The Albanian Muslim Battalion in the Handzar Nazi SS Division: Kosovo Albanian Muslims in the Nazi SS

Waffen SS troops in the Albanian Battalion of the Handzar Division, wearing SS-issued Albanian skullcaps, Bosnia, 1944.

SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler formed a Kosovo Albanian Muslim Nazi SS Division during World War II, the Skanderbeg SS Division, 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian), in 1944. He planned to form a second Kosovo Albanian Muslim SS Division but was not able to because the war ended before he could do so. The history of the Skanderbeg division has been documented and analyzed. What has rarely been analyzed, however, is the role of the Kosovo Albanian Muslim members in the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar or Handschar. This is an untold story of World War II.

Kosovo Albanian Muslims had their own battalion in the Handzar Division, I Battalion of Regiment 28, I/28. The Albanian recruits were from Kosovo and the Sandzak or Rashka region of Serbia, initially in Battalion I/2, later I/28. The battalion had an imam and was modeled on the Austro-Hungarian Albanian Muslim Legion of 1916-1918. SS-Unterscharfuehrer Rudi Sommerer was an NCO in the Albanian Battalion which had at least 300 Albanian Muslim members. Sommerer was from Company 6, I Battalion, Waffen-Gebirgs-Jaeger-Regiment 28, of the 13th Waffen SS Handzar Division. SS-Sturmmann Nazir Hodic was an Albanian Muslim squad commander with I Battalion. Another Albanian Muslim member of Handzar was Ajdin Mahmutovic, who was 17 years old when he was recruited for the SS.

Rudi Sommerer, left, and Albanian Muslim Nazir Hodic as members of the Albanian Battalion in the Handzar SS Division, both wearing the SS Albanerfez or skullcap.

Albanian Muslims were recruited for the Bosnian Muslim Handzar Division because not enough Bosnian Muslim recruits were conscripted. By July, 1943, there were 15,000 members in the division. In order to increase the size of the division, SS-Standartenfuehrer Herbert von Obwurzer, who oversaw the initial formation of the division, began recruiting Albanian Muslims from Kosovo and the Sandzak or Rashka region of Serbia. In 1943, Kosovo was part of a Nazi and fascist Greater Albania, “independent” from Serbia. In the fall of 1943 the SS sought to recruit Albanian Muslims from this Greater Albanian state. The SS recruiting campaign in Albania was opposed, however, by Austrian-born Plenipotentiary in Albania Hermann Neubacher, a special emissary of the Foreign Office whose specialty was economic affairs. Because the Albanian Muslims would serve in a foreign country, Croatia, Neubacher maintained that the SS recruiting “jeopardized Albanian sovereignty.”

Neubacher explained his refusal and the status of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija:

“When I took over my Albania mission, there were applicants in Kosovo for the Muslim Waffen SS Division, Handschar, that was set up in Bosnia. With [Obergruppenfuehrer und General der Polizei und Waffen-SS Ernst] Kaltenbrunner’s support, I managed to get Himmler to stop recruitment for the division because it did not accord with our policy of neutrality. But the Reichsführer SS, who had heard much of the famous elite regiments of Bosnia and Hercegovina in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, finally achieved his aim. He got authorization from Hitler in 1944 to set up a Waffen SS Mountain Division called Skanderbeg for the local partisan war within the country’s borders. It suffered very heavy casualties in a badly led advance into partisan territory at an early stage of training. I was not at all happy with the setting up of this division, but the Albanian Government did not mind because it hoped that it would serve as the core for a well-trained national army and police force. The division had its headquarters in Prizren. I prevented its deployment in the area of Kosovska Mitrovica that remained with Serbia because I was afraid it would commit excesses against the Serb population. …

“After the fall of Yugoslavia in July 1941, the Kosovo and Metohia region … joined the Italian Kingdom of Albania set up in 1939. The Albanians lost no time in driving as many Serbs out of the country as they could. Those who were expelled were often forced by local potentates to pay a fee in gold to be permitted to leave the country. They were simply following the example set by the German Reich with its emigration tax. … I recommended urgently that the Albanian Government put an end to the expulsion of the Serbs.”

Neubacher also sent a telegram to the Auswartiges Amt or the Foreign Office on January 31, 1944. The German Foreign Office for Southeastern Europe similarly was opposed to the recruiting of Albanian citizens outside of Albania. Gottlob Berger, the head of the SS Main Office, assured them in a February 5, 1944 letter, “Einsatz der Albanen der muselmanischen Division” (“The use of the Albanians of the Muslim Division”), to Legationsrat SS-Stubaf. Reichel that the Albanian troops would be used temporarily in Croatia and that “when the division returned to Croatia, additional volunteers would be recruited, and the Albanians would be returned to their homeland, where they would form the cadre for an Albanian division.” The division Berger planned was the Skanderbeg SS Division made up primarily of Kosovo Albanian Muslims. The Albanian recruits were put into an Albanian Battalion of the Handzar Division, initially Battalion I, I/2, later redesignated as Battalion I of Regiment 28, I/28.

The Albanian Muslims were issued gray skullcaps made by the SS Main Office. The cap is known as a plis in the Gheg dialect or as a qeleshe. The traditional Albanian caps made from woolen felt are white but the SS created gray caps to match the darker uniforms. The Albanian Muslim recruits received military training at the Strans training camp near the Neuhammer training camp in lower Silesia where the Bosnian Muslims received their training. Albanian Muslim recruit Ajdin Mahmutovic of company 2 of Regiment 28 recalled: “I found the physical training to be quite easy.” SS-Ostuf. Carl Rachor wrote in a September 14, 1943 letter that “the enlisted men, particularly the Albanians, shall become outstanding soldiers.”

Heinrich Himmler visited the division on two occasions: Novermber 21, 1943, and January 11-12, 1944. Himmler inspected the units of Handzar on his second visit. The Albanian Battalion, I/28, conducted a special field exercise or maneuver for Himmler that demonstrated “the attack of a reinforced battalion from the assembly area.” The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, also visited the division twice during the training period in Neuhammer. The Mufti was accompanied by Muslim officials from Albania and Bosnia during these highly publicized visits. Husseini had himself been an artillery officer in the Ottoman Turkish Army during World War I which had fought on the German side. Husseini arrived in Europe in 1941 through Albania after passing through Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey. The Mufti retained contacts with Muslim religious and political leaders in Albania. When Husseini came to Sarajevo in 1943 to promote the Handzar Division, Muslim leaders from Albania came to meet him.

SS-Uscha. Rudolf Sommerer, an NCO of the Albanian Battalion in the Bosnian Muslim Handzar SS Division.

The Albanian Battalion participated in the offensives of the Handzar division in northeast Bosnia in the spring of 1944. The units of the Handzar division arrived in the Srem-Slavonia area of Croatia in 93 freight trains from Neuhammer, Germany in lower Silesia in February, 1944. Neuhammer had been a German Army training base since the late 19th century. It functioned as a prison camp in World War I and II. After the war, it became a part of Poland, under the name Swietoszow in the administrative district of Gmina Osiecznica. It was a training base during World War II as well. It was where the Handzar Division underwent training. The equipment base for the division was set up at Zemun. The headquarters for the division was in Vinkovci. The Albanian Battalion, I/28. was headquartered in Zupanje. The division was subordinated to the Second Panzer Army of Army Group F. Second Panzer Army was commanded by Lothar Rendulic while Army Group F was commanded by Field Marshal Maximilian Freiherr von Weichs. There was parallel authority betwen the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht. Himmler required permission before the army could issue orders to the division. Himmler wanted the division to operate in the sector between the Sava, Spreca, Drina, and Bosna rivers. This was an important agricultural region. To the north were Volksdeutsche or ethnic German areas. The Handzar Division was sent largely into Bosnian Serb Orthodox regions of Croatia and northeastern Bosnia.

Walter Schaumuller, right, the commander of company 5 in Regiment 28, the Albanian Battalion, wearing the Albanian skullcap, with Erich Braun, during Operation Easter Egg, south of Mitrovici, Bosnia, April 12, 1944.

Before offensive operations began, on March 7, the Muslim holiday of Mevlud was celebrated by the members of the Handzar division. Mevlud, or “mawlid(u) (n-)nabiyyi(i)” in Qur’anic Arabic, meaning literally “the birth of the Prophet” in Arabic, “mawlid an-nabi”, is the Islamic religious observance of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, celebrated in Rabi’ al-awwal, the third month of the Islamic calendar. The Bosnian Muslim and Albanian Muslim observance is based on the Turkish Sunni Muslim custom. Charity and food is distributed, and stories about the life of Mohammed are told and poetry is recited. Mosques and homes are decorated and there are street processions. Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig, the commander of the division, ordered that the imams and commanders in the units organize large-scale celebrations of the Mevlud holiday. Lectures were held along with religious ceremonies and special rations were given to the men. Each regiment of the Handzar division had an imam. The imam for Regiment 28 was Bosnian Muslim Husejin Dzozo, later replaced by Ahmed Skaka.

From December 1, 1943 to June 6, 1944, Regiment 28 was commanded by SS Ostubaf. Hellmuth Raithel, who would later command the second Bosnian Muslim SS Division “Kama”. SS-Hstuf. Walter Bormann commanded the Albanian Battalion, Battalion I of the 28th Regiment from August 1, 1943 to April 13, 1944. SS-Ostuf. Heinz Driesner replaced him on April 13, 1944 and remained the commander until June 10, 1944 when he was killed in action.

The first offensive operation for the division was Unternehmen Save or Operation Sava. Before the operation could occur, however, the Bosut region had to be cleared of Communist Partisan guerrillas. The Bosut was heavily wooded forest which was ideal for guerrilla activity.

Unternehmen Wegweiser or Operation Signpost began with an assault by the diviion along with Wehrmacht and police units against a Communist Partisan brigade and elements of a second brigade in the Bosut. The Handzar division consisted of approximately 20,000 men while the Partisans had up to 2,500 men in the region led by Sava Stefanovic. The Partisan guerrillas were greatly outnumbered and outgunned. Handzar possessed heavy artillery, containing an artillery regiment.

The Albanian Battalion was part of Regiment 28, which attacked on March 10, dividing into four spearheads, taking Strasinci, Soljani, Vrbanja, and Domuskela. By March 12, the operation was finished and the crossing of the Sava into Bosnia could begin. Before the division crossed into Bosnia, Sauberzweig read a message appealing to the Albanian Muslims that one of the goals was “the liberation of Muslim Albania” creating a Greater Albania:

“As we cross this river we commemorate the great historic task that the leader of the new Europe, Adolf Hitler, has set for us—to liberate the long-suffering Bosnian homeland and through this to form the bridge for the liberation of Muslim Albania. To our Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, who seeks the dawn of a just and free Europe—Sieg Heil!”

The Albanian Battalion crossed the Sava at Brcko. NCO Rudolf Sommerer of company 6 in Battalion I in Regiment 28 recalled: “Our company crossed the Sava at dawn. We were the first unit in our sector to cross, and made enemy contact immediately.” Regiment 28 took Pukis and Celic and Koraj.

The Handzar division set up headquarters in Brcko where the division was “heralded by the Muslim population”. To celebrate the success of the offensive, a Mevlud ceremony was held at the Brcko mosque on March 20 attended by prominent Bosnian Muslim leaders.

The next offensive for Handzar was Operation Easter Egg or Unternehmen Osterei which began on April 12. Regiment 27 captured Janja, Donja Trnova, and the Ugljevik mines. Regiment 28 captured Mackovac and Priboj. The Albanian Battalion, I/28, “suffered considerable casualties in the fighting” in battles to take the strategic Majevica heights. SS-Sturmmann Nazir Hodic, an Albanian Muslim in the division, was involved in the assault on Majevica. SS-Uscha. Rudi Sommerer described the assault:

“My Albanian squad leader, Nazir Hodic, took five of his men and stormed a Partisan position in the hills. They overran the knoll, killing several of the enemy without incurring any friendly losses.”

The division continued advancing, taking Bukvik, Srebrenik, and Gradacac. The Albanian Battalion, I/28, however, was detached and transported by train to Pristina in Kosovo. There it would be the core of a new Nazi SS Division which Heinrich Himmler had ordered formed on April 17. The Kosovo Albanian Muslim Nazi SS Division would be called the 21. Waffen-Gebirgs Division der SS “Skanderbeg” (albanische Nr. 1).

SS-Brigadefuehrer Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig, the commander of the Handzar SS Division, wearing the SS Albanerfez or skullcap of the Albanian Battalion, I/28, Bosnia, 1944.

Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton were not the first to sponsor a Greater Muslim Bosnia and a Greater Muslim Kosovo. Heinrich Himmler exploited this policy before them. To be sure, there was a “mutuality of interest” in doing so. Support for a Greater Bosnia and a Greater Albania advanced U.S. geopolitical, military, and economic interests that were beneficial to both parties. Similarly, the Bosnian Muslims provided manpower, the warm bodies, for Himmler’s Waffen SS. What was the tradeoff? The Bosnian Muslims would achieve “autonomy”, their own statelet, sponsored by Heinrich Himmler. Of course, it was done at the expense of the Bosnian Serbs. Northeastern Bosnia was a majority Serbian region of Bosnia. This was where the Handzar Division chiefly engaged in combat, to take control of Serbian cities, towns, and villages. This was the objective of the Handzar division. The goal was to take over a Serbian majority region of Bosnia. Of course, the concepts of “majority” and “minority” had absolutely no meaning or relevance whatsoever in Islam or Nazism. The only question or issue was power and control. The tradeoff was similar with regard to the creation of a Greater Albania. If Albanian Muslims supported the Third Reich and provided Himmler with manpower for the Waffen SS, he, in turn, would support the creation of a Greater Albania, which would include Kosovo and Metohija and western Macedonia.

Based on the 1931 Yugoslav census, Bosnian Orthodox Serbs were the largest ethnic group in Bosnia with a plurality population of 40.92%, while Bosnian Sunni Muslims were 36.64% and Bosnian Eoman Catholic Croats were 22.44%. After the genocide committed against the Bosnian Orthodox Serbs by Croat Roman Catholics and Bosnian Sunni Muslims, the Bosnian Orthodox Serb population would be decimated and they would lose their plurality. While all three groups suffered losses in a three-way civil war, the Bosnian Serb population was the only one targeted for genocide.

Bibliography

Bender, Roger James, and Hugh Page Taylor. Uniforms, Organization and History of the Waffen-SS. Mountain View, CA: Bender Publishing, 1969
Hilberg, Raul. The Destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1961.
Lepre, George. Himmler’s Bosnian Division: The Waffen-SS Handschar Division 1943-1945. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Military History, 1997.
Michaelis, Rolf. Die Gebirgs Divisionen der Waffen SS. (The Mountain Divisions of the Waffen SS). Erlangen, Germany: Michaelis Verlag, 1994.
Neubacher, Hermann. Sonderauftrag Sudost 1940-1945: Bericht eines Fliegenden Diplomaten. (Special Mission Southeast 1940-1945: Report of a Flying Diplomat). Berlin: Musterschmidt, 1957.

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The Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division: Heinrich Himmler and the Formation of the Handzar SS Division

SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, second from left, inspects the reconnaissance battalion of the Bosnian Muslim Handzar SS Division with Karl-Gustav Sauberzweig, the commander of the division, and adjutant Gotz Berens von Rautenfeld in Neuhammer, Germany on November 21, 1943.

SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler was instrumental in the formation of the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division “Handzar” or “Handschar” during World War II. In 1944, a second Bosnian Muslim SS Division was formed, “Kama”. Himmler, “the architect of genocide”, and “the architect of the Holocaust”, was determined to create an all-Muslim Nazi SS division. Although nominally a “Croatian” or “Croat” formation, Himmler always wanted and envisioned a Muslim division made up of Bosnian Muslims, or “Bosniaks”. The division was even referred to as an “Ustasha” division. But, in fact, Himmler always intended the Handzar Division to be a Bosnian Muslim SS Division under German and Bosnian Muslim military and political control.

In a letter to SS Gruppenfuehrer Artur Phleps, Himmler wrote:

“I am sticking to my intention of forming SS Bosniak Division of Moslems, who for the most part are not fighting on our side today, but are standing aside or even fighting against us. As Bosniaks, they would surely be loyal soldiers on our side.

I have notified the Foreign Office personally.

Heil Hitler!

[signed] H. Himmler”

Himmler told Phleps that he had “received report on your talk with Emmissary [Siegfried] Kasche and Foreign Minister [Mladen] Lorkovic. General [Edmund] Glaise-Hostenau was with me yesterday. The suggestions that Emissary Kasche made there do not correspond with my intentions.” What were Himmler’s intentions? Himmler was determined to form an all-Muslim Bosnian Muslim SS division. Lorkovic had proposed that Croatian “Ustasha” troops be used for the SS division. Himmler was clear and adamant in his objectives. He did not want Croatian Roman Catholic or “Ustasha” troops for his new SS division. In his letter to Phleps, Himmler stated that he would accept Croatian troops only for the police:

“I am very happy to accept 6000 Ustascha volunteers for the formation of police battalions and for training as regular policemen. Returned to Croatia after one year.”

Himmler sought to form an all-Muslim Nazi SS division because he saw Islam as a religion that was suitable for soldiers. The fanaticism and self-sacrifice of Islam could be utilized by the Waffen SS, much like the U.S. would use the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Himmler stated to Joseph Goebbels:

“I have nothing against Islam because it educates the men in this division for me and promises them heaven if they fight and are killed in action. A very practical and attractive religion for soldiers.”

Himmler had welcomed Muslim troops into the SS in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and the Caucasus. He had also put Palestinian Arab Haj Amin el Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, in charge of recruiting Muslims for the SS. But foremost, Himmler was influenced by the service of Bosnian Muslims in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. The Bosnian Muslims had fought loyally and fanatically for the German side in World War I. Himmler wanted to revive the German cooperation and solidarity with Bosnian Muslims.

A still from German newsreel footage showing Bosnian Muslim troops in the Handzar SS Division on parade in Neuhammer, Germany, 1943.

Himmler sent a telegram on March 3, 1943 to General Edmund von Glaise-Horstenau, the German Commanding General in Croatia, explaining his intentions:

“Telegram of 2/25/1943 received with thanks. Your personal observations are very valuable to me. I am making immediate contact with the Reich Foreign Minister for the purpose of carrying out my intention of an SS division purely of Moslem Bosniaks. I hope thereby to make an ethnic group that today is standing aside because of the conditions in the Croatian state and has a great tradition and loyalty to the Reich militarily valuable to us. The use of the title ‘Ustascha’ for this division is definitely not possible. I am looking forward very much to a conference with Foreign Minister Lorkovic. I’ll advise you later as soon as I have discussed these matters with the Reich Foreign Minister on his return.

[signed] H. Himmler”

Himmler authorized “that the sum of up to 2,000,000 Reichsmarks be made available” for the formation of the division. Himmler expected “the complete establishment of the division with a strength of about 26,000 men by 8/1/1943.”

Himmler encountered sabotage of the division, however, by the Ante Pavelic Ustasha regime in Croatia. Pavelic saw the formation of a German Nazi SS Division on the territory of the NDH, which included Bosnia-Hercegovina, as an infringement on the sovereignty of Croatia. Pavelic wanted the division to consist of Croatian Roman Catholic troops as well along with Croatian national insignia.

In a July, 1943 letter to SS Brigadefuehrer and Generalmajor of Police Konstantin Kammerhofer, who was the Deputy of the Reichsfuehrer SS in Croatia, Himmler described the sabotage and obstructionism he encountered from the Croatian government in the formation of the division:

“I am absolutely dissatisfied with the support of the establishment of the Croatian SS Volunteer Division ordered by the Fuehrer.”

Himmler objected to reports of “wild recruiting” with conscripts being seized and “hauled out of bed and placed in barracks of the Croatian Army.” Instead, Himmler wanted the recruits to report to the Waffen SS. He also suspected that many of the recruitment “offices belong to concealed Communistic or Chetniki bands.”

Himmler had also received reports that the Croat regime had sent recruits for the division to the Jasenovac and Nova Gradiska concentration camps:

“I also charge you to examine the inmates of the Croatian concentration camps in Novogradisca and Jasenovac. I have received definite and very clear reports that in these areas as well, young men were not only taken to Croatian barracks, but simply because of the fact that they reported to us, were taken to the concentration camps. It is obvious that these actions could have been carried out only by enemies of the Croatian state. Here too, you are to use all your powers to intervene. I want a complete report from you that the inmates of the two concentration camps have been checked by our organization. Likewise I want a report that the guilty enemies of the Croatian state have been held responsible in the strictest way. It is best to take them to the concentration camps. In many cases the death penalty will be appropriate.”

Himmler also complained that he had not received a list of volunteers as he had requested:

“I have not yet received the list of the volunteers as ordered by the ministry of the armed forces on 5/15/1943. I cannot help but suspect that this order of the Croatian state and thus of the Poglavnik has been sabotaged by enemies of the Croatian state.”

Himmler also requested: “I expect that in the troop units of the Croatian Army, which consist predominantly of Moslems, we can set up recruitment evenings for the members of the replacement center, to be followed by immediate turning over and marching away of the volunteers who have reported. I must make this demand because my trust in the loyal carrying out of the terms agreed on has disappeared very strongly.” In other words, Himmler was going to take Bosnian Muslims in the Croatian NDH Army and transfer them to the Waffen SS.

Finally, Himmler wanted Kammerhofer to implement his instructions in the NDH: “I commission you to inform the German Ambassador, the German General in Agram, as well as the appropriate Croatian national agencies of these orders of mine.”

The 13th Waffen Gebirgs Division der SS Handzar was formed in 1943 and saw combat in eastern Bosnia in 1944. Himmler had to compromise with the Pavelic NDH regime to allow token Croatian Roman Catholic troops in the division. The division was also referred to as a “Croatian” formation although Himmler referred to it as a “Bosniak” or Bosnian Muslim formation. The troops also had to wear an arm shield with the checkerboard insignia of the NDH regime. Nevertheless, the Handzar Division was, in essence, a Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division as Heinrich Himmler originally intended.

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Pec Mass Murders: 12th Year Anniversary

During the Albanian Muslim secessionist and separatist war in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija, Kosovo Serb civilians were targeted for murder and expulsion. December 14, 2010 marked the 12th year anniversary of the mass murders of six Kosovo Serbs in 1998 by Kosovo Albanian secessionists and separatists. The cold-blooded murder of the six youths was a horrific and shocking mass murder. The killers were Albanian Muslim separatists, suspected members of the KLA, which U.S. special envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard described in 1998 as “without any question, a terrorist group”: “I know a terrorist when I see one and these men are terrorists.” These Albanian Muslim “terrorists”, however, would become proxies and allies of the U.S. They would be allowed to abduct, torture, murder, and expel Kosovo Serbs and other non-Albanians. They would also kidnap Kosovo Serbs to harvest their organs. The Pec mass murders in 1998 were horrendous and bestial crimes. Twelve years later, the murderers have not been found.

The Albanian separatist war started with the abductions and mass murders of Yugoslav police and Kosovo Serb civilians. The objective was to provoke a response and to induce U.S. and NATO military intervention against the Yugoslav government. Which they did. The mass murders occurred on Monday, December 14, 1998 in the Kosovo-Metohija city of Pec at the Cafe Panda, at 8.10 PM, when two assailants wearing black masks believed to be KLA separatists fired a Chinese-made automatic weapon from the door at six unarmed Kosovo Serbs, most of them teens. This was a planned and premediated, cold-blooded mass murder, a slaughter, a massacre, committed by the KLA.

Those killed in the attack were Ivan Radevic, 25, (born in 1972), Ivan Obradovic, 24, (1973), Dragan Trifovic, 17, (1980), and Vukosav Gvozdenovic, 18, (1980). Another two victims, Svetislav Ristic, 17, (1981) and Zoran Stanojevic, 17, (1981), died in the hospital from their wounds. Vladan Loncarevic, 17, (1981) and Mirsad Sabovic, 36, (1962) were seriously wounded. Nikola Rajovic, 18, (1980) was slightly wounded. This was a planned and organized terrorist attack that targeted Kosovo Serb civilians, most of them youths in their teens.

Four of the murdered were in their teens, three were 17, one was 18. The oldest victim was 25, Ivan Radevic, who was the first one killed. His father Bogdan was abducted by the KLA on June 24, 1999, after U.S. and NATO troops ocupied the Serbian province, and is presumed dead. His mother Milena was attacked in her house in Pec by the KLA and was forced to flee to save her life. She witnessed the burning of the Serbian section of Pec, Brezenica, as the KLA secessionists burned all the Serbian houses after NATO and U.S. troops occupied the Serbian province.

Milena, the mother of Ivan, recalled the attack in the Panda Cafe in Pec:

“The attackers were masked in black. An innocent conversation of children, young men was stopped and brought to an end forever by a burst of fiery death. The first one to fall was my Ivan, my first-born. He had no possibility to defend himself. The Albanian terrorists have shown that they fight like cowards. A crime against God was committed. Cowards and murderers, blinded by the idea of racism and Nazism, and by a desire for an ethnically clean Kosovo. … They killed our children. I couldn’t accept and I didn’t want to accept that cruel tragedy that my Ivan is now gone. My first-born, my joy. I knew that the moment of misfortune was there beside me. The beast was looking for human flesh and blood. The dogs of war. It was a night when it was not rain that was coming down, but heads and tears. Everybody was losing that night. I lost my Ivan and five more mothers lost their sons. I couldn’t escape the cruel reality. I went dumb-founded from pain. Wounded.

“With a bleeding heart. I didn’t feel any pain when I kept hitting my chests and my head.”

An estimated 10,000 Kosovo Serbs from throughout Kosovo and Metohija attended the funerals for the six youths murdered by the KLA. The funeral ceremony took place on Hero Square on Wednesday, December 16, 1998, in the town center of Pec, the third largest city in the Kosovo province, with Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Pavle and Kosovo Orthodox priests conducting the funeral mass. Flags were at half-mast.

The bodies of the Kosovo Serbs in the Pec Panda Cafe.

The horrific mass murders did much to galvanize public opinion in Yugoslavia and Serbia against the Albanian separatists and secessionists in Kosovo. This crime was covered by the U.S. and Western media, but it was dismissed and relegated to insigificance. The murderers were “unknown assailants”. Thus, there was no one who was responsible for the murders. It was merely a tragedy. No conclusions or judgments about the Albanian terrorist and separatist war could be drawn from the mass murders. They were random acts of violence. The perpetrators, the mass murderers, were unknown. Move on. Nothing was done by the U.S. or NATO to condemn or sanction its proxies and allies, the KLA. U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke condemned the KLA mass murders of Kosovo Serbs as “appalling beyond words”, but he was careful to condemn the attack itself, and not the culprits, not the murderers, who were suspected to be KLA gunmen. Who else would have such a genocidal motive? But nothing was done. No actions were taken.

Milena described the funeral for the victims:

“It was for the last time that I was kissing his lifeless and motionless body. I spoke to him, certain that he can hear me and understand.

“Why? Why? Why did I lose you my son, Ivan?

“I was weak. I prayed to God: ‘Don’t give me a burden which is heavier that I can bear.’ You know my heart, my grief, my sorrow…

“Pec was enwrapped in black.”

She took part in the funeral procession to the Pec cemetery:

“As our hearts were breaking apart, on that day at 2 p.m., a long black procession of Pec’s youth and the citizens of Pec and other places in Kosovo and Metohija headed from the Hero Square in Pec towards the town’s cemetery. Ivan was bid the last farewell by his father and me, his brother Djordje and sister Bojana, and his wife Nada, as well as by the family, friends, pals and other citizens of Pec with the prayer: ‘Receive, Lord, the innocent that get killed, their pure arms are lifted towards you, they die for your glory.’ The holy Kosovo soil received them in its warm bosom. The murder of the young men in Pec represented a crime towards a whole nation. The crime went on. Terrorist gangs did not stop with their attacks on the army, police and ordinary citizens.”

She recalled that these crimes culminated in the NATO bombing of Kosovo and Yugoslavia in 1999:

“And then, on 24th March, 1999, NATO aviation started with its aggression on the FRY and kept destroying everything that was on the ground. People, houses, animals, forests, cemeteries. The dead are dying again, they are killed by the dogs of war. And these assist the criminals to keep abducting, killing, torturing, abusing and raping from young girls to old women, everything that is Serbian.”

She comparde the mass murder of the teen victims at Pec by Albanian Muslims to the mass murder of Serbian schoolchildren at Kragujevac in 1941 when German troops executed them in retaliation for guerrilla attacks:

“In the close proximity of the Pec Patriarchate and the patriarchate’s mulberry tree which was planted more than 750 years ago by Saint Sava, there was the venue of yet another bloody fairy-tale, the site where another Sumarice took place. They used to spend their youthful days together, with laughter and songs, just as it was on that dreadful night, on Monday, when at their favorite meeting-place, cafe ‘Panda,’ cold steel bullets tore apart their young bodies and disfigured their tender juvenile faces. With a manner of cowards and assassins, blinded and poisoned by the insane idea of racism and Nazism for ethnically clean Kosovo and Metohija, a terrorist Albanian hand killed them perfidiously from the dark.”

The KLA strategy, according to Jane’s Defense, was: “The assassination of Serb officials and civilians from Kosovo’s Serb minority. This included sniper attacks, Serbs dragged from their vehicles and beaten, together with pressure on them to leave their
homes.” Albanian Muslim separatists had declared Kosovo independent in 1991 but only Albania recognized them. The separatist conflcit that began in 1998 had a two-fold purpose: 1) to engage in murders and terrorist attacks to provoke the Yugoslav government to react to induce U.S. and NATO military intervention against Yugoslavia; and, 2) to kill, intimidate, and expel the Kosovo Serb population to create a de facto ethnically pure Albanian Muslim statelet.

What was the objective of the KLA separatist? According to the report of the U.S. Committee for Refugees as reported in Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime by Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer (Routledge, 2004): “Kosovo Liberation Army … attacks aimed at trying to ‘cleanse’ Kosovo of its ethnic Serb population.” The genocidal policy of the KLA secessionists was obvious and known as early as 1996. Remarkably, the Kosovo Serb victims were ignored in order to manufacture a propaganda construct of Kosovo Albanian Muslims as victims. The UNHCR estimated that 55,000 refugees from Kosovo had fled to Montenegro and Central Serbia during the conflict, most of whom were Kosovo Serbs: “Over 90 mixed villages in Kosovo have now been emptied of Serb inhabitants and other Serbs continue leaving, either to be displaced in other parts of Kosovo or fleeing into central Serbia.”

The funeral procession for the six murdered Kosovo Serbs in Pec, top. The family of Ivan Radevic, 25, mourns at his funeral, below.

At the Hague war crimes tribunal on April 27, 2005, Slobodan Milosevic introduced photographs of the murders and explained their relevance in his questiioning of witness Zvonko Gvozdenovic, the father of Vukosav, one of those killed:

“It does have probative value and weight, Mr. Robinson, in order to show the extent of and brutality and savage conduct exhibited by somebody who burst in and killed the children. And if the father sitting here does not object to this being placed on the ELMO, then I don’t see who else should be objecting. Let the witness decide. If the witness says that it should not be placed on the ELMO, I will agree with that decision.”

He asked Zvonko Gvozdenovic:

“Q. Please could you describe what happened on the 14th of December, 1998.

A. On the 14th of December, 1998, a terrible unheard-of crime was committed, unheard of in the 20th century. I must say that even the ETA and IRA, major terrorist organisations in the world, never did any such thing. Where there were children involved, there were no terrorist attacks anywhere in the world, but in Kosovo, in the — on the 14th of December, this was a crime that can only be compared to the Smerica [phoen] [Sumarice, Kragujevac] crime from the Second World War in Kragujevac. These were bandits. No army would do that, not even the KLA as we call them now.

Q. You are now talking about what happened in Pec where your son was killed.

A. Yes. Yes.
…
Q. How many young boys were killed then?

A. Six boys were killed then. My son Vukosav Gvozdenovic, my Kum Svetislav Ristic, Ivan Radevic, Dragan Trifunovic, Zoran Stanojevic, and the young boy Ivan Lazovic only 14 and a half years old. I must mention Vlado Loncarevic who was wounded then and who is still suffering severe consequences of that, and Mirsad Sabovic, the owner of the cafe, who was wounded in the foot.
…
Q. After the event, did you go regularly to the graveyard where your son and his friends are buried?

A. Yes. Two years later, I went to the graveyard.

Q. You went there two years later. Why did you wait for two years?

A. Well, that’s completely obvious. We even went to see Mr. Gelbard, asking him to enable us to visit this cemetery. He promised us he would. However, for some unknown reasons, Mr. Gelbard never contacted us in order to help us go to the cemetery.

Q. So it was only two years later that you managed to go to the cemetery?

A. Yes.

Q. When did that take place?

A. That was in 2002. And I have to tell you that when we arrived, we found a terrible site.

Q. You mean you went to the cemetery where all of these young men were buried?

A. This is the Orthodox cemetery in Pec.

Q. And what did you find there?

A. We found a terrible sight there at the cemetery. Toppled tombstones, Zoki Stanojevic’s tombstone and Janko Bradovic’s [phoen] tombstones were destroyed. We managed to raise again one tombstone and the other we didn’t manage. The crosses were broken. You can see a cross in one of the pictures. When we went there after the funeral in 2002, there were no crosses or anything there.

Q. All right. You said that this can be seen on the photographs. There is no need to translate that. That’s in tab 6.

A. It seems that everything needs to be translated for them.

Q. What you’re trying to say is that when you arrived two years later, the cemetery was destroyed; the tombstones, the crosses, everything was damaged.

A. Yes, that’s right. I have to tell you that the Italian soldiers who were there as security escorts and who videotaped all of this, they were crying. The Italians videotaped all of this.

Q. And you were forced to go to the cemetery under the protection of Italian security troops.

A. Yes, and they treated us very fairly.

Q. Did anybody give you an explanation for that, how it was possible that something like that happened?

A. Well, we don’t need really an explanation. Nobody guarded the cemetery. When they were able to kill these children, why wouldn’t they be able to destroy the tombstones? Nothing is sacred to them, nothing that is Serbian. You know yourself that in 1981, they set on fire the Pec patriarchate, and that was the first sign.

Q. Mr. Gvozdenovic, based on what you know, after the KFOR arrived, were any other Serbian children killed in Kosovo and Metohija?

A. Yes, that happened in Gorazdevac.

Q. Gorazdevac is a village that you know well?

A. Yes, quite well.

Q. When did that happen in Gorazdevac?

A. I think — I’m not sure any more because there were so many events, that I couldn’t really follow in view of all my problems.

Q. Mr. Gvozdenovic, you were in the village of Bijelo Polje?

A. Yes.

Q. What happened in Bijelo Polje?

A. In that village, when we arrived the first time there, they already started building houses for the Serbs who were supposed to be returning there. I have to tell you that these people are working under very difficult circumstances. However, they are very enthusiastic. What happened was terrible, and that happened on the 17th of March, and everything that they had built was torched, destroyed. And unfortunately, the last time I was there in the cemetery in Pec, on a religious holiday, I saw that these people are exhausted. I really have no words to describe it. The circumstances they live under are so difficult. They’re practically living in a ghetto.

Q. Can Serbs return now to that area?

A. Well, let me give you my opinion. This is my personal opinion, nobody else’s. It would be very difficult for them to return.”

Who was responsible for the murders? A December 17, 1998 communique from the KLA General Staff headquarters blamed the murders on the Serbs themselves, that the Serbs were murdered by Serbs: “we are convinced that the killings were conducted by the Serb secret police.”

Richard Holbrooke meeting with KLA separatist leader Lum Haxhiu in Junik, Kosovo, June 24, 1998.

Ivica Dacic, the spokesman of Serbia’s ruling Serbian Socialist Party, quoted in Tanjug, stated: “Large guilt in instigating the terrorism [is borne by] … the extreme part of the international community which through its open support to Albanian terroristic gangs in Kosovo and Metohij and their political parties becomes a direct accomplice in the terroristic acts.”

Serbia’s Vice Premier and the leader of the Serbian Radical Party Vojislav Seselj, quoted in Tanjug, “accused today the USA and ‘their allies’ of guilt and responsibility for the crime that took place in Pec. In the press conferecne, Seselj said the crime wouldn’t have happened if NATO hadn’t appeared as the direct protector of the terrorists.”

The Yugoslav daily Borba, as reported by the AP, “in a sharply
worded commentary, called on the international verifiers and US envoys to leave Kosovo, calling them ‘direct instigators and helpers of the crimes committed by Albanian terrorists.’ ”

The AP reported that “a crowd of 5,000 assembled in the western city of Pec” for the funeral held on Wednesday, December 16, 1998, quoting the principal of the high school the victims attended as saying that the Kosovo Serb youths were ” ‘killed for the simple reason of being Serbs.’ He concluded with a demand that the state ‘punish the perpetrators and do away with Albanian terrorism forever.’ ”

The AP quoted a top government body for Kosovo which called the killings “the most monstrous crime in the series of assaults by Albanian terrorist gangs.”

The Pec mass murderes occurred in the context of the KLA terrorist and secessionist war in Kosovo. U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and Milosevic had negotiated a cease-fire signed on October 16, 1998. The KLA violated this cease-fire, however, by smuggling troops and weapons into Kosovo from bases in northern Albania. Roland Keith, a field office director of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, noted the egregious and blatant KLA violations of the agreement: “The situation was clearly that KLA provocations, as personally witnessed in ambushes of security patrols which inflicted fatal and other casualties, were clear violations of the previous October’s agreement [and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1199].” Reporters and KLA troops themselves had revealed that U.S. and NATO were training and supplying the KLA secssionists at bases in Albania as early as 1996, two years before the outbreak of the conflict in Kosovo.

The Pec mass murders were seen as retaliation and as a reprisal for the deaths of 36 KLA separatists who were killed in a gunfight with Yugoslav forces while attempting to come into Kosovo from supply and military bases in Albania. This was the putative motive for the mass murders in Pec. Reuters reported that on Monday, December 14, 1998, “Yugoslav troops killed 36 ethnic Albanian guerrillas near the Albanian border as they tried to cross into Kosovo with guns and supplies.” The Serbian Media Center reported that on December 14, 1998, the Albanian secessionists were killed in “clashes with the Yugoslav Army border guards, while trying to illegally cross from Albania to Yugoslavia early this morning between 2 to 7 AM, the Prizren municipal authorities confirmed to the Media Center.

“The Yugoslav Army border guards captured large quantities of modern weapons and military equipment, the armed Albanians tried to smuggle in to Yugoslavia. The killed and wounded, the same source claimed, wore masked uniforms with the insignia of the separatist ‘Kosovo Liberation Army.’ ”

Reuters on Tuesday cited a member of the Kosovo Verification Mission: “A total of 140 KLA members were coming over the border into Kosovo carrying weapons and equipment… They encountered a [Yugoslav army] sentry post and one was killed instantly, so then they turned back to return to Albania… But after they turned around, they were ambushed and 25 were shot and killed and were taken prisoner, including one woman… Our initial feelings are that this was a normal military operation… and not a set-up.”

The Washington Post described the corpses of the KLA separatists who had been killed in order to concoct some sort of Yugoslav atrocity or massacre of terrorists, a precursor of the Racak “massacre’ modus operandi: “Western officials who saw the bodies, or saw close-up photographs, said yesterday that many of the victims had been shot in the head or the face. To some officials, that suggested the victims were killed deliberately and at close range, and not in a battle; to others it bore the earmarks of a well-organized ambush by highly-trained Yugoslav Army sharpshooters. The latter view, a senior official said, is shared by most of the Western military experts who have studied the event. But the matter is not likely to be verified until the Yugoslav Army provides the Western experts access to seven group members who were captured near the site of the killings. ‘The prisoners are the key to everything,’ the official said. But Yugoslavia has not indicated it would provide such access.”

The Daily Telegraph of London noted that “the ambush is evidence that the KLA is continuing to build up its strength. It is also proof of the efficiency of the Serb troops sealing the border.” The violations of the Holbrooke-Milosevic cease-fire agreement showed that the KLA separatists were determined to continue the terrorist war in Kosovo until they induced the U.S. and NATO to intervene on their side.

And who was behind the KLA terrorism and mass murders in Kosovo? Sen. Joe Lieberman was quoted in The Washington Post, April 28, 1999: “[The] United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles … Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.” The KLA separatists and terrorists were always proxies and allies of the U.S.

The KLA began its terrorist war in 1996 with the bombing of refugee camps housing Serbian refugees from the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, expelled during the U.S.-organized campaign that ethnically cleased over 250,000 Krajina Serbs. There were reports that the CIA and the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) were training and supplying the KLA as early as 1996 in bases in Albania. When the KLA was changed from a terrorist organization to proxies and allies of the U.S. and NATO, British SAS teams, US Special Forces, and representatives from Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) were actively and openly training KLA fighters at bases in Albania as reported in the Daily Telegraph, April 18, 1999 and the Herald (Glasgow), March 27, 2001. The U.S. and Germany recruited Arab-Afghan mujahedeen mercenaries, financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, to train the KLA in guerrilla tactics. The Sunday Times reported that Fatos Klosi, the head of the Albanian intelligence service, as saying a network run by Saudi Arabian mujahedeen leader Ossama Bin Laden sent units to fight in the Serbian province of Kosovo. Bin Laden was reported to have visited Albania in 1994.

U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke met with two KLA separatist leaders on June 24, 1998 in the Kosovo town of Junik. AP writer Adam Brown noted that the controversial meeting resulted in “tacit recognition of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s growing strength.” Holbrooke’s solution was for the Yugoslav forces to “withdraw” to let the KLA separatists take over the territory and reinforce their positions with more troops and weapons smuggled in from bases in Albania. And this is exactly what happened after the cease-fire Holbrooke negotiated. Holbrooke only exacerbated the conflict.

What happened to the Kosovo Serb residents after U.S. and NATO troops occupued Kosovo? Milena Radevic recalled the events when her husband Bogdan was abducted by the KLA separatists:

“On 24th June, 1999, at 8 o’clock, two Albanians in civilian clothes, armed with pistols, came to the gate of our house. They wanted Bogdan to go out for some talk. I was overcome by fear. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and after ten minutes Bogdan came back in. I could see by his face that something was wrong. For the first time I felt fear in his speech. ‘We cannot stay in the house any longer,’ he said. They requested him to go for a permit to their headquarters or else we may not stay in the house, not even for 24 hours. They said that we would have to move out unless we obtain the permit or else they would kill us. ‘For, this is Albania ,’ they said. The NATO soldiers, that we had asked for help, didn’t want to protect us. Bogdan set off to go to the Albanian headquarters. We parted in silence and with our glances, feeling that we would never see each other again. He left without looking back. I followed him with my glance, with premonition and fear. Then he turned and I could see that he was crying. We’ve never seen each other again since then. All trace of him is gone since then. Later I found out, when I became a refugee, from the telling of witness Dragan Sekulovic from Pec, who moved in his car from Belo Polje near Pec, with four more passengers, that he saw Bogdan. ‘Luckily for us, but unfortunately for Bogdan, an armed and uniformed KLA group stopped Bogdan who was heading towards the centre of the town, they asked for his ID and then started to beat him,’ Dragan told me. Since that moment, all trace of Bogdan is lost.”

These are crimes without punishment. The murderers of the six unarmed victims in Pec were never apprehended. No one is searching for the Albanian mass murderers. They murdered both the son, Ivan, and the father, Bogdan, and expelled the mother Milena from Kosovo, destroying the Radevic family. No one was held responsible or accountable for the horrific crimes committed in Pec.

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Kosovo’s Disappeared

During and after the the Kosovo conflict in 1998-1999, the KLA abducted and kidnapped over 2,000 Kosovo civilians, Serbs, Roma, and Albanians that opposed the KLA, who were tortured and murdered. Ten years after the conflict, these 2,000 remain missing. Approximately 1,000 to 1,3000 Kosovo Serbs are missing and presumed dead. How did they die? UNMIK occupation forces have been reluctant to investigate these mass murders of Kosovo civilians. What happened to them? Evidence has emerged that the KLA ran a series of prison camps, in Kosovo and in Albania itself, where they tortured and murdered Kosovo Serbs, Roma, and Albanians. Moreover, Carla Del Ponte disclosed that the KLA had detention centers where they murdered Kosovo Serbs and harvested their organs. What happened to the 2,000 kidnapped and murdered, the missing, Kosovo’s disappeared?

The Kosovo conflict was always, first and foremost, about secession, taking land from another country criminally and making it your own, a land grab, a shifting of borders. Secession is illegal under the UN Charter and under international law. This is why it was never openly disclosed before or during the conflict. It was only revealed after the war. So the public had to be deceived and hoodwinked. The people had to be lied to. And this was done in so-called democracies of the West, the so-called free world. Because secession is inherently illegal, a crime, a smokescreen had to be devised. The people had to be told lies through the mass media network. Instead of secession, which was never mentioned, the masses in the U.S. and elsewhere were lied to, told that Albanians wanted greater rights. In fact, Albanians sought a Greater Albania, an illegal land grab based on ethnicity. The gullible were told that the Kosovo conflict was about human rights and “oppression”. But it was known that Kosovo Albanians enjoyed more rights and freedoms than any other minority in the world. They had their own university, their own Albanian language, their own Albanian-language newspapers, their own court system, their own educational system, and they controlled the police. Why was there a conflict in Kosovo then? The issue was that the Albanian population, largely Muslim, wanted to secede from Serbia and Yugoslavia. This is illegal under international law and the UN Charter. This necessitated the manufacturing of a propaganda war which pictured the Albanian Muslims as victims and the Yugoslav and Serbian governments and police as “oppressors”. Such a black and white scenario meant that crimes by the Albanian secessionists were downplayed, minimized, and even dismissed and ignored.

The KLA secessionists, first described by the U.S. government as terrorists, later became proxies and allies of the U.S. and of NATO. They went from terrorists to “freedom fighters” and a “liberation army”. Once they became a proxy army and shock troops for the U.S. and NATO, they could do no wrong and had a free hand. All was permitted during “a period of terror”.

The KLA secessionists took the green light to abduct, kidnap, torture, and murder Kosovo Serb civilians, but also Kosovo Roma, Gorani, and Albanians that opposed the KLA secessionist agenda. U.S., NATO, and UNMIK forces gave them the green light and go-ahead to terrorize and to murder Kosovo Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo. Why did the KLA secesionists murder Kosovo Serb, Roma, and Albanian civilians? This seems rather paradoxical if the goal of the uprising was human rights and greater freedoms. But this was never the goal or objective. The goal was always to create an independent Albanian state out of Kosovo. Secession was always the goal, although Albanians already had a national state of Albania. Kosovo would be a second Albanian state. Murdering and ethnically cleansing non-Albanians was always the goal because the KLA secessionists and their U.S. and Western backers wanted them to create an Albanian state, not a multi-ethnic state. So all non-Albanian Muslims had to disappear. And they did. The U.S., NATO, and UNMIK occupation forces made sure it happened.

American reporter Michael Montgomery investigated the disappearance of the over 2,000 missing in Kosovo. He noted that many Kosovo Serbs “simply vanished without a trace. There were no demands for ransom, no news of any kind.” He spoke of the camps where Kosovo Serbs were tortured and murdered: “I had met sources who spoke vaguely about secret camps in Albania where Kosovo Serbs, Albanians and Roma were interrogated, tortured and in most cases killed.” A former KLA secessionist disclosed information about the prison camps. Montgomery admitted that the goal of the KLA secessionists was independence and secession, not the U.S. propaganda line of greater human rights and oppression from the Slobodan Milosevic regime: “He had returned from a successful career abroad to join the KLA in its fight for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia.” Once the U.S. and NATO had occupied the Kosovo province, why lie anymore? Indeed, there was no further need for lies and deceptions. Secession was always the goal. Of course, that we as citizens of democracies had been brainwashed and treated like cattle did not even enter into the equation. Why did our media and government lie to us? The ends justified the means undoubtedly for American journalists like Michael Montgomery. The truth can now be revealed ten years after the conflict. But on the positive side, we have engineered an illegal secession and created a second Albanian Muslim state in Europe, an illegal entity only maintained by U.S. and NATO occupation troops, by military force alone. This criminal entity, propped up by force, by a foreign power, the U.S., will remain a focal point of instability and future conflict. It will remain a time bomb and powder keg.

In the April 10, 2009 BBC story “Horrors of KLA Prison Camps Revealed” on the prison camps by Nick Thorpe he stated that Kosovo is a part of Serbia which Serbs “regard as their own”. Hold on a second. We need a reality check. Is the legal status of Kosovo up in the air? Kosovo is a part of Serbia under the UN and under international laws. This is a subtle brainwashing and propaganda trick. The BBC journalist seeks to brainwash the listener or viewer into thinking that Serbs “regard” Kosovo a part of Serbia when, in fact, Kosovo is a part of Serbia under international law and the UN. Why this subtle brainwashing? Are we pigs or human beings? Why is he lying to us? This is, in reality, the nature of journalism and news reporting in the U.S. and Western countries, a delusional system of subtle mind control, or, to put it another way, a system of persuasion and suggestion.

His KLA informant “had become haunted by the treatment of civilians he had seen at a KLA prison camp.” He needed to disclose the truth. He admitted that KLA commanders had ordered the abuses and murders and had tolerated them. These alleged abductions and murders of Kosovo Serb civilians were war crimes. He explained that many of the Kosovo Serbs disappeared: “He said the civilians were Serbs and Roma seized by KLA soldiers and were being hidden away from Nato troops. The source believes the captives were sent across the border to Albania and killed.” A total of eight former KLA secessionists gave information on the prison camps. Another KLA witness stated: “Yet another source spoke of driving trucks packed with shackled prisoners – mainly Serbian civilians from Kosovo – to secret locations in Albania where they were eventually killed.”

In the BBC report, Brankica Antic, a Kosovo Serb, described how her husband Zlatko was kidnapped by the KLA in 1999 after NATO occupied the Serbian province and has been missing since then. His body has never been recovered. He is presumed to have been murdered by the KLA under the auspices of U.S. and NATO occupation troops.

In the Albanian towns of Kukes and Tropoje, Carla Del Ponte revealed that over 300 Kosovo Serb civilians were transported using trucks by KLA forces where their organs were harvested. Kidneys were removed from Kosovo Serbs and taken to the airport to be transpoted to Turkey. This was all done after NATO and U.S. troops occupied Kosovo. There was a house, the infamous “yellow house”, in the Albanian town of Burrel where organs were harvested from kidnapped Kosovo Serb civilians. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has stated that these allegations needed to be investigated and regarded the allegattions as “serious and credible”. Del Ponte revealed that Kosovo Serb civilians “were stripped of their organs in Kosovo war” by the KLA and that the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague has evidence of these crimes.

The UN war crimes tribunal has, however, never investigated these alleged war crimes. Jose Pablo Baraybar of the UN Office of Missing Persons in Kosovo stated that evidence of these crimes that the UN tribunal possessed was destroyed. Montgomery had investigated evidence of these war crimes in February, 2004. UN war crimes prosecutors, however, took no action and filed no charges. Nick Thorpe of the BBC explained that this was done because “stability seemed more important than justice.”

Sian Jones, a researcher for Amnesty International (AI) told the BBC that the UN had abandoned its legal obligations and duties: “To see a UN body failing to abide by the international standards to which it holds its member states accountable is really quite shocking. And, more than that, the impact on the families who want to know the fate of their family members, they want to know where their bodies are, they want to know what happened to them.”

“What we have is a massive failure to protect members of the minority communities from human rights abuses whilst that very international community was supposed to be there to protect them.”

One secret KLA prison camp was in Kukes in northeastern Albania, which was an important and key supply base for the KLA secessionists who used the base to smuggle weapons and fighters into Kosovo.

The Kosovo Serb civilians were tortured before they were murdered: “He recalled hearing two of the captives begging to be shot rather than tortured and ‘cut into pieces’.” He noted that the KLA goal was to target Kosovo Serb civilians: “‘I was sick. I was just waiting for it to end,’ the source told me. ‘It was hard. I thought we were fighting a war [of liberation] but this was something completely different.’” Montgomery stated that “it was about killings, it was about greed”. Montgomery noted that these KLA war crimes that approached genocide were suppressed and covered-up in the U.S. and Western media: “A long silence over the atrocities has held strong throughout Kosovo.” Kosovo Serbs continue to be persecuted based on their ethnicity and religion in Kosovo along with other non-Albanians but the egregious human rights violations have not received any attention in the U.S. or other Western countries.

Why was there no interest in investigating and punishing these war crimes in Kosovo? Why was Michael Montgomery and the BBC revealing them ten years after the conflict? The reason was because these facts were now irrelevant and meaningless. Thus, they could safely be disclosed. As Montgomery himself noted, once secession, once independence had been achieved for the Serbian province and it was now an Albanian Muslim state, a new, second Albanian nation, “Europe’s most controversion state”, achieved through criminality and aggression, revealing the information could do no harm or be of any value to anyone.

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Blowback: Afghanistan and Bosnia

As the U.S. and NATO casualties rise from the war in Afghanistan, with 2010 being the deadliest year of the nine-year war for the U.S., the question needs to be asked of how we got involved in that interminable and unwinnable conflict? The Afghan war has been dubbed Barack Obama’s War but its origins go back much earlier. Is the U.S. military disaster in Afghanistan an instance of blowback?

What is the standard definition of “blowback”? The U.S. intervenes illegally in a volatile and unstable scenario and over time the consequences of that criminality come back to reek havoc on U.S. domestic and foreign policy. That definition is as good as any.

The U.S. overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953 in a CIA-engineered “regime change”. He was democratically elected but he threatened to nationalize British Petroleum (BP) and potential U.S. oil firms in Iran. Twenty five years later, the inevitable result was the Iranian Revolution whose militants directly blamed the U.S. and who dub the U.S. “the Great Satan”.

Now, that is classic blowback, the textbook definition. We created that outcome. Yet U.S. policymakers ignore and suppress this obvious cause. Instead, they manufacture delusional explanations, fabrications, and rationalizations. These policy wonks argue that Iran is sui generis and that their animus at the U.S. is motivated by their hatred for our freedom and democracy.

The U.S. armed and created the mujahedeen Freedom Fighters in Afghanistan. The U.S. made them viable. Ossama bin Laden was one of those mujahedeen Charlie Wilson empowered. Twenty years later, these Islamic Freedom Fighters created by Ronald Reagan are flying planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Centers. The U.S. also helped these Arab-Afghan mujahedeen illegally enter Bosnia to fight for the Muslim Army there during the 1992-1995 civil war.

Charlie Wilson was a major supporter of U.S. involvement in the Bosnian civil war on the side of the Bosnian Muslim faction. Wilson toured the former Yugoslavia for five days in January, 1993. When he ruturned to the U.S., he recommended to the Bill Clinton Administration that the UN imposed arms embargo be illegally and unilaterally lifted for the Bosnian Muslim armed forces. He rationalized this illegal action as follows: “This is good versus evil and, if we do not want to Americanize this, then what do we want to Americanize? We have to stand for something.” Bosnia became another 1980s Afghanistan with the Bosnian Muslim forces in the role of the Arab-Afghan mujahedeen. Charlie Wilson urged the U.S. government to remake the Bosnian civil war into another Afghanistan.

Assistant Director of the CIA, Richard J. Kerr, right, meeting with mujahedeen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Islamabad, Pakistan in 1988.

In Afghanistan, according to Peter Bergen in Holy War Inc. (Free Press, 2001), most of the U.S. aid to the Arab-Afghan mujahedeen during Operation Cyclone went to Islamic militant Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a senior Taliban leader who supported and backed Al-Qaeda. In other words, most of the aid went to the Taliban and, through them, to Ossama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. On February 19, 2003, the U.S. State Department designated Hekmatyar as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”. Hekmatyar was transmogrified from “freedom fighter” to “terrorist”.

And what were the consequences of this illegal U.S. support for the Bosnian Muuslim faction?

When Arab-Afghan mujahedeen, now dubbed Al-Qaeda, blew up the WTC, these mujahedeen had Bosnian Muslim pasports that Alija Izetbegovic issued to them and Bosnian military experience as veterans of the Bosnian conflict.

U.S.-backed Bosnian Muslim mujahedeen on parade in Zenica, Bosnia in 1995.

Now this is an instance of classic blowback. What part of this is so difficult to understand?

Of course, we can speculate that these attacks would have occurred even if the Charlie Wilsons of the world had not created them. But this is to be in denial and delusional.

Al-Qaeda needed the infrastructure, the funding, the planning, the training, the logistical knowledge, the financial network that the U.S. and CIA provided. After all, the U.S. recruited Ossama bin Laden from Saudi Arabia. This takes a massive logistical support system that only the U.S. government and CIA could provide. Moreover, the Al-Qaeda group needed the Taliban regime in Kabul to train and organize and to use as a base of operations. The U.S., in essence, created the Taliban and put it in power. We cheered and gloated when the Taliban hung the secular leaders. We had won in Afghanistan.

Moreover, the Bosnia experience made Al-Qaeda global and gave them the skill and confidence to pull off 9/11. It was the U.S. that empowered Al-Qaeda in Bosnia. So the U.S. did everything to create the scenario for 9/11. It is classic blowback.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan meeting with Arab-Afghan mujahedeen commanders at the White House in 1985.

Critics adduce that the U.S. support of the mujahedeen led directly to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The illegal means justified the laudable ends.

But this is just a myth concocted to rationalize our support of Muslim cutthroats who were cutting the throats of Christians. This is a rationalization with no proof.

Now what is the proof that U.S. support of the mujahedeen resulted in the collapse of the USSR? The mujahedeen shot down Russian helicopters with U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles and killed Orthodox Christians. But the Soviet troops killed mujahedeen insurgents and prevented the emergence of a radical Islamic regime such as the U.S.-backed Taliban. The secenario is similar to the one in Afghanistan in 2010. Like the Soviet Union, the U.S. is attempting to secure a moderate Islamic regime in Kabul.

That fallacious argument also goes against common sense and human nature. War unites a nation and makes it stronger and more unified. Just look at America now after 9/11. CIA support for the mujahedeen kept the USSR together and proved to everyone that the U.S./CIA danger to Russia was real. It united the USSR, just like 9/11 did with us.

A U.S.-backed Arab-Afghan mujahedeen, left, before killing a Bosnian Serb POW in Bosnia, 1995.

Finally, the U.S. took a cynical posture about intervention. Kill them all and let Allah sort them out. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.

But most of those Soviet soldiers the CIA-trained mujahedeen were killing were Orthodox Christians as were most of the Bosnian Serb troops. They were, however, the wrong kinds of Christians, Orthodox or Eastern Christians. U.S. aid was used to kill Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarus Orthodox Christians and Bosnian Serb Orthodox Christians. The “atheist” label was something U.S. propaganda concocted.

Was U.S. policy right in creating the Islamic mujahedeen to kill Orthodox Christians?

Also, wonks say this was the Russian Vietnam. But that is pure absurdity and nonsense.

The CIA was on the Soviet border threatening to unleash Ossama bin Laden and his mujahedeen cutthroats against the USSR. That would be like the KGB training Mexican Freedom Fighters on the border of Texas to come in and kill Gringos and take back Tejas which the Gringo criminally seized in 1845. Now, that is a no brainer. You intervene. No American would allow that to happen. But that is what the CIA was doing in Afghanistan, using and exploiting Islam to take back those Soviet republics that were Muslim.

Vietnam was an ideologically-driven military adventure, similar to the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, 6,000 miles away that was based on the “domino theory”. We put in a dictator even though the majority saw him as a U.S. stooge and puppet. There was no support for the U.S. occupation whatsoever. There was no democracy or freedom in the U.S.-created puppet state of South Vietnam. Everyone wanted the U.S. out of there.

Vietnam was not on the border with California. It was not a threat to the U.S. Neither was Iraq in 2003.

But the claim that our support of the mujahedeen brought down the USSR is unplausible because it goes against reason and human nature. War unites us. Threats create unity. George W. Bush knew that well. So did Adolf Hitler.

This is a “big lie” created by those who created Ossama bin Laden and the mujahedeen, such as Charlie Wilson, who have a guilt complex for supporting Muslims who in turn killed Christians. But Wilson claimed that it was, in effect, “genocide” that motivated good old Charlie Wilson. Seeing all those Muslim refugees ignited his religious benevolence. He was a humanitarian.

U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson, left, meeting with mujahedeen near the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, circa 1987.

But Wilson’s support of right-wing dictator Anastasio Somosa in Nicaragua showed what actually motivated his foreign policy. Wilson sought to prop up the Somosa dictatorship and to supply the dictator with a CIA-trained army of 1,000 men, CIA “freedom fighters”, if he would provide $100 million. Greed and self-aggrandizement were always the motives. Feeding a cocaine addiction was another motive.

As a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense in 1980, he was able to doub;le the ai to the mujahedeen. In 1983, he was able to pump an additional $40 million to the mujahedeen while later he was able to get $300 million more in aid.

It was a policy that was criminal and immoral. And it united the USSR and kept it together. And it created Ossama bin Laden and led to 9/11. It created global terrorism as we know it now.

That is what the supporters of the Arab-Afghan mujahedeen in Afganistan and in Bosnia, such as Charlie Wilson, are in denial about. You can make as many movies as you want, but that does not change the facts.

U.S. illegal support for the mujahedeen in Afghanistan did not bring down the Soviet Union by creating Ossama bin Laden and his forces. The U.S. only engaged in an immoral and criminal act that resulted in 9/11, when the U.S. funded and trained mujahedeen Freedom Fighters killed approximately 3,000 Americans.

The truth is not as pretty as lies. So delusions and deceptions continue. Charlie Wilson is even transmogrified into a hero by Hollywood in the biopic Charlie Wilson’s War (2007).

“I was duped in the Nineties by the sob story, endlessly portrayed on the ‘news’ and even in Hollywood movies, that the Muslims were a persecuted minority being slaughtered by fascistic Serbs.”

This begs the question: By whom? Who duped you? Who brainwashed you?

The answer is the U.S. government and the U.S. media. The U.S.-manufactured propaganda war reached ludicrous and improbable levels. Remember the Nazi Concentration Camps the Serbs were running in Bosnia? The mass rapes? The rape motels? The rape camps? The Holocaust-scale “genocide”?

It was the U.S. government that created the Bosnian War in the first place. The U.S. told the Bosnian Muslims to discount the Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats and go ahead and create a Muslim State in Europe. The U.S. told Alija Izetbegovic, a convicted felon and a rabid Muslim ultranationalist, to reject the Lisbon Agreement between the Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims and to declare a Muslim state. He was told by U.S. ambassador Warren Zimmermann that he need not worry. The U.S. media and military would help him out. That is when the war started.

The parties had earlier agreed at Lisbon to preserve the system the Communists created to allow each of the three groups in Bosnia to have a say in the government. The U.S. rejected this plan because it was a compromise. The U.S. told Alija Izetbegovic: Muslims are the largest group in Bosnia, but not the majority. Do what you want. Do not negotiate or compromise with the Bosnian Serbs and Croats. Then the civil war broke out.

But the U.S. was 100% behind this carnage and responsible or culpable for it.

The same is true with Kosovo. Remember how the Albanian Muslims were supposed to be seeking only greater rights and freedoms. Wrong. They were seeking an Albanian state, which is illegal under the UN and international law.

The way the U.S. got around this illegality was by concocting a genocide scenario.

Genocide trumps illegality. We can bomb you and take over your country if we can claim that you are committing geocide. Of course, there was no genocide. But once the U.S. created an Albanian Kosovo state, who cared?

Just like in Iraq. Once the US hung Saddam Hussein and took over the country and killed an allegedly one million Iraqis, who cared that Bush lied about the WMDs? Who cared that Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks? The mission was accomplished. Move on to the next “liberation”.

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Communist Subversion From Within: Linn Farish and the Draza Mihailovich Case

During World War II, the OSS liaison officer to Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Partisans was American agent Major Linn “Slim” Farish. Farish’s accounts helped decisively to switch Allied support away from Draza Mihailovich and to Tito. But who was Linn Farish, known as “Lawrence of Yugoslavia”, and how credible were his reports? New evidence from the Venona decrypts reveals that he may have been an agent allegedly working for Soviet intelligence. British Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean of the Special Air Services (SAS), a special forces unit of the British Army, referred to him in Eastern Approaches (1949) as “my American chief of staff”. Was Linn Farish, like James Klugmann, a committed Communist in SOE in Cairo, a suspected KGB agent with possible links to the Cambridge Five, an instance of Communist subversion from within? Was Farish merely manipulated and duped by the Communists or was he a Communist or Soviet agent himself?

Linn Markley Farish was born on October 3, 1901 in Rumsey, Yolo County, California. He died on September 11, 1944 on a mission in Yugoslavia in a plane crash over Greece.

He attended Stanford University in California where he played football and rugby, majoring in geology. He was a member of the U.S. Olympic team which won a gold medal in rugby at the 1924 Olympic Summer Games in Paris, the Games of the VIII Olympiad. By profession he was a geologist and petroleum consultant. Before the U.S. entry into World War II, he joined the Canadian Army, serving in Iran with the Royal Engineers. He was later a member of a British commando unit. As an engineer and pilot, Major Farish was sent into Yugoslavia as a secret agent as part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, replacing U.S. Captain Melvin Benson. The OSS was the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was selected as the OSS representative to the SOE mission to Tito. His American colleague Colonel Albert Seitz, an engineer, was chosen as the OSS representative to the guerrilla forces of General Draza Mihailovich. His role was to map out landing strips for U.S. aircraft to rescue downed U.S. airmen. He was part of several rescue operations, rescuing hundreds of airmen shot down over Yugoslavia. He spent three 90-day periods in Yugoslavia, parachuting into territory controlled by the Communist guerrillas under Josip Broz Tito in Bosnia. He was serving with Company B, 2677th Regiment, OSS, when he left Yugoslavia for the last time on June 16, 1944. Killed on his third mission in 1944, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

The Venona decrypts were part of a clandestine joint intelligence operation between the US and UK intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union during World War II. Venona was created in 1943 by Carter W. Clarke, the deputy chief of U.S. Military Intelligence or G-2. Code breakers of the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service analyzed intercepted Soviet intelligence messages. Most of the messages were intercepted between 1943-1945. The list of Americans with possible ties to Soviet intelligence based on the Venona decrypts included not only Linn Farish, the senior OSS liaison officer with Tito’s Communist and Soviet-backed Partisans, but also Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, FDR adviser Harry Hopkins, Duncan C. Lee, William Donovan’s assistant who had the Soviet code name “Koch”, and Robert G. Minor, Office of Strategic Services, Belgrade. Minor was one of the twenty suspected members of OSS with possible ties to Soviet intelligence.

After the Venona decrypts were published, new information about Linn Farish emerged. In these records, Farish is identified under the code name “Atilla”, a KGB contact. He is shown meeting with an unnamed Soviet controller named “Khazar”. He also met with a high-ranking member of the Yugoslav Communist hierarchy named “KOLO”. KOLO was Sava Kosanovic, who was the Yugoslav Ambassador to the U.S. from 1946-1950 under the Tito Communist regime. In the decrypts, Kosanovic is shown receiving instructions from Pavel Fitin, the KGB chief. In 1946, the FBI had Kosanovic under surveillance when he met with Soviet agent Nathan Silvermaster, who was part of the Elizabeth Bentley espionage ring.

Farish’s report of October 29, 1943 based on his six-week stay with the Communist Partisans in Bosnia was rushed to FDR before the Teheran conference. His memo was decisive in the switch of Allied support to Tito. Farish reported that “the Partisans have always fought the Germans and are doing so now….They are a more potent striking force at this time than they have been before….Their present strength is given as 180,000 men.” He alleged: “Whereas the Partisans have fought steadfastly against the Axis occupying forces, other Yugoslav groups have not done so … Mihailovich ordered his Chetniks to attack the Partisan forces … the Chetnik forces have been fighting with the Germans and Italians against the Partisans.” He described the Partisans as a “free community” in which persons “of any religion or political belief can express an opinion”, comparing their movement to the American revolution: “It was in such an environment and under similar conditions that the beginnings of the United States were established.”

In a June 24, 2010 interview with author Stanton Evans about Communist and Marxist subversion within the United States during World War II, Glenn Beck discussed the Draza Mihailovich case. Beck discussed the Venona papers and how a smear campaign can be used to discredit anyone. Beck noted: “This is a system and they have done it to people in that entire timeline there.” Evans responded: “You’re so right. It’s happened both domestically and in foreign policy. Any anti-Communist leaders like Mihailovich in Yugoslavia, Chiang Kai-Shek in China, and others were de-legitimized by this very same technique. A Soviet agent named James Klugmann was responsible for sending back to Churchill this information that Mihailovich, who was the anti-Communist in Yugoslavia, was no good, he was collaborating with the Nazis and only Tito was fighting against the Nazis. Completely false. Churchill cut off Mihailovich. They gave all their aid to Tito. Yugoslavia goes Communist. A Soviet agent named Solomon Adler sitting in Chungking, China, 1944, sending back similar reports about Chiang Kai-Shek. Chiang Kai-Shek is not fighting the Japanese. He’s a collaborator. Only the Communists are fighting the Japanese. Well, then cut off Chiang Kai-Shek. Give the aid to the Communists. China falls to the Communists. It’s a pattern.”

Josip Broz Tito with Joseph Stalin in Moscow, April 11, 1945, to sign an agreement of cooperation and friendship with the Soviet Union, the principal backer of his regime.

Farish later grew suspicious of British reports in praise of Tito. He insisted on having American radio operators. Arthur Jibilian was one of the radiomen who accompanied Farish. In his final report filed on June 28, 1944, in Bari, Italy, Farish would file a more accurate, objective, realistic, and skeptical report on the situation in Yugoslavia. He indicated that his first report was based on British disinformation and Communist Partisan propaganda. He observed that “each side places the blame on the other.” He concluded: “It appears to me that there are indications in the past few months that there has been less emphasis placed on the fight against the enemy and more preparation for the political struggle to follow the ending of the war.”

In a June 16, 1952 letter in Life magazine, “Case for the Chetniks”, David Martin explained how Farish had retracted his earlier claims about Tito:

The total evidence from a score of liaison officers and 600 rescued Allied airmen makes nonsense of the charges of collaboration. Major Linn Farish, senior American assigned to Tito’s headquarters in 1944, was at first inclined to believe the charges against the Chetniks; indeed it was he who brought out the first Partisan ”documentation” against Mihajlovich. But after further experience in Yugoslavia he repudiated the significance of the “documents.” In a report written in May 1944 he castigated the folly of supporting the Partisans in a war of extermination against the Chetniks. Before he was killed, Farish’s opinion of the Partisan movement had evolved to the point of complete condemnation.

May Day parade in Belgrade, 1946, with marchers carrying posters of Joseph Stalin and Josip Broz Tito side-by-side.

The damage, however, had been done. He had helped to discredit and to demonize Draza Mihailovich and the Chetnik guerrillas based on deceptions and lies. Was Farish “a credulous conduit for pro-Tito propaganda” or was he a Communist or KGB agent himself? Was he an example of Communist subversion from within?

Bibliography

Benson, Robert Louis (1996). Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957. Aegean Park Press.

Evans, Medford Stanton (2007). Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies. NY: Crown Forum.

Freeman, Gregory A. (2007). The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All for the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II. New American Library.

Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey (1999). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale University Press.

Kurapovna, Marcia (2009). Shadows on the Mountain: The Allies, The Resistance, and the Rivalries that Doomed WWII Yugoslavia. NY: John Wiley and Sons.

Lamphere, Robert J.; Shachtman, Tom (1995). The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story. Mercer University Press.

Roberts, Walter P. (1987). Tito, Mihailovic, and the Allies, 1941-1945. Duke University Press.

Romerstein, Herbert and Breindel, Eric (2000). The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors. Regnery Publishing.

Romerstein, Herbert (Summer 2005). “Aspects of World War II History Revealed through ‘ISCOT’ Radio Intercepts.” The Journal of Intelligence History, 5, 1, pp. 15-28.

Smith, Richard Harris (1972). OSS: The Secret History of America’s First Central Intelligence Agency. Berkeley: University of California Press.

West, Nigel (1999). Venona—The Greatest Secret of the Cold War. Harper Collins.

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Mihailovich vs. Tito: What Was the Real Story?

In 1944 Howard Fast published Tito and His People (Contemporary Publishers, Winnipeg, Canada) which also appeared as The Incredible Tito: Man of the Hour (New York: Magazine House, 1944) in an abridged version. In this version, Josip Broz Tito was portrayed as the only one fighting German occupation forces while Draza Mihailovich did no fighting at all. How accurate was this account?

Howard Fast was a novelist and TV writer who wrote the novel Spartacus (1951). He worked for the US Information Agency, which was the US Propaganda Office. “Information” is the US euphemism for “Propaganda”.

He also worked for Voice of America, which, again, is a propaganda outlet. Fast was also a member of the Communist Party USA in 1944.

He spent three months in US prison in 1950 for contempt of Congress because he would not reveal his Communist connections. The penalty for “Contempt of Congress” is up to a year in jail and a fine of $1,000. Contempt is generally not regarded or classified a felony or misdemeanor but is, nevertheless, a serious penalty.

Howard Fast was a novelist, a fiction writer, and a propagandist. And he was a Communist. He detailed his experiences as a Communist in Being Red: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990). Fast was questioned about his book on Tito when he appeared before the Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives of the United States in 1946.

The Communist Partisans Collaborated with the Nazis

More neutral and more objective sources and documentation needs to be consulted. Howard Fast was a hardcore and dedicated Communist. He is presenting the Communist spin on Draza Mihailovich. Why consult a Communist about Draza Mihailovich? It is like asking Adolf Hitler in order to understand the Jewish people and their history. Instead of Howard Fast, one can read the American historian and diplomat Walter R. Roberts, who was a diplomat in Yugoslavia and knew Yugoslavia perfectly. Read The Forgotten 500 by Gregory Freeman, an American historian. Read about how US President Harry S. Truman awarded Draza Mihailovich a Legion of Merit Award in 1948. Read the accounts of the 513 US airmen who were rescued by Draza Mihailovich. All of this is covered-up and suppressed and instead we get the official Communist version of history.

In his seminal 1973 book Tito, Mihailovic and the Allies, 1941-1945, American diplomat and historian Walter R. Roberts showed conclusively that Josip Broz Tito and the Communist Partisans collaborated with the Nazis. This fact has been suppressed and covered-up in the U.S. because the Communist dictatorship of Yugoslavia became a U.S. proxy and ally during the Cold War. Roberts showed, using official documents, that the Communist Partisans cut a deal with the Nazis in a meeting held at Gornji Vakuf, a town west of Sarajevo, in Bosnia. The Communist Partisans feared an Allied landing in Yugoslavia which would mean that Draza Mihailovich and the Chetnik guerrillas would win the civil war and would allow the Chetniks to link up with U.S. and British forces. So Tito and the Communist Partisans collaborated with the Nazis so that they could focus on fighting the Chetniks, whom they saw as their greatest enemy. The Partisans were supported by Joseph Stalin and the U.S.S.R. Tito was prepared to fight and kill American GIs and British soldiers to ensure that a Communist dictatorship was created in Yugoslavia. Indeed, in 1945 the Communist Partisans shot down several American planes and were ready to kill Americans and go to war with the US and Britain over territorial claims against Italy.

In fact, the first offensive operations of the Nazi SS Division Prinz Eugen were against the Chetniks in Serbia. Otto Kumm’s history of the Prinz Eugen Nazi Waffen SS Division,Vorwärts, Prinz Eugen! Geschichte der 7. SS-Freiwilligen-Gebirgs-Division ‘Prinz Eugen’ (Munin Verlag, 1978), documents this fact. Kumm commanded the division. He wrote that the first operations were against Draza Mihailovich and the Chetniks. The Communist Partisans were only dominant in Bosnia during the war. Here they supposedly fought German troops. But the Communists never won. In fact, they collaborated with the Nazis in 1943. Roberts has documents in his book. In fact, Milovan Djilas, one of the Partisan leaders, admitted himself in his memoirs that the Communists collaborated with the Nazis.

The problem with Fast’s assessment is that it is a single, ideologically driven, that is, very biased source. Howard Fast is not a historian but was famous or infamous for being a hardcore Communist in the United States. He was sent to prison. He was blacklisted. This was because he was a Communist ideologue.

US President Harry Truman awarded Mihailovich a Legion of Merit in 1948 on the recommendation of Allied Supreme Commander in Europe General Dwight D. Eisenhower because he was an ally of the US and because he helped the US win the war.

Now, are we to believe that Truman and Eisenhower did not know what they were doing? Is Howard Fast, found guilty and sent to prison for contempt, a Stalinist and Communist mole in the US, more credible?

In Milovan Djilas’ memoirs, Wartime. Djilas conceded that the Partisans collaborated with the Nazis. Djilas was one of the top Partisan leaders, a Serb from Montenegro. This was in 1943. Why did the Partisans collaborate with the Nazis? Because they feared that the Chetniks would defeat them. Once US and British troops landed in Yugoslavia, which is what Djilas feared, they would link up with Mihailovich and would emerge victorious.

More objective sources need to be examined like American historian and diplomat Walter Roberts’ book or other sources like David Martin, Ally Betrayed, Michael Lees’ The Rape of Serbia: The British Role in Tito’s Grab for Power, 1943-1944 (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), Gregory Freeman’s The Forgotten 500, and US Air Force Major Richard Felman’s Mihailovich and I. All US airmen supported Mihailovich. And the US government supported him, awarding him one of its highest military medals. This is all in the US Congressional Record, so this is also documented.

The Chetniks under Draza Mihailovich continued fighting throughout the war. In late 1943, they broke through into eastern Bosnia and drove out the Communist Partisans there and occupied eastern Bosnia. In early 1943, they were a major military force that the Partisans feared as well as the Germans. The Germans put a reward on Draza Mihailovich’s head of 100,000 German gold marks. The Nazis feared Draza Mihailovich. And so did the Partisans. The Partisans collaborated with the Nazis in 1943 because they feared that the Chetniks would defeat them.

The Chetniks held Serbia for almost the entire war. They also held Montenegro and parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina. The Partisans were driven out of Serbia and Montenegro and fled to Bosnia where there was mountainous terrain. The Germans and the Ustasha held everything else, all the towns and cities, in Bosnia. The Bosnian Muslims created their own Nazi SS Division, Handzar or Handschar, which maintained the genocidal policies against Jews and Serbs. In 1944, a second Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division was created called Kama. The fact is, the Partisans achieved nothing from a military point of view. Zagreb and Sarajevo remained in Nazi hands until the last days of the war.

Belgrade itself was “liberated” by the Russian Red Army on October 20, 1944. The Yugoslav Communists created a falsified and ideologically-based historiography about the war. Tito was a Stalinist and Communist dictator. He made himself the leader for life. There were no democratic elections. He murdered all his opponents. He even waged war against US and British troops in Trieste. Why did he shoot down American planes in 1945? The truth is, Tito was an enemy of America and Britain. His forces shot at American and British troops and wanted to kill them. This is the “ally” we chose. Tito remained a committed Communist ideologue throughout his life.

Howard Fast just presents one viewpoint. But you need to examine other sources to gain a full picture of the issue. You need to look at both sides of the issue, not just one side.

Why did the British abandon and betray Draza Mihailovich and the Chetniks? Winston Churchill, an imperialist and master of realpolitik, cut a deal with Joseph Stalin to let the U.S.S.R. take Belgrade in 1944. This meant that only Tito and the Partisans could win in Yugoslavia because Tito was a tool and puppet of Stalin at that time. Draza Mihailovich was stabbed in the back. But the reason was because Churchill had already decided to give Yugoslavia to Stalin and thus to the Communist Partisans. It was as simple as that. In 1944, Churchill even went to Moscow to agree with Stalin to divide all of the Balkans. Britain and the US got Greece while Stalin got Yugoslavia. It was as simple and ruthless as that. It was a spheres of influence arrangement.

The American war movie Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas (1943) was made by 20th Century Fox in 1943 and was an accurate depiction of the Chetnik guerrilla movement at that time. The Communist Partisans had been defeated at that time and driven out of Serbia and Montenegro. The Partisans only base was in Bosnia. They never won any battles against the Germans, Italians, or anyone else. They mostly engaged in needless bloodshed that cost many innocent victims their lives. Once Churchill gave Yugoslavia to Stalin, the game was up. The Communists then made up their own history and covered-up the fact that they collaborated with the Nazis. Yugoslavia was just a pawn in the wider chess game.

Mihailovich vs Tito: What was the real story? The answer depends of what sources you read.

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Underground Guerrillas: Review of Undercover (1943)

On January 25, 2010, Optimum Home Entertainment in the UK released the 1943 British World War II movie Undercover on DVD.

Starring: John Clements, Mary Morris, Godfrey Tearle, Tom Walls, Michael Wilding

Director: Sergei Nolbandov 

Run Time: 80 minutes

Format: PAL

Region: Region 2

Number of discs: 1

Optimum Home Entertainment 

Catalogue Number: OPTD1571

Plot Synopsis

The subject of Undercover was the Yugoslav guerrilla movement in German-occupied Yugoslavia. There were, in fact, two rival guerrilla movements in Yugoslavia. Which one does this movie depict? The movie was produced by Sir Michael Balcon and directed by Sergei Nolbandov. The movie starred John Clements as Milosh Petrovitch, Mary Morris as Anna Petrovitch, his wife, Stephen Murray as Stephan Petrovitch, his brother, Michael Wilding as Constantine, and Stanley Baker as Petar. Clements had appeared as the Airman in H.G. Wells’ Things to Come (1936) and the 1939 classic The Four Feathers. The movie was re-released in the United States in 1944 by Columbia Pictures under the title Underground Guerrillas. The Ealing movie was similar to the 20th Century Fox wartime film Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas (1943) made in the U.S. The plot revolves around a resistance movement that emerges in Yugoslavia after the German invasion in 1941.

Undercover was originally entitled Chetnik, based on the account of Milosh Sekulich, an émigré Serbian doctor who had fled to London from Belgrade after the German invasion. The subject of the film was the Yugoslav resistance movement under the command of General Draza Mihailovich. But politics overtook the situation because Mihailovich and the Royalists were about to be abandoned and betrayed by the British government in favor of the Communist and Stalinist leader Josip Broz Tito at the time of the movie’s release in 1943. The movie was subsequently changed and references to the Chetniks and Draza Mihailovich were deleted. The movie became an amorphous, fictionalized account of a generic guerrilla leader in Yugoslavia. Not every reference to the Chetniks was deleted, however. There are scenes where guerrillas are shown wearing the black Chetnik shubara hat. And the plot closely follows the Draza Mihailovich story line.

The screenplay, by John Dighton and Monja Danischewsky, was accordingly amended and the movie re-edited. Dighton would later co-write the Ealing comedy classic The Man in the White Suit (1951) which starred Alec Guinness and the Academy Award-nominated screenplay for Roman Holiday (1953) with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. It was a war movie filmed in black and white, 80 minutes in length, that focused on the Petrovitch family in Belgrade, Serbia.

One brother, Captain Milosh Branko Petrovitch, a Yugoslav military officer, played by John Clements, emerges as a Serbian guerrilla who forms an anti-Nazi resistance movement in the mountains of Serbia although they are referred to as Yugoslavs. The other brother, Dr. Stephan Petrovitch, played by Stephen Murray, is a physician in the Belgrade Municipal Hospital who acts as a quisling or collaborator to obtain information for the guerrillas. German General von Staengel, played by Godfrey Tearle, does not suspect that Stephan is an undercover agent for the Serbian guerrillas. Tearle had played Professor Jordan in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The 39 Steps (1935).

Using information obtained by Stephan, the guerrillas are able to ambush a German train and to free Yugoslav POWs, wound General Staengel, and to blow up a strategic railway tunnel in the mountains. In retaliation, German troops under Colonel von Brock, played by Robert Harris, execute six Serbian schoolchildren in reprisal and as a lesson. Stanley Baker, in his first movie role at the age of fourteen, plays one of the Serbian students, Petar. Anna Petrovitch, Milosh’s wife, is taken prisoner by German forces and interrogated. She is able to escape and to rejoin Milosh in the mountains.

Stephan manages to plant explosives on a train which he sets to go off in a mountain tunnel. His father Kossan, played by Tom Walls, is captured by German troops and placed on the train to deter an attack. Stephan and Kossan are both killed when the explosives go off and destroy the train and the tunnel. In retaliation, Staengel orders that “one hundred Yugoslavs for every German” will be killed and orders retaliatory strikes against the Serbian guerrillas.

The climax of the movie is a pitched battle between the Germans and the guerrillas. The Serbian guerrillas defeat the German troops and retreat into the mountains to continue the guerrilla war against Axis occupation forces.

The movie remains invaluable as a contemporary cinematic account of the guerrilla resistance movement in Yugoslavia during World War II, even though the references to Draza Mihailovich and the Chetniks were deleted. Undercover was part of the series of movies Ealing Studios produced during the war that featured wartime themes, such as Ships with Wings (1941), The Next of Kin (1942), and Went the Day Well? (1943).

The betrayal and abandonment of Draza Mihailovich by the British government was one of the most controversial and debated issues of World War II. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill later admitted that he made a major mistake in abandoning Draza Mihailovich in order to support a Communist and Stalinist movement bent on establishing a totalitarian dictatorship in Yugoslavia. Churchill admitted: “I thought I could trust Tito . . . but now I am well aware that I committed one of the biggest mistakes in the war.” British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden also later conceded that abandoning Draza Mihailovich was a grave mistake: “My biggest regret of the war was abandoning Mihailovic.”

Although the names and references have been changed, the movie remains essentially a film account of the guerrilla resistance movement headed by Draza Mihailovich. The film captures the drama and chronicles the exploits of one of the first and one of the most effective guerrilla movements in the world.

The film suffers from an attempt to be all-inclusive and too generic. Characters are referred to as “Slavs” or “Yugoslavs”. This was based on the British policy not to favor any single national, ethnic, or religious group in Yugoslavia. The sentimental, emotional, even patronizing tone takes away from the storytelling, the narrative flow. The central plot revolves around the theme of self-sacrifice and determination. Emotional appeal rather than critical judgment is emphasized. Like all American and British war movies of World War II, a knee-jerk, emotional reaction is encouraged, while a simplistic, archaic, and melodramatic view of nationalism and patriotism reflecting British mores of that time is presented. There are universal themes of uncompromising resistance to occupation and the brutality of military force. Take away the details and it is a story that could take place in any country and in any time, the human resistance to force.

The movie also shows how we manufacture the heroic figures in movies. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. One man’s hero or guerrilla is another man’s war criminal. The struggle goes on as we try to find some transcendent or enduring understanding or meaning for war and conflict. But we never do. In a sense, it is always a case where final judgment and meaning is deferred and displaced. What do we learn? Ultimately, nothing. Like in Plato’s allegory of the cave, we observe shadows, representations or reflections of reality. We are never allowed to comprehend or understand anything. We are offered a simple and superficial morality play of Good (always Us) versus Evil (always Them). No learning or comprehension is allowed to occur. We do not understand the real or underlying nature of conflict and war. As a result, new wars and conflicts can be manufactured at will and without end.

Transfer Quality

The transfer quality is excellent. The picture quality of the digital transfer to DVD is flawless. The sound is very good. The presentation is in Full Frame.

Extras

There are no extras.

Summary

This is a worthwhile movie. Its value lies in the opportunity it offers in showing us how we reconstruct and remold the past to suit our current needs. Meaning is constantly deferred and evolving. We see the past through a glass darkly. As in Plato’s allegory of the cave, we see shadows from which we construct meaning. But do we ever learn anything? Like in all things, it depends on the individual. A movie is a record, an artifact of the past, a part of the historical record. It is something that we can always use as a window to the past. A film freezes and preserves a moment in time that we can analyze and examine and dissect.

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Corpus Delicti

Bosnian Muslim Kasim Blekic was allegedly murdered by Bosnian Serbs but was, in fact, alive outside of Sarajevo.

One of the fundamental legal principles or concepts of jurisprudence is that before a person can be charged with a crime, evidence must be shown that a crime has occurred. This is known by the legal principle of “corpus delicti”, the body of a crime, meaning that there must be evidence that a crime has occurred before a defendant can be charged or prosecuted for the crime. The 6^th edition of Black’s Law Dictionary (1990) gives the meaning of corpus delicti as “the fact of a crime having been actually committed”. In a murder or homicide case, evidence must be presented that meets the beyond a reasonable doubt standard. In  murder cases, evidence must show that the specific injury has occurred, a human being has died, and that the injury can be ascribed to criminal agency on the part of an individual as the cause of the injury, that the victim died due to a criminal act.

Bosnian Serb Borislav Herak was born in Sarajevo and lived and worked in the capital city of Bosnia-Hercegovina but was referred to as a “Serb” by the U.S. and Western media, and by his Bosnian Muslim captors, stripping him of his Bosnian and Sarajevo identity, implying he was from Serbia.

The concept of corpus delicti is essential and elemental in all murder or homicide cases. It is the bedrock upon which the crime of murder is prosecuted in Anglo-American jurisprudence. During the Bosnian civil rar of 1992-1995, this fundamental legal precept was blatantly and flagrantly violated. The most egregious case is that of the prosecution of Bosnian Serbs Borislav Herak and Sretko Damjanovic. In March, 1993 they were tried, and subsequently convicted of committing war crimes by the Bosnian Muslim faction and sentenced to death. Herak, who had been born on January 18, 1971 in Sarajevo and who had worked as a store clerk, was charged with raping 16 Bosnian Muslim women and murdering 32 Bosnian Muslim POWs and civilians, although the figures were repeatedly altered. After their conviction, two of their alleged victims, Kasim and Asim Blekic, were found alive.

Bosnian Serb Borislav Herak was put in a 6-by-12 foot cell, after he was beaten and his head was shaved by his Bosnian Muslim guards.

In the January 31, 1996 New York Times story “Symbol of Inhumanity in Bosnia Now Says ‘Not Me’”, Kit R. Roane admitted that there was no corpus delicti, no evidence of any crimes, murders or rapes: “The Bosnian Government has no witnesses to the killings and has recovered no bodies.” The Houston Chronicle reported similarly that there was no evidence of any crimes: “There are no witnesses to the killings Herak is said to have committed and no bodies of those thought dead have been recovered.”

Bosnian Serbs Borislav Herak and Sretko Damjanovic were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by execution by firing squad based on the absence of a corpus delicti, based on the lack of any evidence. How is this justice? Why was the Bosnian Muslin faction allowed to stage this travesty of justice?

This egregious perversion of justice was sponsored and endorsed by the U.S. government and the U.S. media. John F. Burns even received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his “interviews” of Borislav Herak. Herak and Damjanovic later recanted their “confessions” which were obtained through torture. Damjanovic displayed four knife wounds and a broken rib. The Bosnian Muslim interrogators and guards had beaten, tortured, and abused him to obtain a false confession.

John F. Burns won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that was based on lies and deceptions in 1993.

On March 1, 1997, John F. Burns’ newspaper, The New York Times, in a story by Chris Hedges revealed that the two Bosnian Muslim murder victims were actually alive. In the story, “Jailed Serbs’ ‘Victims’ Found Alive, Embarrassing Bosnia”, the New York Times disclosed that the alleged murder victims had been members of the Bosnian Muslim Army during the civil war who still lived in Sarajevo. Kasim Blekic was photographed raising sheep outside of Sarajevo.

This horrendous miscarriage and travesty of justice has not, however, received the attention and analysis it deserves. Moreover, Burns was never stripped of his Pulitzer Prize for fraudulent and fake reporting. Ironically, the prize was named for Joseph Pulitzer, who was, along with William Randolph Hearst, one of the founders of yellow journalism, a deceptive, sensationalist, and distorted form of journalism that is more akin to propaganda or public relations than to news reporting.

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The American World War II Film: Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas (1943)

In The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (Lexington, KY, The University Press of Kentucky, 1985, republished in 1996 with Afterword), film historian Bernard F. Dick analyzed the role and impact of the 20^th Century Fox wartime movie Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas (1943) on pages 163-165. He noted that “Hollywood managed to cover most of the European resistance movements, directly or indirectly. “ The Soviet Union, as an ally of the U.S., was also portrayed positively in such films as MGM’s Song of Russia (1944), Warner Brothers’ Mission to Moscow (1943) starring Robert Taylor, and RKO’s The North Star (1943) written by Lillian Hellman and Days of Glory (1944) starring Gregory Peck. These movies became controversial after the war when the U.S.S.R. became a global rival of the U.S.

One of the most successful and critically acclaimed wartime movie was on the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia, on the resistance movement headed by Draza Mihailovich. Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas was both a box office and critical success. Chicago Mayor Edward J. Kelly made a public appearance for the movie in April, 1943 and The Ink Spots and Lucky Millinder performed on stage before it was shown in theaters. The movie was reviewed favorably in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
 
Hollywood had made To Be or Not To Be (1942) and In Our Time (1944) starring Ida Lupino and Paul Henreid on the Polish resistance. The Conspirators (1944) was on the Dutch resistance. Casablanca (1942) by Warner Brothers featured fictional Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo, played by Paul Henreid, and made reference to the Free French resistance movement led by Charles de Gaulle with its symbol of the cross of Lorraine. Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas was one of the rare Hollywood movies on the Balkans.

As the Yugoslav conflict became more complex, entangled, and controversial, Hollywood tended to stay away from making any films on the Balkans. As Dick noted, Greece was another country ignored by Hollywood during the war, largely because of its complexity:
 
“Greece was a notable omission; Chetniks (1943) vaguely alludes to Greek guerrillas, but it was not until The Angry Hills (1959) and The Guns of Navarone (1961) that Americans saw them in action.

 “The Greek resistance was uncommonly complex. The two leading guerrilla organizations were politically bipolar: the Communist-dominated ELAS and the republican EDES. Their coalescence, achieved through British efforts, was purely temporary; when it ended, civil war erupted (although it was nowhere as bloody as the internecine massacres in Yugoslavia). If screenwriters had difficulty with the Spanish civil war, they would have been equally uncomfortable with the Greek resistance and its Communist and anti-Communist factions.”

Dick compared the Greece scenario to the Yugoslav conflict, where similar rival resistance movements vied for Allied support:
 
“There was a similar problem with the Yugoslav resistance with its two politically distinct guerrilla bands: the Chetniks led by the royalist Drazha Mihailovich and the Partisans under the Communist Tito. In 1942, Mihailovich was a likely prospect for a film; the British still supported him (though not for long), and he had appeared on the cover of Time. Thus Fox went ahead with Chetniks, subtitled The Fighting Guerrillas, which may well be the greatest embarrassment of the 1940s: it is never revived or shown on television, nor can it be rented. While Britain was able to salvage its film about the Yugoslav resistance, changing the title from Chetniks to Undercover (1943) and the focus from the Chetniks to the Partisans, Fox was stuck with its paean to Mihailovich; the dedication only attests to the unalterably admiring tone of the film: ‘This picture is respectfully dedicated to Draja Mikhailovitch and his fighting Chetniks—those fearless guerrillas who have dedicated their lives with a grim determination that no rest shall prevail until the final allied victory and the liberation of their beloved fatherland, Yugoslavia, has been achieved.’”

Dick emphasized the reluctance of Hollywood to do a movie on the Communist Partisans under Tito was due in part because they were Communists:
 
“On the other hand, a movie about Tito’s Partisans would have ended up on the House Committee on Unamerican Activities’ list of subversive films and might have been a different sort of embarrassment: a Yugoslav Song of Russia. Favoring the right can be as precarious as favoring the left. But in 1942 Fox could not have known that the British would back Tito, or that in 1946 Mihailovich would be sentenced to death on a collaboration charge and executed as a fascist. While Chetniks shows Mihailovich (Philip Dorn) killing Nazis, it also shows him ransoming Italians, who were still members of the Axis. It was precisely because of such activity that the British stopped supporting Mihailovich.”

Dick noted, however, that the movie was well-written and deserved to be rescued from the obscurity it had been consigned to because of the changing circumstances of the war:
 
“Admirers of epigrammatic dialogue should not dismiss Chetniks. When a Nazi colonel discovers that Mihailovich has feigned a retreat, he tells one of his generals, “The exodus of the children of Israel has started, and you will have the opportunity of playing the Red Sea.” Surely a movie with such a line warrants at least one airing on the Late Late Show.”

Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas became politically incorrect and an anachronism after the Allies abandoned Mihailovich and threw their support to Tito, a known Communist and Stalinist. After the 1948 Tito-Stalin split, Tito manipulated and exploited the Cold War antagonisms and rivalries to play the two superpowers off against each other. The U.S. became a supporter of the totalitarian Communist regime  and dictatorship established by Tito under the concept that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. As a result, U.S. policy and public opinion tended to favor the Tito regime. Under this regimen, Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas was further relegated to insignificance and obscurity, in fact, totally suppressed and virtually deleted from film history.

It was only after the collapse of Communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1991 that a more critical attitude was taken towards World War II. In 1967, it had been revealed that Draza Mihailovich had been awarded the Legion of Merit Award in 1948 by U.S. President Harry S. Truman on the recommendation of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Mihailovich had rescued 513 U.S. airmen, one of the largest Allied rescue operations behind enemy lines during World War II. As the role of Mihailovich in World War II was thus re-examined and re-evaluated, the movie became much more relevant and important in assessing the role Mihailovich played in the war. As a result, the movie gained wider exposure and availability on the internet. The movie allows new generations to revisit and to reassess and to re-evaluate the role that Draza Mihailovich and the Chetnik guerrillas played in World War II.

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