Abstract
The First International Police Peacekeeping Mission in Ottoman-Macedonia: Mürzsteg Reform Program
The nationalist conflict in Macedonia at the turn of the twentieth century incorpo-rating the territory slipping out of Ottoman control led to intervention of Euro-pean countries in 1903. A Mürzsteg Program was introduced by those countries to reform the Ottoman law enforcement agency i.e. police and gendarmerie (jandarma) organization in Macedonia. The gendarmerie was the empire's principal internal security organization and in a broader sense it was a paramilitary and centralized police organization. Therefore Mürzsteg Reform Program could be taken as the first international peacekeeping police mission within Ottoman-Macedonia.
Although acknowledging the wide-ranging Mürzsteg Reform Plan, the present ar-ticle is concerned more with the law enforcement agency reform in Ottoman-Macedonia within which gendarmerie ?in a broader sense police forces- was reestablished, monitored and reformed almost a century ago. So the article does not try to reveal other aspects of the Program and concentrates solely on the police reform.
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Keywords
Macedonia, Mürzsteg Reforms, Ottoman Gendarmerie, Balkans