COLUMN ONE : Bound by ‘the Call of Blood’ : Despite official claims of neutrality and horrible past defeats, Bulgarians are poised to defend their ethnic kin in Macedonia. Such fervor shows why the Balkans’ violent history is compelled to repeat itself.

Dagger-wielding goatherds and vintners lugging 50-year-old hunting rifles stalk the Pirin Mountains, listening as they tend their flocks and truss denuded vines for the starting shot of a fifth ethnic bloodletting this century.

The summons will not come from the military high command in Sofia. The government has vowed neutrality in the conflict destroying this land’s Yugoslav neighbors. This peaceful pose has drawn Western plaudits for Bulgaria as an island of stability in a tempestuous realm.

Neither will it be the promise of victory and resolution of the century-old “Macedonian question” that would propel Bulgarians into the medieval savagery on their doorstep. Impoverished and politically drifting, Bulgaria could expect from the current conflict the same ignominious defeat it suffered after four previous wars for Slavic unity and territorial grandeur.

But logic and strategy seldom wield much clout against nationalist passions in the Balkans.

If war spreads to Macedonia, explains would-be warrior Hari Mavrodiev, Bulgarians will be honor-bound to answer “the call of blood.”

“We must go and defend our relatives if this war touches them,” says the burly, mustachioed paramilitary commander outfitted in camouflage. “If war spills to Macedonia, every man in this region will go there to fight.”

The call of blood is a venerated principle by which the poor and backward of the Balkans live. The need to stand by ethnic brothers, no matter how doomed their fight, is the defining measure of nationalist dignity and a convincing explanation for why the region’s violent history is compelled to repeat itself.

While officials in the capital of Sofia assure Western leaders of their determination to stay out of the Balkan conflict, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization--a turn-of-the-century terrorist group--has reinvented itself as a quasi-legal nationalist movement. It is arming and training volunteers for battle.

Mavrodiev and fellow activists in the group pay lip service to the official aim of staying neutral. But they readily concede all bets are off if any Balkan neighbor threatens the Slavs of Macedonia, whom Bulgarians claim as their kin.

“We would be among the first to protect Macedonia, because we are conscious of the fact that we would not just be protecting a new country but our own brothers,” said Anatoly Velichkov, a revolutionary organization leader in the city of Blagoevgrad.

The brash, 29-year-old artilleryman disclosed that the group is engaged in paramilitary training. He said Bulgaria’s loose, poorly applied gun-control laws pose little obstacle to the movement’s drive to secure arms.

The group’s women’s councils are stockpiling food and clothing in the event Slav refugees from neighboring Macedonia begin to pour in, and to ensure rations are ready for men who go off to fight.

The battles would be triggered, as Velichkov and others see it, by a series of events that would destabilize the region. Under these predictions:

* Serbs would spark the crisis by moving to ethnically cleanse Albanians in Kosovo, the southern Serbian province.

* In turn, Albanians in Kosovo, trying to escape Serbian aggression or gather arms and supporters for their fight, would seek refuge in the predominantly Albanian western half of Macedonia, disrupting the ethnic balance there; as a result, Serbian forces would be enticed into Macedonia to eradicate nests of Albanian resistance.

* Hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians then would rush to the defense of the Macedonians.

Almost 1,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops, including 300 American GIs, are deployed along the Macedonian-Serbian border in an effort to stare down such an escalation. But the foreign soldiers, like 27,000 comrades deployed in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, are hamstrung with so restrictive a mandate they could do little more than watch, if the worst happens.

Bulgaria was the first country to recognize Macedonia’s claim to independence from the former Yugoslav federation roughly two years ago, hoping that according it statehood would protect the territory from Serbian or Greek adventurism, preserving it for eventual union with Bulgaria.

But Macedonian President Kiro Gligorov insists that his 2 million citizens make up their own nation; Macedonians reject claims that their people and language are actually Bulgarian, and they are wary, at best, about Sofia’s offers of assistance to them in the event of conflict with the Serbs.

This striving for a separate identity stirs the ire of nationalists like the 17,000 members of the revolutionary organization and the larger mass of Bulgarian society whose unspoken aspirations for unity they represent.

“There is too much tolerance for this principle of self-determination,” insists Velichkov, who contends the Macedonian nation is an artificial creation of late Yugoslav leader Marshal Tito.

Velichkov believes war is coming and Bulgarian patriots must prepare for it. He says the outbreak is not imminent because Serbian nationalists are now pinned down by the struggle for Bosnian territory.

Still, fears of being drawn into the Balkan conflict undulate with the waves of butchery in Bosnia, where an undeterred Serbian land grab is fueling regionwide desires for territorial expansion and demanding resolution of what has been known since the end of Ottoman Turkish rule as the “Macedonian question.”

The dilemma arises from the search for political and national identity for a territory inhabited by at least eight peoples. Macedonia has had a name since antiquity but has seldom been united and never affixed with formal boundaries.

More a geographic distinction than a national entity, like the Great Plains or the Sahara, the land known as Macedonia reaches into three countries today--northern Greece, this southwestern corner of Bulgaria and the entire former Yugoslav republic now bearing the name.

With the Balkans’ diverse peoples seeking national definition in the post-Communist era, the expanse of Macedonia provides fertile ground for overlapping territorial claims and clashing nationalist sentiments and for reviving painful memories of ethnic slaughters.

The former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, which covers about one-third of the geographic region, has angered Greece by adopting a name that Athens considers the property of Hellenic history.

Athens insists on referring to the newly independent state by the name of its capital, Skopje, and Bulgarians call it Vardar Macedonia, alluding to its principal river.

Here, in the Bulgarian portion of the territory known as Pirin Macedonia, extremists lay claim to the whole region, contending that the former Yugoslavs are primarily Bulgars and that Slavs were the majority in the Greek sector, known as Aegean Macedonia, before Athens expelled them after World War II.

Mihail Ivanov, adviser to Bulgarian President Zhelyu Zhelev on ethnic and religious issues, concedes the clashing views of history could undermine the government’s determination to preserve peace.

“We have to consider the worst possible scenario. Bulgaria has taken part in two world wars and two Balkan wars this century. A third Balkan war would be devastating,” he says, with resignation rather than alarm. In the event of fighting in Macedonia, “the Bulgarian government would oppose any involvement, but things would be out of control.”

Some academics in the region have lately expressed the view that Macedonia has little chance of surviving as an independent state--comments seen here as fanning the hopes of neighboring nationalists lusting after its territory.

Ivanov sees another risk in partitioning Bosnia, in that it would strengthen the arguments of those who contend Christians and Muslims cannot live together. “This model of intolerance is being transplanted into the minds of Bulgarians,” Ivanov says, warning that religious polarization is a potent danger.

Deputy Foreign Minister Dimitar Ikonomov sees the potential for a spread of the Balkan conflict as “very great” and cautions that the government’s power to control extremists is limited. “We are trying to avoid being influenced by the demons of the past,” Ikonomov says.

But, as at the start of this century, Bulgaria is an often forgotten state, too economically troubled to forge Western alliances and too militarily weak to defend itself should the regional bloodshed worsen.

“Conflict has been raging around us for three years now and everyone has been living in a state of war paranoia,” Ikonomov says. “This has created a kind of vacuum that has to be filled.”

The revolutionary organization and an even more ardently nationalist group, OMO-Ilinden, appear to be filling that vacuum. More than 1.5 million of Bulgaria’s 8.5 million people claim Macedonian origin--350,000 from the Pirin area and many more from the Aegean region that suffered an earlier bout of “ethnic cleansing.”

“Despite 40 years of communism, nationalism has proved durable enough and attractive enough to interest the younger generation,” said Evgeny Ekov, a portly 33-year-old who is part of the revolutionary organization’s national leadership in Sofia. “Some people will defend Vardar Macedonia because of family ties, but others simply because they realize it is the right thing to do.”

As has become common in the war-ravaged Balkans, Ekov tends to see clear strategy in what is more likely gesture, interpreting American participation in the meager U.N. peacekeeping force for Macedonia as an ironclad guarantee that Washington will never let that republic suffer the same fate as battle-torn Bosnia.

Most activists in the revolutionary organization expect the United States to protect Macedonia, noting that otherwise the whole of the Balkans will be drawn by cross-border ethnic links into the conflagration.

“Bulgarians are sensitive about Macedonia because a lot of Bulgarian blood has been spilled there,” says Georgy Todev, a 73-year-old who spent a dozen years in prison for revolutionary organization activity while it was banned.

“Zhelev will do whatever he can to keep Bulgaria neutral, and I believe he is sincerely working for that,” the white-haired revolutionary says, hoisting up his black wool sweater to reveal a pistol tucked into his belt. “But if the war spills over to Macedonia, Zhelev will not be able to do anything. No one will be able to stop us.”

Bulgaria’s sorry history in past Balkan conflicts seems to weigh little in the minds of Pirin peasants, who have convinced themselves that 19th-Century battle tactics and weaponry that is scarcely newer will suffice in a faceoff with Serbian-led Yugoslavia, Albanian separatists or NATO-member Greece.

“No country can count on continuous military successes,” Ekov says of the neighbor states that defeated Bulgaria in 1912 and 1913 Balkan bloodlettings and in both world wars. “We don’t foresee a fifth victory by other powers.”

Reminded that Serbs command the third-largest army on the Continent, Ekov contends that “nationalist energy can be channeled to make up for any technical inadequacies.”

The revolutionary organization was founded in 1893 with the aim of reviving Bulgarian national consciousness after 500 years of rule by the Turks. In its first decade, it gained a reputation as one of the most ruthless terrorist groups in Europe as it ambushed, tortured and killed in a failed campaign for liberation.

Nowhere was its underground activity so well-organized and successfully masked as in this rugged mountain stronghold, known before World War II as Nevrokop. Gotse Delchev, a teacher, helped build a network of shadow governments, schools and other institutions in preparation for the day when revolutionaries would be able to drive out the Turks. Delchev was captured and executed even before the movement staged its ill-fated rebellion in 1903, but his efforts won him the respect of Slavs throughout Macedonia.

Antonina Zhelyazkova, a specialist in Ottoman history who heads the International Center for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations, says the dispute over Macedonia is an “invented problem,” but one that has the potential to throw Bulgaria back into the carnage of Delchev’s time.

She expresses confidence that no Bulgarian group, no matter how radical, will provoke fighting with Serbs, Greeks or Albanians. But if any of those forces invade Macedonia, “our nationalists would participate gladly.”

Zhelyazkova sees trouble for Bulgaria in the event of Macedonian fighting, even if Bulgarians can somehow be compelled to stay within their own borders. Any influx of refugees would strain an already bankrupt social system and change the delicate balances in Pirin Macedonia’s Orthodox and Muslim communities.

The revolutionary organization’s unfettered, nationalist saber-rattling has already fueled antagonism toward Bulgaria’s 1-million-strong ethnic Turkish minority by reviving Slav resentment of descendants of Ottoman occupiers.

Mavrodiev, the self-styled revolutionary organization warrior, belabors claims that the Turks are trying to assimilate Bulgaria’s Muslim Slav population, which, as in Bosnia, is a legacy of Ottoman rule.

Stoyan Boyadjiev, the revolutionary group’s national president, also rails against what he calls Greek and Yugoslav Communist-era perfidy against the Bulgars, reciting statistics of post-World War II expulsions, executions and internment.

The inflammatory campaigns against rival religions and ideologies exacerbate fears of moderates that nationalism is strengthening its hand in deceptively placid Bulgaria. Those concerns are not eased by growing signs of extremist sentiment and intolerance that foretell another impassioned quest to reverse perceived wrongs against the Bulgarian nation.

Across the roadside wall of a whitewashed farmhouse in the nearby town of Melnik, someone has scrawled a warning in red spray paint that seems to express the belligerent spirit of Bulgarians poisoned by nostalgia and nationalism.

“God forgives,” the graffiti read. “The (revolutionary organization) doesn’t.”

Williams, The Times’ Vienna Bureau chief, recently was on assignment in Sofia.

Bulgaria at a Glance

Population: 8.5 million

Area: 42,855 square miles (about the size of Ohio)

Monetary unit: Lev

Language: Bulgarian

Religions: Eastern Orthodox, 27%; Muslim, 8% (atheist, 65%)

Economic activity: Processes agriculture, mineral, timber products; manufactures machinery, electronics.

The history of Bulgaria clearly bears the marks of the long strife in the Balkans:

First Bulgarians, horsemen akin to Huns, crossed Danube in 600s, subjugating Slavs in area but adopting Slavic dialect and customs

* After Serbs subjected their kingdom in 1330, Bulgars gradually fell prey to Turks

* From 1396 to 1878, Bulgaria a Turkish province

* In 1878 Russian forced Turkey to accord Bulgaria independence, but European intervention caused it to be made an autonomous state under Turkish sovereignty.

* Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha declared country independent, himself Tsar in 1908

* Bulgaria sided with Germany twice in the great wars, though it resisted sending its troops against Russia in World War II and briefly declared war on Germany before Russian troops streamed in.

* A Soviet-style republic was established in 1947 and Bulgaria became one of Moscow’s most slavish satellites.