Reading Eagle (June 3, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
‘The Case of Drazha Mikhailovich’
By Dorothy Thompson
The United Committee of South Slavic Americans has published a pamphlet under the above title, summarizing the evidence against Gen. Mihailovich. It consists of 15½ pages of description of Chetnik activities and documentary evidence. Its author is Vaso Trivanovitch.
Meanwhile, the Commission of Inquiry set up by the Committee for a Fair Trial for Mihailovich has taken evidence, under oath, from American military personnel attached as liaisons to Mihailovich’s headquarters or rescued by him and returned to the Allies, and has published its findings. The Yugoslav Embassy in Washington, representing Mihailovich’s accusers, was invited to send persons to cross-examine the American witnesses. They refused.
The evidence presented by the two committees is contradictory at almost all points. But conscientious study of both reports does throw light on Yugoslavia from the beginning of 1942, until the end of the war. It is only in the framework of that general picture that the case of Mihailovich can be understood.
King Peter’s government, and the guerrilla movement, entered the war against the Axis through a revolt in March 1941. Mihailovich became commander of the guerrilla Chetniks. The Croatian population, disaffected for years, and led by Ante Pavelich, welcomed, in large part, the establishment of an “independent” pro-Axis state. Resistance depended on the Serbs. King Peter’s government, disgusted with Croatian behavior, developed a strong Serbian policy.
Until Russia entered the war, the Chetniks were, therefore, the only resistance forces. Vaso Trivanovitch, author of the case against Mihailovich, was then, as an officer in the American Friends of Yugoslavia, an apologist for King Peter, and in this capacity sponsored a coast-to-coast broadcast stating that the “Revolt of March 27” had “electrified the world.” Answering the Axis propaganda that Chetniks executed by the Axis were “Jews and Communists,” this broadcast said, “Yugoslavia has some 60,000 Jews, but it has no Communist party. It is doubtful whether there were more than 10,000 underground Communists. But 80,000 Yugoslavs have already been executed by the Axis and Pavelich’s Croatian traitors.”
I quoted this for the view of Mr. Trivanovitch, at the time, concerning the popularity of Communism in Yugoslavia, for he is now the supporter of the Yugoslav Communist regime. But he had changed his mind before. He was at one time an apologist for the Nazi economic system, and associated with Prof. Auhagen against the boycott of Nazi Germany.
Only when Russia was attacked, did a new resistance movement spring up, definitely Communist – and therefore (according to Mr. Trivanovitch) without popular roots – anti-Axis and anti-Chetnik, and fighting for a totally different objective than Mihailovich’s.
The result was civil war combined with war against the Germans and Italians. It is the charge of the anti-Mihailovich pamphlet that, he abandoned the fight against the Germans and Italians only to fight the Partisans, and “documentary” evidence is presented, to show that he assisted the Germans, and the Italians in particular, in their struggle against the Partisans. But American officers testified that Chetniks, fighting Germans, were fallen upon in the rear by Partisans – which was certainly collaboration with the enemy. In such a situation, the probability is, and the evidence on both sides indicates, that the Axis did its best to draw consequences favorable to itself from the condition of civil strife, and to drive one resistance movement against the other.
The question, therefore, of who was guilty of collaboration and if so, why, can hardly be answered without asking the prior and fundamental question: Who started the civil war in Yugoslavia? For nothing could have been more favorable to the Axis than civil war. And on this, I believe, impartial history would pin the guilt on the Partisans. For instead of making a common front for the duration of the struggle against the Germans, their fight against the Axis was, from the outset, a fight also against the London government and the Chetniks, and a struggle to weaken and destroy Serbia – the very center of the resistance. To do this, Marshal Tito has not hesitated to welcome the aid of former Pavelich Croatians.
Mihailovich is now being tried for treason by his opponents who, in this case, are prosecutor, judge and jury. The trial will never unravel the threads of the tragic Yugoslav events, for it is to the interest of the prosecution, which has already presented the verdict, to suppress the complete story of the civil war.
As for the “evidence,” this columnist was for four years a correspondent in the Balkans, and knows too much about Balkan forgeries of documents to accept anything as prima facie evidence, without cross examination before an impartial judge. Knowing also Belgrade police methods, which have not been humanized by Marshal Tito’s OZNA, “confession” indicate nothing to me except the efficacy of these methods.
If anything is evidence, the testimony of the American officers and flyers is. That it is barred in Yugoslavia is, in itself, sufficient indication of the sort of “trial” to which Gen. Mihailovich is being exposed. The American name for it is “lynch law.”