THE YUGOSLAV TRAGEDY
By R. W. SETON-WATSON
AFTER a spell of unexampled over-confidence the Nazi leaders have been driven by the Russian victories into an opposite extreme of gloom, and are desperately assuring Europe that in Hitler's "New Order" lies the sole salvation of the Continent from the Bolshevik menace. The impudence of this claim in the mouths of men who are terrorising and plundering huge tracts of Europe is surpassed only by the naivety of supposing that anyone will listen to their shouts. Enough is now known about the treatment of Poland or Norway or France to convince the Allied nations of the utter hopelessness of peace with those in control of German policy. But the classic instance of the New Order is the con- dition to which the Axis has reduced Yugoslavia since April, 1941. The country is now a prey to civil war, anarchy, famine and pro- gressive disintegration, deliberately encouraged from Berlin and Rome ; and unless a clear lead is speedily given by her statesmen abroad and endorsed by the Allies (Russia certainly not less than Britain and America), the armies of victory, when at last they force an entrance into the Nazi fortress, may find a whole population dead or dying.
It is now known that the Axis, while inviting Yugoslavia to adhere to the Tripartite Pact, already had a detailed plan for the establish- ment of a separate Croatia. That was a trap into which the Croat peasant leader, Dr. Matchek, declined to fall. If in 1939 he acqui- esced in the Regent's negotiations with Hitler, it was not for love of Germany, but in a mistaken eleventh-hour bid to averttwar. But when he realised what the situation was, the Croat leader joined the Simonvitch Cabinet and endorsed its resistance to German aggres- sion. When the Cabinet had to fly the country, he felt it to be his duty to stay with his people, but he gave his three co:leagues—MM. Krnyevitch, Shutey and Shubashitch (the first two now in the London Cabinet, the third on his way from Washington to London) —the assurance that he would never repudiate them so long as they held together ; and for two years, under the most stringent police control in his native village, he has resisted repeated offers and threats from Pavelitch and the German High Command, refusing to break his pledge or to co-operate so long as a foreign conqueror is in occupation. And today his moral leadership of the Croat masses is more unchallenged than ever.
Our debt to Yugoslavia is immense. Her resistance, following on Greece's, dislocated Germany's whole Eastern plan and probably saved Moscow. But in Yugoslavia the Germans wasted not a moment. Their first step was to set up the assassin of King Alexander as Chief of State in a Croatia which had to pay for its mock " independence," by ceding outright to Italy large tracts of the Dalmatian coast (including the port of Split) and to the Reich the major portion of Slovenia. (In passing, be it said that not even in Poland have the Nazis applied so minutely and ruth- lessly the policy of extermination and transplantation as towards
this, the smallest and most helpless of the Slav nations.) The inne history of the selection of the Duke of Spoleto as Croatian Kin is still obscure; but Tomislav II still signs " Aimone di Savoia, and still keeps the Adriatic between himself and his Ustashi subjects for whom Mussolini had long ago set up special schools of training in terrorism.
The next stage was to unleash bloodshed and terror against the Serbian population of Bosnia, at the same time evicting large numbers of Serbs from southern and eastern Croatia, or putting pressure upon them either to accept Catholicism or to call them- selves " Orthodox Croats." Ne,:dless to say, the moving spirits in this razzia were not the Catholic authorities (who adopted an attitude of extreme reserve towards the Pavelitch regime), but the lawless Ustashi, encouraged by such men as Eugene Kvatemik, Pavelitch's chief accomplice in the Marseilles murder of 1934. Inci- dentally, Kvaternik has openly admitted his responsibility for the reduction of the Jews of Croatia from 8o,000 to ro,000 under this regime—a fact all the more horrible when it is realised that his own mother, the Field-Marshal's wife, was a daughter of Joseph Frank, the Jewish leader of the Clerical Frank Party, and that she took her own life in despair at her son's misdeeds. There is no country in the world in which similar horrors might not be per- petrated, if once the machine of State were placed in the hands of convicts from the prisons, led by abnormal pathological types. All our sympathy goes out to the Serbs in their resentment of this butchery, and we are ready to blame the Croat leaders for not raising their voices more loudly in protest. But unfortunately the Serbs have spoilt their case by enormous exaggeration of the number of victims, and seem incapable of realising the extent to which they are playing into the hands of the Germans by a persistent and unjust identification of two such utterly different concepts as " Croat " and " Ustasha."
The third stage followed in August, 1941, when the German Command found it possible to set up in Belgrade a Serbian Quisling Government. Its head,- General Milan Neditch, is a dis- tinguished soldier who has long had Nazi sympathies (incidentally, his equally brilliant soldier brother, General Milutin Neditch, went to a German concentration camp rather than co-operate with the Nazis). He is, of course, not to be mentioned in the same breath as Pavelitch, and his chief aim was undoubtedly to pacify the country and put an end to bloodshed and reprisals. But he soon became a helpless instrument in German hands, forced by them to indulge at increasingly frequent intervals in wild vituperation against the London Government and its Allies. And yet he is perfectly well aware that no Government of modem times in Yugoslavia was so completely representative of all shades of political opinion as the Government formed by General Simovitch in March, 1941, and re- formed under that brilliant scholar and acute political thinker, Slobodan Jovanovitch, in January, 1942. Neditch's diatribes are unconvincing: if he criticised the Government for its passivity and lack of a constructive programme, he would be on strong ground. but in effect he is merely criticising them for refusing to despair of Allied victory, and grows all the more acrimonious as he realises that he is backing the wrong horse.
While Neditch decided to play the part of a Serbian Petain. denouncing the Yugoslav idea as an unhappy aberration, and con- senting to co-operate with that notorious German agent, the ex- comitadji Petchanats, there were many Serbs, especially in the army, who would not give in, and who upheld in the mountains the traditions of Karageorge and Peter Mrkonitch. The man- whose name will always be pre-eminently identified with that movement is Colonel Drazha Mihailovitch, who rallied round him many unknown heroes and bore the burden and heat of the day. Un- fortunately it suited some of the exiles to exaggerate his military resources and importance and to put out from such centres of rumour as Istanbul, Cairo and Ankara much information which, to say the least of it, was inaccurate : and it also suited the exiled Government, while in process of reconstruction, to assign to the Colonel the portfolio of a non-existent Ministry of War.
Meanwhile at home Mihailovitch adopted a narrowly Serb outlook, keeping the Croats at arms' length and at the same time falling out with the " Partisans " or supporters of leftward tendencies. It as only natural that the successful resistance of Russia to the Germans should awake echoes throughout Yugoslavia, and that the less "Yugoslav " General Mihailovitch showed himself to be, the more would Russian influences spread among those patriots who ut resistance and liberty first, and all political considerations second. ondon and Moscow have long been agreed as to the desirability f co-operation between the Cheinitsi and the Partisans, but the General and his friends have been consistently unco-operative. After a gallant resistance in western Serbia, they found it necessary to withdraw into the fastnesses of Montenegro, and there to play for time: and if this has led to a sort of tacit understanding between them and the Italian army of occupation, it would be unjust to condeuin it without kncwing all the local circumstances. But the charge levelled against the General from Moscow, and supported by an official Note to the Yugoslav Government—to the effect that e has had dealings with the Germans also—is far more serious, and ust be probed to the bottom. Moreover, the situation has been considerably transformed by the fact that while eastern Serbia has irtually submitted to Neditch (a fact for which it is not necessarily to be blamed), there' is increasing resistance to the Axis and its rstashi tools in large tracts of Croatia, Slovenia and north-west osnia—notably by the bands under the leadership of Ivan Ribar, a former President of the Skupshtina.
Men such as this (and they have the tacit backing of public opinion throughout western Yugoslavia), are increasingly impatient at Mihailovitch's narrow outlook, and demand that the Yugoslav Government, now again in process of reconstruction, should put forward without further delay a clear-cut programme of political and social reform, based upon the federal principle at home and a wider co-operation of all the Balkan nations.
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