The Mihajlovich Tragedy

...At the end of 1943 the Communists formed a new Yugoslav government, the Anti-Fascist Assembly, and three months later the Mihajlovich movement created its National Committee...

...In any case, in December 1943 Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain sharply altered his policies toward the Yugoslav insurgents and, under the pretext that Tito's Partisans were doing more damage to the Germans than Mihajlovich's forces, shifted the full weight of his support to Tito...

...The Djurovich trial has again focused public attention here on one of the most painful questions facing the Yugoslav Communists: their attitude toward the Mihajlovich movement...

...Djuro Djurovich, a long-time correspondent for the Yugoslav press from London and Paris (where he earned his PhD), a lawyer by training and a prominent Democratic party politician by profession, was elected secretary...

...In all probability, the British Prime Minister decided that no matter who the Allies helped, Tito would win the civil war, and therefore it was necessary to establish the best relations possible beforehand...

...Mihajlovich's detachments acted more cautiously in this respect, refusing to purposely incite German reprisals against the peaceful population...

...Yet, even after reading the official and obviously doctored stenographic record of the trial—in which there was no place for the remarks and full speeches of the defense, or the defendant's statement—it becomes perfectly clear that Mihajlovich was guilty of only one crime: fighting the Communists...

...General Mihajlovich behaved in a way that made one wonder about what he had been subjected to in prison: He answered questions irrelevantly, did not understand many of them, and once even fell asleep during the court examination...

...Since the Croatian national movement had tied its destiny to the German Reich, it was clear that the struggle for power in the country following the expected defeat of Germany would be between Tito and Mihajlovich...

...Within only a few months the lines were drawn between his forces and the Germans and Ustashis...

...The most serious was the antagonism between the two biggest nationalities, the Eastern Orthodox Serbs and the Catholic Croats, who speak the same language yet have a different historical past and different social mores...

...It cannot be said that Western public opinion was very indignant over these events...

...But the interrogator reminded me of the encounter with the gray-haired old man in the house of my lawyer acquaintance (I was followed day and night), and only then did I really learn who I had met...

...Once, after he had already left office, Churchill said his stake on Tito was his biggest mistake during the War...

...The court did not want to hear out the witnesses presented by two brave defense counsels (who later paid for their bravery), and the special hand-picked audience was raging...

...That step could not have been a concession to Stalin, for the Teheran conference was then under way and Churchill's decision provoked Stalin's strongest suspicions...

...By no means did he believe Tito's constant, solemn promises not to introduce one-party dictatorship in Yugoslavia, although he was forever convincing the British Parliament of their sincerity...

...Then, after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the Communist party of Yugoslavia quickly changed its line and started to organize a resistance too...

...One can only guess at Churchill's motives...

...But, of course, what we have here is a double standard: When the Partisans conducted negotiations with the Germans and Italians that was a military ruse, and when Mihajlovich did the same thing it was collaboration...

...Still, at the time that Churchill shifted his full support to Tito few people doubted the Nazis' defeat, and Churchill had to realize that his policy change would do more to bring about the Communists' victory in Yugoslavia than to harm the Germans...

...One cannot be under any delusion: Communism and democracy cannot coexist...

...At the same time, there were extreme Rightist elements among the emigres who had a harmful influence on the policies of the Yugoslav Kingdom toward the Communists...

...Except for England, from April-July 1941 Hitler was resisted only by Mihajlovich, who was properly named the first rebel of Europe...

...Ironically, the more the official propaganda tries to villify Mihajlovich, the more it provokes reservations among unprejudiced observers...

...And General Mihajlovich himself, despite his great personal valor, was better suited for the role of a "patriarch" (as his entourage jokingly referred to him) than a stern insurgent leader...

...Moreover, Ustashi atrocities served to replenish the bloodied ranks of the two men, with most of the Serbs joining Mihajlovich and the Croatian anti-Fascists joining Tito...

...Mihajlovich (who was promoted to the rank of general and named minister of war by the departing royal government) received full Allied support during the first years of the War, and the British BBC was a mouthpiece of his movement...

...Documents available now, though, prove that Hitler regarded Mihajlovich as the more dangerous enemy than Tito, because it was Mihajlovich who the majority of the Serbian people supported during almost all of the War and they make up approximately 50 per cent of this multinational country...

...It is improbable that such a reevaluation of history would even do much harm to the reputation of so prominent a political-historical figure as Tito, who was capable of taking Yugoslavia out of the Kremlin's orbit in 1948...

...the Allied struggle for victory over the enemy...

...In addition, many secret documents from the British, American and German government archives now available in the West have shed new light on the relations of both the Allies and the Axis to the competing Tito and Mihajlovich movements...

...Last year I again met Djurovich by accident in a friend's house in Belgrade, and I told him about the attempt to link me with him...

...Having subsequently served 17 years of a 20-year sentence, he recently wrote a book about his incarceration and sent part of the manuscript to friends in Paris...

...Furthermore, the patriotic notion of a "united and indivisible" Yugoslavia and the worshipping of traditional national-Serbian Orthodox values clearly provided an inadequate ideological platform for a multinational country...

...The German and Italian occupiers tried to interfere as little as possible, knowing that the internecine struggle would totally paralyze the anti-Hitler movements and hoping that at an opportune moment they would thus succeed in crushing both leaders...

...In the interval between the creation of the Communist Assembly and the Committee, however, an event occurred that decided the future direction of Yugoslavia—an event whose underlying causes still have not been fully uncovered because the explanation for it given by all involved could merely have been the immediate reason for what happened...

...Undoubtedly, the fact that Tito was inflicting greater damage on the Germans than Mihajlovich played a significant role...

...The absence of a political organization and the impossibility of disciplining the whole movement exclusively by military means under conditions of guerrilla warfare and inadequate communications was another weakness...

...His opponents contend that from the very beginning he was a German collaborator, but this claim is substantiated mainly by the fact that he also fought against the Communists...

...He invited me then to stop by sometime...

...I went to visit him briefly in December 1973 and found him bedridden with rheumatism...

...Apparently the court wanted to show that the Western Allies were making agreements with the Germans behind the back of the Soviet Union...

...For its part, the Soviet Union opened Radio Free Yugoslavia in Tbilisi to serve as the mouthpiece for Tito...

...A pattern has emerged, in fact, that explains why Tito won, though some important causes of Mihajlovich's defeat remain hidden...

...The last led some commanders in different parts of the country to become virtual local autocrats, who often compromised the whole movement by slaughtering Communist sympathizers and Muslims...

...He even proposed that Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt continue helping both movements, evidently having little hope that Tito would ultimately prevail...

...The honeymoon year went quickly and governments in the West, albeit somewhat belatedly, began to remember the General...

...In November 1966, a day before I was to start a one-year prison term given to me by the court in Zadar, I stopped to say goodbye to an elderly lawyer who is an acquaintance of mine...

...Although none of it has been published so far, he was convicted under Article 109 of the Criminal Code, covering actions that "aim at overthrowing the existing order...

...The attitude toward Mihajlovich's movement and the Croation national issue will also be the greatest stumbling block to the pan-Yugoslav democratic trend called "Djilasism," at present the only realistic way out of the impasse created by the long-lasting one-party monopoly...

...Everything else, like the charges of collaboration and of intensifying the fratricidal war, was either untenable and pure fiction, or could just as well have been brought against the Communists...

...The new state of Southern Slavs was burdened with many national, social and political problems from the outset...

...Many of them recalled the farewell speech the General gave to a group of 250 Americans who were returning home in the summer of 1944: "Your leaders will soon realize what a grave mistake they have made...

...In 1948 President Harry S. Truman posthumously awarded Mihajlovich an honored American decoration for "high merit in...

...In short, because the King lacked wide popular support, the two-week-long campaign of Hitler and Mussolini against Yugoslavia in April 1941 ended with the shameful capitulation of the Yugoslav Army, the flight of the government to the West, and the total partition of the country by German, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Albanian occupiers...

...It was news to him...

...It would have been difficult to resolve the existing social-political contradictions even in a state with well-established democratic traditions, let alone under the semi-authoritarian regime of the Karadjordjevich Serbian royal dynasty...

...The most curious charge against the General was that he had negotiated with the Germans in the fall of 1944...

...By the fall of 1941 both Mihajlovich's and Tito's detachments were fighting the German occupiers...

...To be sure, the Mihajlovich movement suffered from the weaknesses characteristic of all anti-Communist movements, without exception, throughout history...

...At the beginning of 1945, threatened by Tito's detachments and the Red Army, part of Mihajlovich's movement followed the retreating German armies into Italy...

...I had been formally convicted not because my articles had appeared in the Western press, but because of my attempt to establish an independent journal, which is not punishable under the Yugoslav laws...

...In their struggle for power the Partisans did not spare either themselves or others, and they never paid the least attention to the outrages committed by the Germans in return-the shooting of 100 hostages for each German soldier lost, and the burning of entire villages...

...Any regime after Tito's that does not at least partly rehabilitate Mihajlovich and his movement will merely be prolonging a dictatorship that prevents the healing of the civil war wounds...

...They recognized that until the Allies arrived, an open, aggressive war with the German occupying armies could not bring anything but enormous casualties...

...You have armed them and strengthened them for your own misfortune, because they will turn all their strength against you...

...To comprehend the full complexity of the bitter contest between the two men, waged during the Fascist occupation, one must go back briefly to the formation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia...

...To begin with, it lacked a positive philosophy for building a new society and failed to understand that the Communist idea cannot be fought by force of arms alone...

...when the Partisans attacked the General's detachments that was war with quislings, and when the General attacked the Partisans that was intensifying the fratricidal war...

...It is not only the quiet debate stimulated by the trial of Djuro Djurovich that led me to set down my thoughts about the Mihajlovich movement...

...In March 1946 the Communist secret police succeeded in trapping Mihajlovich...

...Four months later he was shot, marking the end of the Yugoslav civil war...

...The next day I entered the prison in the town of Pozharevac, and after 10 days I was transferred suddenly to the central prison in Belgrade for reinvestigation...

...And it is possible to sustain the sugary myth—Partisans fought heroically against the tremendous number of German divisions and numerous quislings, among whom the bearded followers of General Mihajlovich figured prominently (in accordance with national tradition, many of the men vowed not to shave until the country was free)?only under a complete ban on all unofficial statements...

...The General was shot in 1946, yet articles, books and films designed to show that he was essentially not an adversary of the Nazi conquerors have continued to appear every year...

...Mihajlovich stopped receiving any help from the Allies, while the aid for Tito's Partisans—arms, uniforms, strong air support, medical supplies, transportation of the wounded by military ships to Italy, and so on-grew from day to day...

...He had with him a tall, thin, gray-haired man who kept silent all the time, and to whom I did not pay much attention, missing his name altogether...

...The arrested members of the editorial board of our journal were already awaiting me...

...On the contrary, this seemed to gladden the Communists, for it reinforced the flight of the population to the ranks of the insurgents...

...In the middle of 1944, as the result of strong pressure from Churchill, the King's government-in-exile in London signed a pact with Tito and dissociated itself from Mihajlovich...

...Alas, not overlooked was the firing of the editor of Nin during the subsequent crushing of "liberalism...

...The role of the general prosecutor was played by the present foreign minister, Milosh Minish...

...A reintroduction of freedom of the press would undoubtedly lead immediately to reevaluating the civil war and particularly Mihajlovich's role...

...Since up to that time they had been trying to accuse me of nonexistent connections with the Croation nationalists, I just chuckled, assuming that this was simply an attempt to create a Serbo-Croation "balance...

...It was created in 1918 by a merger of the Kingdom of Serbia, the Kingdom of Montenegro (which fought on the Axis side during World War I) and Croatia and Slovenia, previously parts of Austro-Hungary...

...Churchill not only persisted in his plan, but he resolutely prevented the Americans from continuing to send aid to Mihajlovich (the Balkans comprised England's political zone of interest), although American communications officers remained in Mihajlovich's headquarters until the end of 1944...

...During the new investigation the interrogator insisted throughout that I confess about the person I had contacted from the high leadership of Mihajlovich's movement...

...The General was shot...

...I will no longer be able to see with my own eyes how right I was but it is your destiny to comprehend how blind you have been...

...All doubt about this was removed three years ago, during the peak of the so-called "liberalism" here, when Yugoslavia's best weekly, Nin, published a strange article in connection with the 30th anniversary of the armed uprising, entitled, "Forgive us, history...

...I first met Djurovich under strange circumstances...

...Nevertheless, until the arrival of the Red Army under Marshal Fyodor Ivanovich Tolbukhin, Mihajlovich's forces in eastern Yugoslavia far exceeded the Communist forces...

...But this was somehow "overlooked," the article continued, because the leaders of this initial, spontaneous uprising later became outstanding commanders in Mihajlovich's detachments...

...A week later he was arrested and taken off to prison...

...Djurovich had his first brush with Yugoslav law in 1945, while secretary of the National Committee formed by General Draja Mihajlovich—chief rival to Marshal Josip Broz Tito during World War It...

...The same fate was shared by thousands of active fighters in his movement, and tens of thousands of others were subjected to severe persecutions that threaten his sympathizers to this day...

...This basically sealed the fate of the Yugoslav civil war...

...The leaders of the two movements met personally three times from September to November to negotiate a possible unification of their military units, but they did not arrive at any agreement and soon started an internecine war...

...The young generations in Yugoslavia, naturally, know very little about the true history of the civil war...

...In the near future, he felt, the Communists' forcible collectivization would surely arouse sharp resistance from the peasantry (which did indeed occur, but three years later after Tito's 1948 clash with Stalin...

...Instead, they were used by the German High Command in German uniforms to fight as a so-called "Russian Guard Corps" throughout World War II against Tito's Partisans, and they lost three-quarters of their number in battle...

...General de Gaulle also spoke well of him in his memoirs...

...Two puppet states were set up: a formally independent Croatia, where power was seized by the Croation fascists, the "Ustashis," and Serbia, which was occupied by the German Army and found itself in the same position as Petain's France...

...The Communist party took a detached stand, and thanks to the alliance then in force between Hitler and Stalin, it embraced the slogan, "We should not participate in an imperialist war...

...The General himself declined the Allies' offer to evacuate him and his entire general staff to Malta, and with 10,000 men decided to continue the struggle in the mountains of Yugoslavia...

...The Germans are already on their deathbed, and after they are defeated, Stalin and his servants won't need you any longer...

...Yet it is hard to believe the sincerity of that statement because of the existing proof that he very well knew what a Partisan victory would lead to...

...The brigade-leader Fitzroy McLean, who represented the British Army at Tito's headquarters, describes in his memoirs an extremely interesting conversation between himself and Churchill following the Prime Minister's decision to stop supporting Mihajlovich...

...When you realize all this, it might be too late...

...Most of the protests came from hundreds of American fliers who had been shot down above Yugoslavia and saved by Mihajlovich's forces...

...But the fatal mistake of the rulers was their unwise attitude toward the Communists—and it must be admitted, regretfully, that the Russian emigres in the country played no small part in the development of that attitude...

...Many of the Russian emigres in Yugoslavia, who were fully accepted by the government and people, repaid the kindness by raising the level of theater, opera and ballet in the country, and by helping considerably to advance the teaching of science in the universities...

...In briefing Churchill, McLean expressed his conviction that a Partisan victory would bring a Communist system to Yugoslavia no different from the Soviet one...

...Nevertheless, Mihajlovich was brought down not only by his shortcomings, but to an equal degree by the attitude of the democracies toward one of the two most pro-Western, anti-Hitler resistance movements (the other being the Polish national movement of Generals Anders and Bor-Komarovsky...

...The Committee was supported by leaders from almost all of prewar Yugoslavia's political parties, including the Socialist and Democratic parties...

...DISENTANGLING HISTORY The Mihajlovich Tragedy By Mihajlo Mihajlov Novi Sad Last October 23 Djuro Djurovich, 74 years old and ailing, was sentenced to five years in prison by a Belgrade court on charges of writing hostile articles for foreign publications...

...Notwithstanding the official story that the entire anti-German revolt began after an appeal in July 1941, the article said, big and bloody battles were already being fought in June against the Ustashis and the Italian Army in Herzegovina, involving artillery, planes and large Army formations...

...A mere comparison of the present complete myth with the history of the Yugoslav internal struggle, as described by the very same Communist press immediately after the War, casts doubt upon everything the regime is attempting to prove...

...it was the first year, the "honeymoon year," after the War...

...The British and Americans declined this onesided offer, unsuccessfully demanding a full German surrender to Tito and the Red Army, too...

...BBC broadcasts ceased mentioning Mihajlovich and sometimes even attributed his military success during the last battle with the Germans to the Partisans...

...Churchill looked at him coldly and asked: " 'McLean, do you intend to live in Yugoslavia after the War?' " 'No sir.' " 'Neither do I.' " In the summer of 1946 in Belgrade, three months after a cagey secret police maneuver had resulted in Mihajlovich's capture, a Moscow-style demonstration trial was hastily arranged...

...At the new trial in Belgrade, where I was sentenced to three and one half years in prison, they did not bring up the encounter...

...After the Axis overran Yugoslavia, those authoritarian Russian emigres formed a voluntary military movement of 10,000 men to fight the Bolsheviks on the Eastern Front...

...They had previously prepared the first issue and had been continuing publication work, refusing to be intimidated by the fact that I had actually been convicted...

...last October, almost a year afterward, he finally received his day in court—and five-year prison sentence...

...It was in these circumstances that Draja Mihajlovich, a colonel of the Army's General Staff and a professor at the Higher Military Academy, decided not to be taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans and with a group of his officers took off for the mountains to organize a resistance...

...The day has not yet arrived when a lamb can sleep safely near a wolf both Stalin and Tito are going to be against you...

...As was widely known, those negotiations were carried on in the presence of the United States representative, Colonel McDowell, and the German High Command in Yugoslavia offered to surrender to the Western Allies represented by Mihajlovich...

...The Communist movement in Yugoslavia, as well as in the rest of Europe, experienced a great upsurge right after World War I. Had it been left alone to exist in a framework of democratic laws, it would never have become the iron-disciplined organization it became the moment the party was outlawed and Communist activity was persecuted in many ways, including long prison terms that only encouraged Communist fanaticism and underground activity...