Serbian Courts Reinterpret History to Forgive Chetniks’ Crimes

Chetnik commander Nikola Kalabic (centre, with black beard) and his men during WWII. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Ninja212.

On May 26, the Higher Court in the town of Valjevo in Serbia rehabilitated Nikola Kalabic, one of the World War II commanders of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland, more commonly referred to as the Chetniks.

The decision again demonstrated how Serbian courts have been selectively reinterpreting the facts about what happened during WWII to exonerate the Chetniks and whitewash the crimes they committed.

The court ruling represented the climax of a five-year-long process initiated by his granddaughter Vesna Kalabic, annulling all the post-war decisions of the Yugoslav authorities and declaring Kalabic to have no prior convictions.

However, the higher prosecutor’s office has announced it is filing a complaint and the process will probably not end with this court decision.

Kalabic was the commander of the Chetnik Mountain Guard Corps. Under the leadership of Dragoljub Mihailovic, the Chetniks were officially on the Allied side until 1943, representing the Yugoslav exiled government in London. However, they had already begun collaborating with Nazi German forces in autumn 1941.

Their reluctance to fight against the Nazi occupation, the constant clashes with the Communist-led Partisans and the violence inflicted upon civilians contributed to the Allies’ withdrawing support and transferring it to the Partisans instead, with the Chetniks ending up on the losing side at the end of the war.

A strictly positive reinterpretation of the Chetnik movement has been central to the official politics of memory about WWII in Serbia since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

As the war represented the founding event and the source of legitimacy for Yugoslavia, this historical revision represents a crucial aspect of the process of Yugoslavia’s delegitimisation.

Officially declared an anti-fascist movement equivalent to the Partisans in 2004, the Chetnik movement has been completely rehabilitated politically, while judicial rehabilitations, such as Kalabic’s case, represent the legal aspect of historical revisionism in Serbia.

Chetnik leader Mihailovic, who was sentenced to death at a public trial and executed in 1946, was also rehabilitated in Belgrade in 2015, after a long legal process that included historians as expert witnesses and attracted enormous media attention.

Innocent victim of Communist conspiracy?

Nikola Kalabic. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Vandal.B.

The exact circumstances of Kalabic’s death are uncertain.

What is known from available sources is that he was caught and imprisoned by the Yugoslav authorities, who he had given information that helped them to capture Mihailovic in 1946.

The Yugoslav State Commission for the Crimes of the Occupiers and their Domestic Helpers declaredhim responsible for various crimes on seven counts in 1945, and a court in the Serbian municipality of Mionica confiscated his family’s property in 1946. Both decisions were annulled as a result of this year’s rehabilitation process.

The first step the court had to take before the rehabilitation process was to decide on the official date of Kalabic’s death.

Accepting testimony given in 2011 by Mijailo Danilovic – a retired priest and former member of the Chetnik movement – the Basic Court in Valjevo declared January 19, 1946 as Kalabic’s official date of death, establishing that he was killed in a cave near Valjevo that day.

Deciding on this date of death means that Kalabic could not have betrayed Mihailovic, as he was already dead.

Although this assertion does not correspond to the facts, insisting that Kalabic did not betray his general has been a common claim by his admirers – his granddaughter included – who saw proving this as an important aspect of the rehabilitation process.

Throughout the legal process, Vesna Kalabic claimed that her grandfather was executed for political and ideological reasons, understanding rehabilitation as an opportunity to remove the stigma from his name.

In his closing statement, her lawyer Goran Brankovic claimed that Kalabic was “one of the most significant people of the Ravna Gora movement, a famous land surveyor, respected family man, honourable officer and remarkable commander”.

The plaintiff also argued that there was no valid evidence of crimes and collaboration, saying that “the horrible lies spread about him by Communists” would be exposed by the case.

But the Mountain Guard Corps was one of the most notorious Chetnik units, directly involved in collaboration, crimes and terror against civilians in central Serbia.

Numerous sources, including those from the Chetnik movement, endorse this. For instance, Kalabic and Jevrem Simic, a colonel in the Chetnik Avala Corps, signed a truce with Nazi German forces in November 1943 that included an agreement on a united fight against the Communists.

Moreover, the Corps and Kalabic personally committed a series of crimes, such as in Kopljare in 1943 when 22 people died, and in Drugovac in April 1944 when 72 locals were killed, with houses burned down and looted.

After the massacre in Kopljare, Kalabic sent a report to Mihailovic, bragging about the event and calling the victims “active Communists”.

One of the most important testimonies about the behaviour of Kalabic and his unit is a written complaint from a Corps officer to Mihailovic in November 1943, which argued that people were more afraid of the Chetniks coming to a village than of the occupation forces, and that half of the victims of the massacres were innocent.

The officer claimed he was aware that reports to higher commanders were being written as if the victims were guilty.

Surviving correspondence with Mihailovic such as this also shows that he was well informed about the activities of Kalabic, and did nothing about them.

Legal problems with rehabilitation in Serbia

Anti-fascist activists protest in Belgrade in 2016 against the rehabilitation of Milan Nedic, premier of Nazi-occupied Serbia. Photo: Facebook.

The Serbian National Assembly has adopted two Rehabilitation Acts – in 2006 and 2011 – introducing the possibility of legal rehabilitation for people convicted, imprisoned, executed, or deprived of any rights for political and ideological reasons after April 1941.

Generally, the mechanism of legal rehabilitation has the purpose of accommodating victims of unfair trials by revising them. In the case of rehabilitation in Serbia, there is a series of problems that arise from the formulation of both legal acts, expanding the grounds for rehabilitation and making it possible for almost anyone to be rehabilitated as a victim of ideological and political persecution.

The 2006 law defined the existence of a juridical or administrative decision as grounds for rehabilitation, but also the lack of such a decision, meaning that there does not have to have been any trial in the first place.

When Dragisa Cvetkovic, the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia who signed the accession to the Tripartite Pact in 1941, was rehabilitated in 2009, the 1945 decision of the State Commission declaring him a state enemy was taken as grounds for his rehabilitation – a document that was not preserved at all.

Similarly, Prince Regent of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia Pavle Karadjordjevic was rehabilitated in 2011 together with the entire royal family, although they had not been arrested, put on trial, or convicted.

Most significantly, the vague formulation of the 2006 act enables the rehabilitation of people with command responsibility or direct responsibility for wartime collaboration or crimes, as long as it can be argued that political and ideological reasons also played a role in their persecution.

The 2011 Rehabilitation Act corrected this, ceasing to allow requests for the rehabilitation of members of occupation or quisling forces and people convicted of or declared to have been war criminals by the Yugoslav authorities.

Therefore, as Kalabic was declared a war criminal by the Yugoslav authority, he should not have been rehabilitated according to the 2011 Rehabilitation Act.

However, the same act decrees in its Article 2 that rehabilitation is possible even for people declared war criminals if it is established during the rehabilitation process that the person did not participate in crimes. Article 2 was applied in Kalabic’s case.

The importance of facts

One might wonder how it is possible for the court to determine that there were no crimes or collaboration when primary sources prove otherwise.

The general problem lies in the rehabilitation of prominent figures from WWII in Serbia, which are political processes at their core, such as the ongoing case of Milan Nedic, the Prime Minister of Nazi-occupied Serbia.

The accuracy of historical facts is obviously not a priority in the courtroom and plaintiffs and their witnesses normally present only facts and documents that speak in favour of someone’s rehabilitation as an innocent victim of Communism.

It still remains to be seen how the legal process will continue in case of complaints from the higher prosecutor’s office in the Kalabic case.

Nevertheless, Kalabic’s rehabilitation represents the most problematic case of rehabilitation in Serbia so far and the judge’s positive decision is outrageous from both a historical and moral perspective.

Without a doubt, Kalabic’s wartime activities included not only command responsibility but also direct and personal responsibility for collaboration with occupation forces and acts of terror that included intimidation, looting, beatings and massacres of civilians and those considered Communists or their sympathisers.

As the facts demonstrate, what we know about Kalabic is not a product of ‘Communist lies’ but is deeply rooted in documents from diverse sources, including those of the Chetnik movement and Kalabic himself.

Because of all that, this rehabilitation case serves as an example that literally anyone involved in WWII can be rehabilitated and relieved of all responsibility in contemporary Serbia.

Jelena Djureinovic is a PhD student and a lecturer at the Department of Eastern European History at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany.

The opinions expressed in the comments section are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.