Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland
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The Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland was a guerilla force loyal to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's government in exile during the Second World War. It was founded on Ravna Gora, Serbia, by Colonel Dragoljub Mihailović on 13 May 1941, following Nazi Germany's invasion and dismemberment of the Kingdom. Although most of its members were Serbs and Montenegrins, the army also included Slovenes, Croats, and Muslims by nationality.
After some initial skirmishes with the occupying Axis forces, the Chetniks split, half continuing to fight the Germans, and the others concentrated on fighting the Communist partisans, sometimes collaborating with Italians (who offered protection from Ustasha atrocities) and even German forces. After 1943, the Allies, who had been supporting the chetniks, shifted their support to the rival guerilla communist partisans. In 1944, the royal government recognized the partisans as Yugoslavia's legitimate armed forces, and ordered chetniks to join the newly named Yugoslav army. Some chetniks refused and in April and May 1945, as the victorious Yugoslav army took possession of the country's territory, they retreated towards Italy and a smaller group retreated to Austria. Many were captured by partisans or returned to Yugoslavia by British forces. Some were tried for treason and either freed, sentenced to prison terms or death. Many were summarily executed, especially in the first months after the end of the war. In 1946, the last chetnik units under the command of Draža Mihajlović were captured in eastern Bosnia. He was tried, found guilty of treason and executed.
After the World War II, escaped Chetniks and other nationalist Serbian emigrants formed nationalist clubs in countries like the United States, England and Australia and continued to support the Chetnik ideology, which was illegal and suppressed in the new socialist Yugoslavia.[citation needed]
In late 1980s, as Slobodan Milošević came to power in Serbia, chetniks were unofficially rehabilitated and the suppression of their literature and iconography was lifted. New opposition parties openly supported the role of chetniks in the Second World War, claiming that the official history had been falsified.
Politicians like Vuk Drašković and Vojislav Šešelj organized para-military units and demanded that Serbs use force to solve the nationalistic tensions in Yugoslavia and ensure that the territories populated by Serbs in other Yugoslav republics which planned to secede remain united with Serbia. During the Yugoslav wars which followed, many Serb paramilitary units called themselves chetniks, and Croats and Bosniaks commonly used the word to describe any armed Serb unit, regular or paramilitary.
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[edit] Name
Also referred to as the Chetniks (derived from the Serbian word četa, meaning "military company").
[edit] WW2
After the surrender of the Yugoslav royal army in April 1941, some of the remaining Yugoslav soldiers organized the Yugoslav Royal Army in the Fatherland in the Ravna Gora district of western Serbia under Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović to fight the German occupation. They were almost entirely ethnic Serbs. Mihailović directed his units to arm themselves and await his orders for the final push. He avoided actions which he judged were of low strategic importance. The reason behind his resolve was the fact that he had been a World War I officer.
Between 1941 and 1943, the Chetniks had the support of the Western Allies. TIME Magazine, in 1942, featured an article which boasted of the success of Mihailović's Chetniks, and heralded him as the sole defender of freedom in Nazi-occupied Europe. However, Tito's Partisans fought the Nazis as well during this time. Both Tito and Mihailović had a bounty of 100,000 Reichsmarks offered by Germans for their heads.
Throughout World War II, the Chetniks were faced with two main enemies: the German occupiers and the Ustaše on one side, and the ideologically opposite Communist Partisans on the other.
After the summer uprising during 1941, the guerilla activity of the Chetniks increased, and the forces of Nazi Germany retaliated very harshly against the civilian population. The Germans had introduced exact punitive measures against guerilla activity: 100 Serb civilians were to be executed for every killed soldier of the Wehrmacht and 50 for each wounded. The rival anti-fascist movements, Tito's Partisans and Mihailović's Chetniks, collaborated at first, but later turned against each other, and inside Serbia a bitter civil war ensued.
In late 1941, the Germans started a massive offensive on the areas of Ravna Gora and Užice. Mihailović offered a truce, but it was denied and the bulk of the Chetnik forces had to retreat for eastern Bosnia and Sandžak. There they came in direct conflict with the Ustaše, the fascist regime of Independent State of Croatia.
As the forces of Fascist Italy were latently opposed to the Communists and the Ustaša regime in their southern zone of influence, the Chetniks collaborated with the Italians to be able to engage the Ustaše and Communists. The Allies frowned upon this but kept sending support for the Chetnik forces for some time. Chetniks also cooperated with the Nedić quisling regime in Serbia. Finally, the Chetniks started concentrating on fighting the Partisan forces, even allying themselves with some German forces in Bosnia. General Draža's secondary goal was to preserve as many Serbian lives as possible, even if it meant collaborating with the enemy, and slaughtering tens of thousands of Croat and Muslim civilians in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Western Allies originally supported the Chetniks because they were a better option for them than the potentially pro-Soviet Communist Partisans. The Allies had planned an invasion of the Balkans, and so the Yugoslav resistance movements were strategically important, and there was a need to make a decision as to which of the two factions to support. A number of Special Operations Executive missions were sent to the Balkans to determine the facts on the ground. In the meantime, the Allies stopped planning an invasion of the Balkans and finally reverted their support from the Chetniks due to their collaboration with the Axis powers, and instead supported the Partisans. At the Teheran Conference of 1943 and the Yalta Conference of 1945, Stalin and Churchill decided to split their influence in Yugoslavia in half.
On 16 June 1944, the Tito-Šubašić agreement between Partisans and the Royal Government was signed on the island of Vis. The document called on all Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs to join the partisans. Partisans were recognized by the royal government as Yugoslavia's regular Army. Mihajlović and many Chetniks refused. On 29 August king Peter II dismissed general Mihailović as a Chief-of-Staff of Yugoslav army in the Fatherland and on 12 September appointed Tito in his place.
By the end of the war, the Chetniks were still important in numbers. Some retreated with German forces north to surrender to Anglo-American forces; Mihailović and his few remaining followers (including the father of Radovan Karadžić) tried to fight their way back to the Ravna Gora, but he was captured by Tito's Partisans. In March 1946 Mihailović was brought to Belgrade, where he was tried and executed on charges of treason in July.
[edit] Chetnik ideology
Chetniks were royalists, and their salute was "За краља и отаџбину" ("Za kralja i otadžbinu") - For King and Fatherland. They held family values and private property in high esteem, and were thus ideologically opposed to Communists, who denounced the monarchy. Chetniks fought for the restauration of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and some of them to create a Great Serbia.
Many Chetniks grew elaborate beards during the war, which is a traditional Eastern Orthodox way to express sorrow. In this manner, they marked their sorrow for the occupied fatherland which was ravaged by war. It was said that they will keep their beards until their King returns.
Some ethnic Croats[1], Slovenians[2][3] and Bosnian Muslims[4][5] also joined Chetniks forces. Most of them were democratically oriented Yugoslav patriots or monarchists, anti-communists and anti-fascists. They didn’t fight for Greater Serbia but for the liberation of their homeland, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
But, as Chetnik movement didn't have a strong hierarchy, a number of Chetnik units had a clear nationalist ideology.[citation needed] Also, during the war Dragoljub Mihailovic was changing his position from Yugoslavian unitarist to Serbian nationalist.[citation needed]
[edit] Collaboration and war crimes
Few Chetnik leaders did collaborate with Italians and Germans. In occupied Serbia, Nazis had Milan Aćimović installed as leader, and later the former Minister of War, General Milan Nedić, who governed until 1944. This small group of Chetniks had an enormous influence in this government, and were collaborating with the German occupation since the beginning, but later shifted all their efforts to exterminating Communists and Croatians, which included both Croats and Muslims (who were considered Croats in the NDH).
Chetniks were operating semi-independently. One group remained under the pre-war leader, Kosta Pećanac, and started collaborating with the Germans against the partisans, who, as a matter of fact, also did collaborate with Germans in this civil-war.[citation needed] In NDH, Chetniks were under the command of Voivoda Đujić (The Serbian priest) in the Serbian Krajina region were they organized themselves in response to Ustase's attacks on Serbian villages.
Majority of Chetniks rallied behind Draža Mihailović, a 48 year-old Army officer who had been court-martialed by Nedić and was known to have close ties to Britain. Early in the war Mihailović offered some resistance to the Italian and Nazi forces. By July 22, 1941 the Yugoslav Government-in-Exile announced that continued resistance was impossible. Later in the war, with emerging stronger Partisan forces, Chetniks tried to avoid a multiple front lines by avoiding clashes with Nazis, and instead they focused their efforts to eliminating Communists (and civilians beleived to be helping or hiding Partisans). At their peak, Mihailović's Chetniks claimed to have three hundred thousand troops. Chetniks viewed their ideological struggle against the Partisans as one more important than their struggle against the Germans. Once Soviet troops liberated Belgrade, and installed Tito's communist regime, Mihailović was tried and executed in 1946 for genocide.
During and after WW2, the communist regime in Yugoslavia occasionally proved the chetniks’ collaboration or neutrality with Axis powers. Sometimes, forged pictures are very easy to spot. For example, at the front cover of the book that talks about chetniks’ collaboration, there is a picture that shows a German officer with chetniks. Check the forged picture However, the original picture from February 1944 has survived. In the original picture, there is not a German officer. Check the original picture The collaboration can be further disputed by the fact that many of Mihailović's chetniks fought major battles against Germans, such as October 28th battle in Kraljevo, where around 250 chetniks perished, and thousands more civilians.
[edit] Postwar era
Although the number of victims was less than that of the Ustaše government which carried out a well-coordinated and organized genocide of the Serbs and other unacceptable citizens, the Chetniks' force was smaller in size and more ineffectual. During the closing years of World War II, many Chetniks defected from their units in 1944 and early 1945, when there was a general amnesty granted for royalist forces. Many Chetniks took up the offer; this treatment was also received by the Domobran fighters, but it was not extended to Ustaše.
It is also worth noting that Partisans too were involved in numerous war crimes, like the executions of thousands of Ustaše and Domobran fighters in the Bleiburg massacre, as well as many others. This includes the indiscriminate execution of large groups of people in the aftermath of the War, including native Germans from Vojvodina, Italians from Istria, ideological and political opponents, as well as anybody suspected of collaboration with Germans, often without producing any proof.
[edit] Contemporary period
In recent times, the Chetnik movement has been largely rehabilitated in Serbia, notwithstanding the involvement in war crimes by some of the Chetniks. They are highly praised by Serbian nationalists, but all the political factions see them in a very different light from the one common in Tito's time. This is largely due to the impact of Serbian pro-monarchist politician, and nation's current Foreign Minister Vuk Drašković, who was against Serbian ultranationalism and Milošević rule, and made a great effort to rehabilitate the Chetnik movement.
Many Serbians also support Chetniks due to the Yugoslav wars and a failure of the Communist idea. On the other side, Croats and Bosnians still see Chetniks as some kind of a fascist movement, no better than the Croatian Ustaše or the Bosniak SS Handžar Division which was part of NDH forces.
[edit] Pensions for veterans
In late 2004, the National Assembly of Serbia passed a new law that equalized the rights of the former Chetnik members with those of the former Partisans, including the right to war pensions. Rights were granted on the basis that both were anti-fascist movements that fought occupiers, and this formulation has entered the law. The vote was 176 for, 24 against and 4 abstained. The socialist party (SPS) of Slobodan Milošević was the one against the decision.
There have been varying reactions to the law in Serbian public opinion. Many have praised it as just and long overdue, including the Aleksandar Karađorđević (son of the last Yugoslav king), as well as most political parties (with the most notable exception of SPS). Others protested the decision, including the Serbian Association of Former Partisans, the Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, the Croatian Anti-Fascist Movement, and the President and Prime Minister of Croatia.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ General Mihailovic with Zvonko Vuckovic, commandant of 1st Chetnik Corps. Mr. Vuckovic was an ethnic Croat – loyal officer of Royal Yugoslav Army.
- ^ Uros Sustaric, one of famous Slovenian chetniks.
- ^ [ http://www.pogledi.co.yu/mhs/img/20.jpg Aleksander Bajt, the famous Yugoslav and Slovenian economist, after fifty years of silence published a book about Slovenian chetniks.]
- ^ Mr. Mustafa Mulalic, one of Muslim officers in Chetnik’s headquarters, together with General Mihailovic and Mr. Stevan Moljevic (only three of them are in uniforms)
- ^ General Mihailovic with Muslim leaders in Bijeljina.
