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Serb Pension Law Rehabilitates WW2 Chetniks
By Ellie Tzortzi, Reuters News
Serbia
December 21, 2004
The original Chetniks were Serb guerrillas who fought in the Balkan Wars and the First World War. Charismatic commander Draza Mihailovic revived the units, wearing trademark full beards, to fight the Nazis in World War Two -- but later changed sides.
"Serbia must not enter 2005, when the world marks the 60th anniversary of the victory against Fascism ... with unpatriotic lies about General Mihailovic," said the draft bill.
"The greater part of Serbia was with Mihailovic and supported him. A slur on the Serbia of 60 years ago is also a slur on the Serbia of today," it added.
Mihailovic, an ardent royalist, initially fought the Nazis alongside the partisan troops of Marshall (Josep Broz) Tito. But when the Allies switched their support to Tito, his Chetniks joined Axis forces to battle against their communist rivals.
The partisans emerged victorious and executed Mihailovic as a traitor, consigning the Chetnik movement to history as bloodthirsty Nazi collaborators. For almost 50 years, the word was synonymous in the Balkans with brutality and fanaticism.
The current bill was promoted by groups which say Mihailovic was a hero, demonised by communist propaganda.
The Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), the successor to Tito's communist party, opposed granting the pensions. "One cannot deny that a significant part of the Chetnik movement collaborated with fascist Germany. To do so would be to rewrite history," argued Zoran Andjelkovic of the SPS.
Some histories say Mihailovic's execution was part of Tito's drive to eliminate opponents before becoming leader of the People's Republic of Yugoslavia.
But the dispute is also about raw memories of recent wars.
In the 1990s, when Yugoslavia broke up in bloody conflict, Serb paramilitary units in Bosnia and Croatia hijacked the Chetnik name and some of their insignia as symbols of Serb pride. They committed some of the war's worst atrocities.
The shock of history repeating itself has kept 60-year-old fears alive. Last month a Serb basketball player was barred from Croatia because of a tattoo of Mihailovic's face on his arm. Croatia, facing a similar dilemma after it won independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, also revised the communist-sanctioned version of history.
Croatia broke with Yugoslavia in 1941 and allied itself with the Third Reich, a fact never forgotten by Serbs who suffered at the hands of ruthless pro-fascist Croat fighters.
Modern Croatia gives pensions to conscripts of the old pro-Nazi state. Observers believe some former members of the hated Ustasha paramilitary army get the pensions -- giving them the same status as Tito's partisans, and now Serbia's Chetniks.
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