Chetniks (Serbian Četnici, Четници) were an organization of Yugoslavs (mostly Serbs) who supported the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and formed a notable resistance force during World War II. The name is derived from the Serbian word četa which means "company" (of about 100 men).

Origins

Chetniks originally formed as a result of the Macedonian struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Soon, other ethnic groups in the Balkans created their own chetnik detachments: Serbs, Bulgarians, Greek Andartes and Albanian kacaci. The Ottomans had little problems with them since they were too busy fighting each other. In Herzegovina, they were fighting the Turks, in northern Macedonia against Turks and Albanians who sided with them.

At the start of Balkan wars there was 110 IMRO, 108 Greek, 30 Serbian and 5 Vlach detachments. They fought against the Turks in the First Balkan War, while in WWI they fought against Austria-Hungary.

World War II

After the surrender of the Yugoslav royal army in April 1941, some of the remaining Yugoslav soldiers organized in the Ravna Gora district of western Serbia under Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović to fight the German occupation. They were mostly ethnic Serbs though there were some Slovenes and Croats as well. 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 the success of Mihailovich'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 Mihailovich had a bounty of 100,000 Reichsmarks offered by Germans for their heads.

Throughout the World War II, the Chetniks were faced with the two main categories of enemies: the German occupiers and the Ustashe troops that murdered or otherwise harassed the ethnic Serbian population on the one side, and the ideologically opposed Communist Partisans on the other. They were also opposed to the Bosnian Muslims mainly for ideological reasons (they were seen as remnants of the Ottoman Empire that previously occupied Serbian lands, and they were of a different religion).

After the summer uprising and during 1941, the guerilla activity of the Chetniks and Communist Partisans in Serbia 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 Ustaše committed atrocities in the Serb-populated villages, the Chetniks retaliated in the villages populated by Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

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.

The Western Allies originally supported the Chetniks because they were a better option for them than the potentially pro-Russian Communist Partisans. The Allies have planned an invasion of the Balkans, and so the Yugoslav resistance movements were strategically important, and there was a need to make a decision which of the two fractions 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 have 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.

By the end of the war, the Chetniks were still important in numbers. Some retreated north to surrender to Anglo-American forces; Mihailović and his few remaining followers 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.

The last remaining Chetnik was captured in the Herzegovina-Montenegro border area in 1957.

Allied pilot rescues and Legion of Merit

The Chetniks have rescued some 500 U.S. airmen who crashed over Yugoslavia in 1944-45.

Due to the efforts of Major Richard L. Felman and his buddies President Harry S. Truman, on the recommendation of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, posthumously awarded Mihailovich the "Legion of Merit", for the rescue of American Airmen by the Chetniks.

For the first time in history, this high award and the story of the rescue was classified secret by the State Department so as not to offend the communist government of Yugoslavia. Such a display of appreciation for the Chetniks would not be welcome as they switched sides to Tito's Partisans during the war.

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.

Many Chetniks started to grow elaborate beards during the war, which is a traditional Orthodox Christian way to express sorrow. In this manner, they marked their sorrow for the occupied fatherland which was ravaged by war.

Some Chetniks expressed staunch Serbian nationalism, sometimes even ultra-nationalism. A Chetnik ideologue Stevan Moljević composed a memorandum called "Homogenous Serbia" that outlined a plan to solve Serbian problems by expanding the Serbian territory to all the lands where ethnic Serbs live, and subsequently remove its heterogeneous ethnic composition, revising the idea of Greater Serbia.

Collaboration, war crimes and the postwar communist propaganda

After the victory of Tito's Communists, the rival Chetniks were consistently discredited in the post-war Communist Yugoslav propaganda for their alleged collaboration with Nazis and alleged war crimes. Mihailović was summarily executed, which strained the Franco-Yugoslav relations at the time, and Charles de Gaulle refused to visit Yugoslavia or meet Tito, whom he saw as a murderer that executed his rival.

The Chetnik collaboration with Germans and Italians did exist. Chetniks had offered a truce to Germans in 1941, which was accepted. Some groups of Chetniks collaborated with Italians, from whom they received arms to fight Partisans and Ustashe, and also with Germans in Bosnia. Nevertheless, Chetnik advocates argue that these were tactical collaborations on a local level, with the main aim to fight their common enemy - the Partisans. Chetniks viewed their ideological struggle against the Partisans as one more important than the fight against the Germans.

In the areas of Independent State of Croatia, which included Bosnia and Croatia, a bitter ethnic war was fought. The ruling Ustase regime had proclaimed as its goal to exterminate one third of the Serbs, expel the other third and convert the rest to the Catholic faith. Chetniks fought both the Ustashe and Partisans in these areas, and retaliated for the crimes against Serbs in the villages populated by Bosnian Muslims (who they saw as ones allied with the Ustashe) and Croats. The areas around Višegrad, Zvornik, Foča, Čajniče, Pljevlja were gravely impacted by this kind of ethnic cleansing until Tito's Partisans arrived at the site in large numbers in 1942. There's one report of 2,000 Muslim men killed in Foča and Muslim women mass raped, and another report of 1,200 fighters and 8,000 civilians killed in easternmost Bosnia and Sandžak during this time.

During the Tito's era, Chetnik crimes were equalized with the crimes of Ustashe regime. However, Serbs consistently point out that there is a major difference in the scale of the atrocities of the two groups, as well as to the fact that Chetniks were guerilla fighters with many independent cells who also fought Nazis, while the Ustashe formed the government of a Nazi satellite state and carried a well coordinated and organized genocide of the Serbs. However, Communists have put a sign of equality there, and completely discredited Chetniks in this way. Also, it is worth noting that there is a far greater number of Chetniks who were prosecuted and executed after the war than the number of Ustashe. The decision was made by the communist goverment to grant amnesty to the Ustashe and Domobran fighters who were not involved in the most serious war crimes, while the worst Ustashe criminals have fled Yugoslavia at the end of the war. The Royalist Chetniks were much more hated, as they were explicit enemies of Communism.

It is also worth noting that Partisans too were involved in numerous war crimes, like the murder of thousands of Ustashe and Domobran fighters in the Bleiburg massacre, as well as many others. This includes unselective execution of large groups of people in the aftmath of the War, including native Germans from Vojvodina, Italian in northern Yugoslavia, ideological and political oponents, as well as people whose collaboration with Germans was only suspected.

Modern times

In modern times, the Chetnik movement is 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 Vuk Draskovic, who was against Serbian ultranationalism and Milosevic rule, while making a great effort to rehabilitate the Chetnik movement and do some justice to historical facts.

Many Serbians also support Chetniks due to the Yugoslav wars and a failure of the Communist idea of "brotherhood and unity of southern Slavs". 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 Bosnian SS Handžar Division.

Vojislav Šešelj, a leader of the Serbian Radical Party, held a rank of vojvoda of the Chetniks, given to him in 1989 by Momčilo Đujić, a surviving leader of the WWII Chetniks who fled to the US.

During the Yugoslav wars, several paramilitary formations, including those by Željko Ražnjatović "Arkan", boasted Chetnik insignia and some of them committed crimes against non-Serbs. This has contributed to the negative image of Chetniks in Croatia and Bosnia.

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 pension. Rights were granted on the basis that both were anti-facsist movements that fought occupators, and this formulation has entered the law. The vote was 176 for, 24 against and 4 abstained. The socialist party (SPS) of Slobodan Milosevic was the one against the decision. This law has had various reactions to it. Many have praised it as just and long overdue, including the prince Alexander Karadjordjevic of Yugoslavia (son of the last Yugoslav king), and most political parties (with the most notable exception of SPS). Others protested this decision, including the Serbian association of former Partisans, the Serbian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, and some people in the neighbouring countries.

External links

• Official site of Ravna Gora Chetnik movement
• Rescue of 500 US Airmen by Chetniks
• AP: Airmen revisit World War II sanctuary (2004)
• Zdravko Dizdar: Chetnik genocidal crimes during World War II
• History of Chetniks, both in English and Serbian
• Chetnik movement during World War II
• U.S. Congressional record on Chetniks and Draza Mihailovic, 1987
• "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" description, from the Museum of Tolerance Multimedia Learning Center (Simon Wiesenthal)