Dear Editor
Dear Editor The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. Mihajlovich I would like to point out a few omissions or mistakes in...
...To plead the Chetnik movement's case, to ask for the rehabilitation (even partly) of Mihajlovich, means to advocate an official program for the future democratic (post-Tito) Yugoslavia that disregards the vital interests of the peoples in the country...
...An internal policy of Yugoslavian nationalism necessarily involves the paraphernalia of a secret police, dictatorship and oppression-all of which are characteristic of the regime Mihajlov now so consistently and correctly criticizes...
...Indeed, his consistent refusal throughout the piece to call Mihajlovich's movement the Chetnik movement, although the terms are synonymous only serves to increase one's suspicions of the author's intent...
...Indeed, the notion of Yugoslavian nationalism that implicitly permeates his article is in contradiction to Mihajlov's widely known support for democracy...
...And since the other peoples in the country freely and readily accepted the fact of Yugoslavia's nonexistence during the conflict, Mihajlovich's forces fought primarily against them, and only secondarily against the Germans-with whom, I hasten to add, the Chetniks at times collaborated...
...Finally, the arguments Mihajlov uses for assailing Winston Churchill's decision to shift Britain's support from the Chetniks to Tito's Communist Partisans conceal the consistency of the move...
...That the Chetniks were in fact fascist is demonstrated both by their collaboration with the Fascist armies of the German and Italian occupiers and by the basic political program of the Great Serbian cause they represented...
...Mihajlov mentions the Communist sympathizers and Muslims as the Chetniks' victims, which is true but not a complete truth...
...If, from the Chetnik point of view, all the peoples who separated from Yugoslavia to unite with their mother-countries during the War were guilty of high treason, then Mihajlovich's followers had to do battle with them...
...The real tragedy of Draja Mihajlovich, therefore, was not his failure to win but his entanglement with the Serbian monarchy's Chetnik movement...
...As a renowned leader in an antifascist war, the British Prime Minister could not but abandon Mihajlovich's fascist forces in Yugoslavia...
...Tito's Communist victory, supported by the Allies, was definitely a lesser misfortune for the peoples of the multinational Yugoslavian state...
...This movement, by the way, even preceded the similar movements that grew up in Italy and Germany during the '20s and '30s...
...Is Mihajlov's emphasis on the episodic rather than the essential motivated by an effort to cover up the Chetniks' involvement in that "fatal mistake" and "unwise attitude...
...Equally misleading is Mihajlov's comment that "the semiauthoritarian regime of the Karadjordjevich Serbian royal dynasty" made a "fatal mistake" in taking an "unwise attitude" toward Communists...
...While appreciating Mihajlov's demands for democracy and admiring his intrepidity, I regret that he compromises himself and the democratic reputation he has acquired through his sincere writings and his years of imprisonment for the sake of freedom...
...Mihajlovich I would like to point out a few omissions or mistakes in Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The Mihajlovich Tragedy" (NL, February 3) that almost seem to have been made purposely in order to rehabilitate General Draja Mihajlo-vich's Chetnik movement...
...The statement, for example, that Slovenia and Croatia were "parts of Austro-Hungary" is misleadingly incomplete, since Croatia was, from its very beginning, a distinct kingdom of the Haps-burg Middle-European empire, and had a centuries-old parliament that functioned until November 8, 1920, when it was abolished by the Serbian King Alexander I. It was then that the Chetnik movement, a royalist paramilitary organization, was activated, with the purpose of suppressing, by violent means, justified claims for national rights in all non-Serbian areas of Yugoslavia...
...During the years before World War II, the atrocities and crimes of the Chetniks, ignored by Mihajlov in his article, gained wide notoriety at home and abroad...
...Toronto George Budrovic...
...Consequently, Churchill's decision was no political mistake, either with regard to the War aims or to establishing democracy in Yugoslavia...
...If accepted and applied, this nationalism would inevitably lead either to a new breakdown of Yugoslavia or-even worse- to more intense oppression of its various peoples...
...But it is also true that when Yugoslavia fell apart, the General found that the only ones willing to fight for its preservation were the old and compromised Chetniks, recruited exclusively from among the Serbians...
...As early as 1931, Albert Einstein and Heinrich Mann publicly protested against Chetnik atrocities in Croatia on behalf of the human conscience...
...It is commonly known that the monarchy directed its "unwise attitude" basically against the national movements, and against the Communists only in so far as they contributed to the struggle for national rights...
...Mihajlov is correct in stating that Mihajlovich, in the moment of Yugoslavia's capitulation, started the resistance against the Axis invaders to secure the survival of the kingdom of Yugoslavia as an ally of the West after the War...
Vol. 58 • March 1975 • No. 7
