'
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).
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