Chetniks

• 1. Introduction

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  The Chetniks began as a few dozen men who refused to surrender. On the 13th of May 1941, Colonel Draža Mihailović arrived at a cluster of shepherd huts at Ravna Gora, on the western slopes of Suvobor Mountain, with only seven officers and 27 other ranks. Yugoslavia had collapsed in less than two weeks. The Germans had invaded on the 6th of April, the army had capitulated, King Peter II had fled to London, and the country had been carved up among its conquerors. Those 34 men at Ravna Gora faced a simple choice: surrender or resist. They chose to resist.

  What followed is one of the more unsettling stories of the Second World War. The movement they founded, formally called the Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army, would spend most of the war not fighting the Germans, but fighting other Yugoslavs. It would strike agreements with Fascist Italy, with the puppet Ustaše state, and eventually with Germany itself. It would carry out mass atrocities against Croat and Muslim civilians, and it would wage a ferocious civil war against the communist Partisans of Josip Broz Tito. Estimates of the deaths caused by the Chetniks in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina alone range from 50,000 to 68,000, with more than 5,000 additional victims registered in Sandžak.

  How did a royalist resistance movement become a byword for collaboration and ethnic violence? What did the Chetniks actually want? And why did the Allies, who initially recognised Mihailović as the commander of all Yugoslav resistance, ultimately abandon him in favour of the communists he despised? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Name from the Mountains

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  Matija Ban used the word Chetnik in 1848 to describe the need for armed units outside the Principality of Serbia to resist Ottoman rule. The word itself is older and murkier. Some trace it to the Turkish çete, meaning to plunder and burn down. Others derive it from the Proto-Slavic četa plus the suffix -nik, producing something like member of a company. A third theory points to the Latin coetus, meaning coming together or assembly. By the mid-18th century, the term appeared in descriptions of army and police units. By 1904, it had settled into common Serbian usage as a name for guerrilla fighters operating in bands, or čete.

  Those early bands were not romantic outlaws. Between 1904 and 1912, small groups of fighters privately recruited, equipped and funded in Serbia crossed into Ottoman Macedonia with the aim of pulling that region into the Serbian state, regardless of the wishes of the people living there. The Royal Serbian Army's own officers and non-commissioned officers led many of these groups, and the Serbian government soon took formal direction of the effort. Greece and Bulgaria sent their own forces to Macedonia for the same purpose, and the Chetniks clashed with Bulgarian rivals as often as they clashed with Ottoman troops.

  The Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 gave the Chetniks their most celebrated military role. In the First Balkan War against the Ottomans, they served as vanguards to soften enemy positions, attacked supply lines, spread panic behind the front, and performed basic administrative tasks in newly occupied territory. After the wars, Chetnik bands were used to pacify the newly acquired areas, which sometimes meant terrorising civilians. The name carried both pride and menace from the start.

  By the end of the 19th century, the term had extended to any member of a military or paramilitary organisation with Serb ethnonationalist aims. Today, per the source, it refers to followers of what has been called the hegemonic and expansionist politics driven by Greater Serbia ideology. The word never shed its political charge, and that charge would electrify everything the Chetniks did in the 1940s.

• 3. Veterans, Politicians, and a Growing Organisation

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  In 1921, Chetnik veterans gathered in Belgrade to form the Chetnik Association for the Freedom and Honor of the Fatherland. Its stated aims were modest: preserve Chetnik history, support widows and orphans of fallen fighters, and care for disabled veterans. In practice, it was also a political pressure group, and disputes about its leadership and ideology began almost immediately.

  The liberal Democratic Party initially held the most influence inside the organisation. The challenge came from the dominant People's Radical Party, and by 1924 the resulting split had broken the association apart. The pro-Radical, Greater Serbia wing formed two new bodies, which in July 1925 merged into the Association of Serbian Chetniks 'Petar Mrkonjić' for King and Fatherland, led by Puniša Račić. Račić was elected to the National Assembly as a Radical representative in 1927. In 1928, he murdered three Croatian Peasant Party representatives on the floor of the National Assembly itself.

  King Alexander imposed a royal dictatorship in 1929, renaming the country the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and dissolving Račić's organisation. Its former members rejoined the original Chetnik Association, now officially sanctioned by the state. Under the next leader, Kosta Pećanac, the organisation's character changed dramatically. Membership opened to young men with no war service who joined for political and economic reasons. Through the 1930s, Pećanac drove the organisation from a veterans' group focused on welfare rights to an aggressively partisan Serb political body that reached 500,000 members in more than 1,000 groups across Yugoslavia.

  Starting in 1929, the Chetniks established chapters in at least 24 cities and towns outside Serbia proper, many with large Croatian populations. This expansion of what one source describes as a Serb nationalist-chauvinist movement into non-Serb areas heightened ethnic tensions throughout Yugoslavia. After 1935, Chetnik activity was officially banned in the predominantly Croat Sava Banovina and the almost entirely Slovene Drava Banovina, but the local groups kept operating at a reduced level. Pećanac also forged close ties with the far-right Yugoslav Radical Union government of Milan Stojadinović, which ruled from 1935 to 1939. By 1938, the General Staff had concluded that operations like those the Chetniks had carried out between 1904 and 1918 would not be possible in a modern war, and it refused to entrust the Chetnik Association with any important wartime functions.

• 4. Ideology of Greater Serbia

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  In June 1941, Stevan Moljević, a Bosnian Serb lawyer who would become one of the three most important members of the Chetnik Central National Committee, wrote a document he called Homogeneous Serbia. It called for a Greater Serbia covering 65-70 per cent of total Yugoslav territory and population. Croatia would be reduced to a small rump state. The non-Serb population would be expelled from within Greater Serbia's borders, though Moljević proposed no specific numbers.

  At almost the same time, the Belgrade Chetnik Committee was working on its own proposal. It matched Moljević's territorial vision but went further by quantifying the population transfers. The plan called for expelling 2,675,000 people from Greater Serbia, including 1,000,000 Croats and 500,000 Germans. About 1,310,000 Serbs would be brought in from outside, of whom 300,000 would come from Croatia. Roughly 200,000 Croats would be permitted to remain. Bosnian Muslims were identified as a problem to be solved in the war's final stages but received no specific figure.

  These documents were not fringe pamphlets. A 1941 Chetnik leaflet called Our Way reflected their contents. Mihailović referenced them in a proclamation to the Serbian people in December of that year and in detailed instructions of the 20th of December 1941 sent to newly appointed commanders Pavle Đurišić and Đorđije Lašić in Montenegro. The Belgrade proposal was smuggled out of occupied Serbia in September 1941 and delivered to the Yugoslav government-in-exile in London by Chetnik agent Miloš Sekulić.

  Later documents hardened the vision. A conference of young Chetnik intellectuals that met at Šahovići from the 30th of November to the 2nd of December 1942 envisioned a post-war Chetnik dictatorship with a gendarmerie drawn entirely from Chetnik ranks. Revenge against the Partisans and the Ustaše was written into an internal manual as a sacred duty. The Ba Congress of January 1944 produced a document called The Goals of the Ravna Gora Movement. Historian Jozo Tomasevich concluded that its net effect would have left Yugoslavia not merely back in the same Serb-dominated state of the interwar years, but worse, particularly for Croats. The congress included only two or three Croats, one Slovene, and one Bosnian Muslim among its more than 300 attendees.

• 5. Ravna Gora to Civil War

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  On the 19th of September 1941, Tito and Mihailović met for the first time, at Struganik. Tito offered Mihailović the chief-of-staff role in a merged command. Mihailović refused to attack the Germans, citing the reprisal formula Hitler had imposed: 100 civilians shot for every German soldier killed, 50 for every soldier wounded. That calculation was not abstract. In October 1941, German forces and Serbian collaborators killed more than 4,500 civilians in Kraljevo and Kragujevac. Most of the victims were Serbs.

  The two men met again six days after Tito put a 12-point cooperation program on the table on the 20th of October. Mihailović rejected the core points: no common headquarters, no joint military action against the Germans, no combined supply staff, no national liberation committees. Coordination between the two movements collapsed, and uprisings in Montenegro and Novi Pazar were quashed partly as a result.

  By late October 1941, Mihailović had decided privately that the Partisans were the Chetniks' primary enemy. He told a British colonel as much: the list of Chetnik enemies ran through the Partisans, the Ustaše, the Muslims, and the Croats, with the Germans and Italians last. On the 2nd of November, Chetnik forces attacked Partisan headquarters in Užice. The Partisans drove the attack back, then counterattacked. The Chetniks lost 1,000 men and a large quantity of weapons in those two engagements.

  Mihailović's staff violated subsequent truces, killing a local Partisan commander in October and massacring 30 Partisan supporters, described as mostly girls and wounded individuals, in November. Meanwhile, in December 1941, the Yugoslav government-in-exile promoted Mihailović to Brigadier-General and named him commander of the Yugoslav Home Army. He was internationally recognised as the leader of Yugoslav resistance even as, on the ground, he was requesting weapons from the Germans to use against the Partisans. General Franz Böhme rejected the request, demanded Mihailović's surrender instead, and then launched an attack on Ravna Gora that effectively drove the Chetniks out of Serbia entirely. The centre of Chetnik activity shifted into the Independent State of Croatia.

• 6. The Web of Collaboration

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  Chetnik collaboration with fascist Italy began as early as July and August of 1941, when Chetnik leaders approached the Italian VI Army Corps under General Renzo Dalmazzo for assistance. The Chetniks detested the Ustaše far more than they feared the Italians. Some leaders believed an Italian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina would be preferable to Ustaše control, and they calculated that Italy, if the Axis won, would favour Serbs in Lika, northern Dalmatia, and Bosnia. When Albanian nationalists from the Balli Kombëtar targeted the Visoki Dečani monastery for destruction, Italian troops moved in to protect it, a gesture the Chetniks took as evidence of where Italian sympathies lay.

  A formal agreement was concluded on the 11th of January 1942, between Captain Angelo De Matteis of the Italian 2nd Army and Chetnik representative Mutimir Petković, later signed by Mihailović's chief delegate in Bosnia, Major Boško Todorović. Italy would supply arms and provisions and help release recommended individuals from Axis concentration camps. By 1942-1943, somewhere between 19,000 and 20,000 Chetniks in the Italian-occupied parts of the Independent State of Croatia alone had been organised into formal auxiliary units called the Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia. They received thousands of rifles, grenades, mortars, and artillery pieces.

  Collaboration with the Ustaše state followed a parallel logic. Historian Enver Redžić put it plainly: the Ustaše-Chetnik accords were driven by neither common interest nor mutual respect, but by each side's need to obstruct Partisan advances. By February 1944, according to a report by Edmund Glaise-Horstenau based on official NDH data, 35 Chetnik groups existed in NDH territory; 19 of them, with 17,500 men, were collaborating with Croatian and German authorities.

  Direct German-Chetnik collaboration deepened after Italy capitulated on the 8th of September 1943. With a larger area to police, the Germans liberalised their approach to Serb nationalist groups and authorised the XV Army Corps to use Chetnik troops and forge local alliances. The 114th Jäger Division incorporated a Chetnik detachment in its advance to retake the Adriatic coast. Germans used Chetnik troops for guard duty in Split, Dubrovnik, Šibenik, and Metković. Captain Merrem, the intelligence officer for the German commander-in-chief in southeastern Europe, was described as full of praise for the Chetnik units and their working relationship with German forces. Field Marshal Maximilian von Weichs later observed that Mihailović shrewdly refrained from giving his personal view in public, but allowed his commanders to negotiate and cooperate with the Germans, and they did so, more and more.

• 7. Terror and Its Victims

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  Several historians have concluded that Chetnik actions in this period constituted genocide. The destruction they carried out was not incidental to their military operations. About 300 villages and small towns were destroyed, along with a large number of mosques and Catholic churches. The death toll in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina is estimated at between 50,000 and 68,000; more than 5,000 victims are documented in Sandžak alone.

  The terror was applied with a particular logic. In areas where Serbs and Croats were intermixed, Chetniks used violence to drive out Croats. In Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Sandžak, the targets were the Muslim population. The killing of civilians, the burning of villages, assassination, and the deliberate aggravation of ethnic tensions between Croats and Serbs were all recorded methods. Chetnik propaganda explicitly framed revenge against the Ustaše and the Partisans as a sacred duty.

  The massacres in eastern Bosnia present a specific historical problem. Chetnik ideology held that the violence against non-Serbs was a reaction to the Ustaše genocide against Serbs in the NDH, and there is no question that the Ustaše killings were real and ongoing. But the largest Chetnik massacres took place in eastern Bosnia, and they preceded any significant Ustaše operations in that region. The directive Mihailović issued on the 20th of December 1941 to his commanders Đurišić and Lašić made the intention clear: non-Serbs in areas intended to become part of Greater Serbia were to be cleansed regardless of any actions taken against Serbs elsewhere.

  Political scientist Sabrina Ramet has written that the Chetniks' political program and the extent of their collaboration have been, in her words, amply, even voluminously, documented, and that it is more than a bit disappointing that people can still be found who believe the Chetniks were doing anything other than attempting to realise a vision of an ethnically homogeneous Greater Serbian state, which they intended to advance, in the short run, by a policy of collaboration with the Axis forces.

• 8. Losing the Allies, Losing the War

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  British Special Operations Executive agents were sent to Yugoslavia to determine which resistance movement was actually fighting the Germans. The evidence they gathered was not encouraging for Mihailović. Archival records published in 1980 confirmed that some anti-Axis operations carried out by Mihailović's Chetniks alongside British liaison officer Brigadier Armstrong had been mistakenly credited to Tito's forces, but the broader pattern of Chetnik inactivity against the Germans was undeniable.

  The turning point came in late 1943. After the Second Session of the communist-led Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia in November 1943, which declared a post-war federal republic and denied the King the right to return without a referendum, the major Allied powers met at Tehran. They decided to give their exclusive support to the Partisans and withdraw it from the Chetniks. At the Teheran Conference, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill also agreed to split their influence in Yugoslavia evenly.

  The Battle of Neretva in early 1943 had already shown the Chetniks' military limits. A 20,000-strong Chetnik force participated alongside German and Italian units in the encirclement of the Partisans, holding the eastern bank of the Neretva. Tito's forces broke through the encirclement, crossed the river, engaged the Chetniks directly, and won a near-total victory. The Chetniks west of the Drina were left almost entirely incapacitated.

  By August 1944, the Tito-Šubašić agreement, signed on the island of Vis, called on all Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs to join the Partisans. Mihailović refused. In early May 1945, with the war nearly over, Chetnik forces withdrew through Ustaše-held Zagreb. Many were killed by the Partisans in the Bleiburg repatriations. Momčilo Đujić and his Dinara Division Chetniks, granted passage by Ante Pavelić himself, fled through the NDH into Slovenia and then Italy. The movement that had started with 34 men at Ravna Gora ended in flight, not liberation.