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Vladko Maček, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS), which was the most influential party in Croatia at the time, rejected German offers to lead the new government. On 10 April the most senior home-based Ustaše, Slavko Kvaternik , took control of the police in Zagreb and in a radio broadcast that day proclaimed the formation of the ...
The Chetniks, [a] formally the Chetnik Detachments of the Yugoslav Army, and also the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland [b] and informally colloquially the Ravna Gora Movement, was a Yugoslav royalist and Serbian nationalist movement and guerrilla force [2] [3] [4] in Axis-occupied Yugoslavia.
It consisted largely of Bosnian Muslim and Croat refugees from eastern Bosnia, where large massacres were carried out by Chetniks and to a small degree by the Yugoslav Partisans. [1] It became known for its fierce fighting against the Chetniks and the Partisans and massacres against Serb civilians. [ 1 ]
The Chetniks wanted to forge an ethnically pure Greater Serbia claiming it was to ensure the survival of Serbs in Axis/Ustaše-controlled areas by violently "cleansing" these areas of Croats and Muslims. [7] Several historians view Chetnik actions against Muslim and Croats as constituting genocide.
The Yugoslav government embraced the Chetniks and their basic ideas, which were already a part of the political framework of pre-war Yugoslavia. A December 1941 directive, attributed to Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović, explicitly ordered the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats from Sandžak and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
At the time, the militia consisted of about 76,000 officers and men. This figure did not include the Ustaše Defence Brigades, numbering about 10,000, who remained outside the armed forces. [ 14 ] Ustaše members with appropriate experience, along with some professional military officers with strong loyalty to Pavelić, were placed in all key ...
There were about 950 Chetniks serving under Drenović that year, positioned around Manjača and Glamoč. [37] Drenović had about 400 Chetniks under his command by the following year. [38] Drenović was a Chetnik vojvoda (warlord), [39] and his Chetnik band was the only one that the Ustaše trusted fully during the war. [38]
Chetniks on parade in Belgrade, c. 1920. Association against Bulgarian Bandits, between 1922 and 1925. Chetnik Association, between 1921 and 1926. In the interwar period in Yugoslavia (1918–41), there were several veteran associations of Serbian guerrillas (known as "Chetniks") that had fought in Ottoman Macedonia (1903–12), Balkan Wars (1912–13) and World War I (1914–18).