The Montana Freemen - 12 April 1996

Whistling in a graveyard is a wonderful image worthy of Shakespeare or Dickens, and somebody said this week, that the American people were whistling in a graveyard in Montana, but I think the true situation is more scary than that. It's more like a man in a nightmare tiptoeing nervously through a graveyard that never ends. I'm talking of course about those rebels, mutineers – whatever you want to call them who call themselves freemen – and are holed-in, camped in a cabin or two out on a range on the short grass country of the Great Plains.

In a week or two, the snows will vanish from the lower slopes of the Rockies, which buttress the state on the west, and the forests will glisten with most of the conifers western march and the noble Douglas fur and the high plains that roll away to the east will be alive with blossoming bare grass with aster and dog-tooth violets with over 2,000 species of flowers, which you'll be relieved to hear we're not going to count or name!

Between the western mountains and the plains, the foothill country sparkles with a watery paradise for fisherman, and does no more great rivers hiding grayling and bass and white fish and leaping with most varieties of trout including the giant fighting rainbow.

I stress at the beginning the pleasures of Montana, it's vast restful solitude, the gentle west wind over waving grass, the great possibilities for shooting, hiking, mountaineering, camping, fishing. For solid citizens who like these country sports, Montana has always provided a wonderful holiday through three seasons of the year. Montana is almost as large as California, but whereas California's population density averages 200 to the square mile, in Montana it's five humans.

So what could be a more attractive place, and on such a grand scale to get away from it all, that attraction has been its blessing and its curse. It long ago made tourism an important industry, it also made Montana an ideal place for rogues, ruffians, train robbers, murderers to hold up for months, years even. Of course, there is a resident population something we always forget to add when we call off the delights of a holiday land, not quite a million population against California's 31 million.

Since Montana was first settled, to stretch a word, in the early 18th century, by fur traders and missionaries meaning to convert the Indians, since then, most people saw their livelihood all about them: in the huge amount of timber, in farming and underground minerals and oil. But what with one thing and another – depressions, new materials, light metals, plastic – most of the old logging and mining towns are abandoned or bankrupt.

The little town outside of which the FBI recently arrested a Unabomber suspect after 18 years of sleuthing, that little town is broke. And now in the past few years, Montana has suffered another invasion, which on the face of it looks like a fine jolting injection to any states economy: the rich, the rich retired, the youngish people still, who made a fortune way down in California Silicon Valley and movie stars followed by ageing television stars. These people buy very expensive land, build fancy lonely mansions don't they, and shop lavishly so they do, but in no time they also drive up the real estate prices, which means of course also taxes.

Now wherever this happens, has happened and the creation of Palm Beach in Florida, which was practically drenched up from the seashore, Palm Springs in the California Desert, the natives begin by welcoming the rich but as they proliferate and as what they spend doesn't compensate for what they take away from ordinary people by way of taxes and affordable homes, they come to be resented.

In Montana where solitude and a modest livelihood with prime gifts to the natives, the invasion has been swift and the resentment has been bitter. It has been felt by most of the people who've lived there for 10 years or more: retailers, college professors, religious sects, scraping farmers, but it has been felt with rage by the poor, and the sons and grandsons of the old miners and the sugar beet farmers who are, in Montana's recession having a tough time making out.

Among these malcontents is the curious minority we've learned about only lately: the militia men, not always so self-styled but those 13 defiant freemen – that's the number as I talk – belong to a type of political rebel who have formed in groups, and while so far I believe there's been no large violent episode, they've threatened to seize courts, radio stations and made actual threats on the life of state and county politicians, judges so on.

The Montana Freemen seem to us outsiders, to be pitifully small, and the numbers of all the militia men do not yet begin to compare with say, the armies in the early 20s who joined and terrified and burnt with the Ku Klux Klan. But the apparent harmlessness of the numbers is obliterated by the law defying noises they make. As you know the FBI is parked a very long way off, keeping them as the saying goes, under surveillance, but why is the FBI there in the first place? Because the freemen have already committed plenty of crimes against this state, and others, and the federal government, of which inciting to riot is only one. They have refused to qualify for driving licenses, they won't pay taxes, they don't recognise the jurisdiction of the courts – they set up their own – they routinely, you might say on principle, write nothing but bad cheques.

From FBI men who have infiltrated the freemen, as of other groups, they undoubtedly teach insurgency and in some camps, the making of bombs. Their rhetoric is not only high flown but positively frightening. They predict, and soon, the overthrow of the dreadful federal government. Clinton or Dole they're all the same.

The freemen in Montana have been around the state for two or more years, a constant nuisance, but now people are saying, if they've cheated and forged and refuse subpoenas for so long, why didn't the police – and once members came in from other states, the FBI – move in on them, arrest them, try them and if they were found guilty put them in jail?

And here we come on the dreadful truth that has made the FBI in this place hold back, and made Ms Reno, the United States attorney general, swear over and over, no armed confrontation, no siege. That doesn't sound at all like the Janet we know, we all came to know three years ago when, you remember, February 1993, federal agents attacked the compound of a religious cult near Waco Texas.

The outcome of that episode was about as bad as it could be for the reputation of federal agents and the FBI and gave a plausible stimulant to the rage of militia men throughout the country. Whenever these rebels are interviewed – why do you hate the government, why do you meet in armed camps and threaten terrible things, they all quote the shame of Waco.

Remember in the first attack four federal agents were killed by shots fired from within the compound. There was an outcry on the public side, but the agents waited through February and March – the cult had been approached in the first place, for being stacked with arms for which nobody had procured a licence – in April, the federals could wait no longer. They lurched in there with tanks. Pretty nearly the whole encampment, about 80 people, including many women and children died in a fire, set it's pretty certain, by the cult leader. Eleven of the cult had meanwhile gone to trial for killing the four agents in the early raid. The fact of dead women and children preyed on everybody's mind, not least the juries. The 11 were found not guilty of murder and conspiracy, a result, which brought aid and comfort and boldness to every militia man in the country.

You can well understand why in Montana, the FBI has been told to stand and wait, and hope that negotiations between local officials and the freemen will eventually persuade them to follow the trickle of freemen and women who have defected. You may wonder why these rebellious or barmy groups call themselves militia men? By so doing, they have to their satisfaction, solved a problem that has bitten at the heels of the National Rifle Association ever since rising city crime made gun control a national issue.

The NRA and most members of the Congress defend everybody's right to own a gun by quoting the Second Amendment to the Constitution: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Written in 1789 when there was no standing army, the old colonials had enough of them, kings could commandeer them, the country would be kept safe by the understanding that every man would keep a rifle by his fireside. When there was trouble from foreign enemies or native Indians, the towns would instantly, they called themselves Minutemen, instantly form militias, grab their guns, and put the insurrection down and then disband.

Of course there have been no militias to organise since the United States got itself a standing army. This simple fact has been drummed into the National Rifle Association and its fans, but in the past year or two, and now in 32 states, there are self appointed militia men. And when their right to have guns is questioned, they point to the Second Amendment: see we are a well regulated militia. And they say, they threaten to use the guns one day to preserve or rescue the American people from their present form of government, which they proclaim to be undemocratic and corrupt beyond reform or redemption.

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