Samaria and Judaea. The largest unit was commanded by Fawzi Kaukji, also a fugitive from Syria. The rebel high command was in Damascus, but there was in actual fact little, if any, coordination between the bands. The Damascus leaders helped with money and arms, some of which came from Fascist Italy. On the whole the rebels were skimpily equipped; they had no artillery, no heavy machine guns, no motorized transport. Later it appeared that British and Jewish accounts about the quantity and quality of Arab equipment had been considerably exaggerated; the standard weapon of the rebels was the old (World War I) Turkish rifle and they used bombs of a primitive kind.77 The insurgents would focus their attacks with some effect against highroads, and railway and small Jewish settlements; they would refrain from clashes with the army or police strongpoints ("Tegart fortresses") in Arab territory. Part of the supplies and the money needed by the rebels was collected through taxes imposed on the not always willing villagers. The gang leaders and their followers engaged frequently in settling old personal accounts and tribal feuds. More Arabs were killed at the hands of Arabs than British and Jews put together.

  During the summer of 1938 the rebellion spread from the hilly regions throughout the country. "By October 1938 a large part of Palestine was physically under the control of the rebels, and almost the entire Arab population was either giving active support to, or was dominated by fear of, the rebels."78 As a result, substantial British army units were dispatched to the country and in October of that year the army was officially made responsible for the maintenance of public order. It lacked counterguerrilla experience altogether, but a number of elementary measures were sufficient to break the back of the revolt within three months. These included the imposition of curfews, traffic restrictions, occasional razzias and the building of roads into rebel territory. In 1938, the worst year of the rebellion, approximately two thousand Arabs were killed, as well as three hundred Jews and seventy British. (The official figure for Arab casualties, sixteen hundred, was for once almost certainly too low.) Isolated attacks continued throughout the spring of 1939, but when World War II broke out, the rebellion had already petered out — partly as the result of substantial political concessions made by the British government, but mainly in view of the military defeats and dispersing of the bands which were not strong enough to fight regular army units and not agile enough to evade them. Futhermore, the Jews, too, had gone over to active defense in the later stages of the rebellion, and as the tide turned against the bands they found far less support in the Arab villages. They no longer readily obtained supplies and they could not take it for granted that their whereabouts would not be betrayed to the authorities.

  The Palestine rebellion was not, as is sometimes claimed, a peasant uprising, even though most of the guerrillas themselves were villagers. The political struggle preceding the revolt had been the work of the urban upper and middle classes and the intelligentsia, but these disappeared from view once armed struggle broke out. With one exception (Abd el Kader Husseini), the leading Palestinian families were not actively represented in the guerrilla movement; many of them moved to Egypt or Lebanon during the "riots" — as these were called locally throughout their three years' duration. The military chiefs were all "lower class"; one of the most respected among them, "Abu Khaled," had been a stevedore at Haifa harbor.79 But even though it was a popular movement, it was by no means radical by modern standards; it lacked a social program, there was no demand for the redistribution of land, and the general inspiration was nationalist-religious-fundamentalist in the narrow sense. In other words, the aim was to fight foreigners and infidels. Militarily, the guerrillas chose by instinct the correct tactics. They did not try to establish liberated zones, which they would not have been able to hold, but engaged instead in hit-and-run attacks. But they had little military training, there was no overall strategy, no coordination, no outstanding leadership. The country was too small and the bands too exposed for successful partisan warfare. When the revolt was finally put down, it transpired that the guerrillas had been unable to overrun even the smallest Jewish settlement, and this despite the lack of military experience and weapons among the Jews.