Yugoslav government in Exile London

Out of Context - The Yugoslav Government in London 1941-1945Author(s): Stevan K. PavlowitchSource: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 16, No. 1, The Second World War: Part 1(Jan., 1981), pp. 89-118Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260618 .Accessed: 20/02/2011 06:56

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Stevan K. Pavlowitch

Out of Context - The Yugoslov Government in London

1941-1945

When King Peter II and the nucleus of the Yugoslav government arrived in London at the end of June 1941 to join the gathering of emigre Allied leaders, they were received as heroes. Deprived as they were of the usual material assets of government, they found moral assets waiting for them in England, in other words the credit due to them for having sacrificed all to defy Hitler. 'Regardless of what political "realists" and those benefiting from hindsight might say, the event of March 27, 1941 won universal admiration.'1

The events in the Balkans during February-April 1941, added to the Italian defeats in Africa, had given the British the brief illusion of being able to tackle the conquering might of the Axis, an illusion which had also been felt in the enemy camp. The bold about-turn in Belgrade had contributed much to the illusion. (The several risings in occupied Yugoslavia over the following summer were to be seen as a natural sequel.) Such was the cause of British gratitude and goodwill, which was fixed, in particular, on the romanticized per- sons of the young King, symbol of his country's struggle to keep its freedom in alliance with Great Britain, and of General Dusan Simovic, his prime minister and apparent leader of the March coup.

The exiled Council of Ministers under them was anyhow impressive as a broadly based coalition of all parties that strove for a solution of Yugoslavia's problems within the restraints of a representative system. The new administration assembled under

Journail of CoInteporarv Hiistorv (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills), Vol. 16 (1981), 89-118

Journal of Contemporary History

General Simovic on 27 March 1941 had been brought into existence by a deep yearning for a fully representative government in an hour of necessity.

Its moral assets, however, rested on weak foundations. Compos- ed of the leaders of all the parties that had, at one time or another, been in opposition since 1929, when King Alexander had suspended the original Constitution of 1921, the government had come into being through a coup d'etat, yet it had been legalized under the existing Constitution of 1931, granted by King Alexander and which made ministers responsible to the sovereign alone. The party leaders did subscribe to a theory formulated by Slobodan Jovanovic, according to which the coup had, in intention at least, restored the National Representation as a constitutional factor equal to the Crown; and until such time as a parliament could be elected, its rights were deemed to be vested in the political parties represented in the government. That theory notwithstanding, constitutional legality was, for the time being, vested in the King alone.

Yet the party leaders were fully entitled to formulate constitutional theories, for it could be argued that the Constitution of 1931 had been all but destroyed between August 1939 and April 1941. In view of the approaching war crisis, a bargain had been struck between the regency and the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS). As a result of the Cvetkovic-Macek Agreement (Sporazum) of 23 August 1939, an autonomous Province (Banovina) of Croatia had been instituted, the Senate and the National Assembly had been dissolved, and the restructured government had been empowered to prepare a new electoral law. Although they had, in fact, initiated a revision of the Constitution, the first and third of these measures had been enacted on the basis of the Crown's reserved emergency powers which authorized the King, in exceptional circumstances, to issue legislative ordinances ultimately to be submitted to the Na- tional Representation. There had been no formal constitutional amendment. The new parliament would presumably have had a constituent role, but it was never to be.

On 27 March 1941 King Peter had accepted to assume the royal prerogative six months before his statutory majority of 18. Ma6ek, the HSS chairman, had then made a further extension of the com- petence of the Croatian Banovina's administration a condition to his joining Simovic's government, because he suspected that the coup had, in part, resulted from resentment against the Sporazum. Accepted by the prime minister personally, this was not given of-

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Pavlowitch: Yugoslav Government in London

ficial formulation for lack of time before the debacle, but it was confirmed, along with the Sporazum itself, by a solemn declaration of the government issued when it had arrived in Jerusalem, on 4 May.

General Simovic's government had been formed not only in a constitutional near-vacuum, but also in the middle of a foreign policy crisis. It had been made up as a representation of parties, to compensate for the absence of an elected parliament. These were a collection of very different political groups - the HSS and its In- dependent Democrat (NDS) allies, the Slovenian Populists (SLjS) and the Yugoslav Moslem Organization (JMO), the Radicals (NRS) and the Democrats (DS), the Serbian Agrarian Party (SZS) and the Yugoslav National Party (JNS).

The whole political spectrum was there, except for the subversive extremes and the unrepented time-servers of the makeshift government Yugoslav Radical Alliance (JRZ) of the late thirties. These were men of differing character, standing and background; politicians who had been against the extent and the manner of the 1939 Sporazum with Macek and then against the 1941 pact with Hitler, politicians who had been both for the Sporazum and for the pact, politicians who had been for the Sporazum but against the pact; national leaders, regional leaders, ethnic leaders, parliamentary party leaders without a parliament, along with a couple of distinguished non-party personalities, and with the generals who had emerged at the head of the coup. In order to contain them all, the government had had to leave aside all controversial internal issues. Neither a war cabinet nor a working team, it claimed to be a revolutionary government, which it was only to the extent that it wanted in principle to return to parliamentary solutions, but even that it was never able to do. It had had no choice but to be legalized under what remained of the existing Constitution. Finally, in their few days of ef- fective power, the ministers had had no time even to begin working out a platform which could unite them in more than just the pious desire to demonstrate national unity in the face of danger, let alone to tackle any of the country's accumulated problems.

Of the 22 ministers sworn in on 27 March in Belgrade, two had been killed and five had decided not to leave Yugoslavia. Two new ones had been appointed, to readjust the ethnic balance, just before flying out to Greece. These changes had reduced the cabinet to 17 and altered its character. When it reassembled in exile, the acknowledged spokesmen for the Croats, the Slovenes and the

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Moslems were no longer with it. The JMO leader Kulenovic had gone over to Pavelic and joined the government of the newly- proclaimed, ustaSa-ruled, Independent State of Croatia (NDH); there had been no one to take his place. The SLjS leader Kulovec had lost his life during the bombing of Belgrade, and had been replaced. Most serious of all, Macek had decided not to go abroad with the government, but to stay and share the ills of war with his own people in Croatia. He had delegated to the government the HSS secretary general Krnjevic, who had only in 1939 returned from 10 years of self-imposed exile.

No sooner had the King and his ministers been reunited in Athens on 16 April 1941 than they issued statements to the effect that they would continue to fight until victory, statements that were repeated in fuller and more solemn form in Jerusalem on 4 May. How would the emigre government continue the war? By 4 May it had probably not yet realized that only a few hundred officers and men had been able to leave Yugoslav territory and join the British, or to what extent the renown of the Yugoslav army had been shattered during the short and hopeless April campaign.

Already before the coup had been carried out, there had been disagreement between the conspirators as to what form the new government should take. General Mirkovic had favoured a military government under a general who would head an authoritarian regime. Simovic, more moderate, had wanted to preside over a 'government of national salvation', made up of 'distinguished personalities', representative of the various ethnic groups, churches, regions and parties. Radoje Knezevic, the civilian link with the opposition, had fought these proposals and argued forcefully that the new government had to seek its legitimacy from the nation by being made up of representatives from all the political groups. On the whole, the generals of 27 March had had to give in, but the rivalry between them and the party leaders remained as a potential source of conflict.

Simovic appears to have been a patriotic general but a politically incompetent prime minister. He wanted to play a great role and did not, in spite of appearances, really trust politicians. On the grounds that they had lost in the turmoil of the collapse whatever following they had ever had, he opposed the 'Jovanovic theory' and put forward his own - that the cabinet formed by him on 27 March was a

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revolutionary government which had received the unanimous confidence of the nation, and that, for the duration of the war, the only possible expression of legitimacy was a government led by him, surrounded by distinguished personalities of his choice.

No sooner in London than the lionized hero of 27 March tried to reorganize the government as a smaller team in which he would himself take over the main portfolios, flanked by two representatives each from Croats and Slovenes. In no time at all, this had degenerated into a convulsive effort to retain 'power' by exploiting the differences between the politicians, who reacted by soon agree- ing unanimously on one point: that Simovic, in spite of his patriotism, was ill-suited to preside over them. His value in their eyes was precisely that of being the hero of 27 March, but it had been marred by his part in the responsibility for the military defeat. It was now yet further marred by his clumsy scheming against them.

It was true that Simovic could not easily be discarded. The world saw him covered with the glory of the coup, and the British feared that his replacement would both destroy the cohesion of the government in London and threaten the existence of the resistance in Yugoslavia. This was the reason why, under Jovanovic's influence, the ministers postponed his downfall, in the hope that he could be made to mend his ways. But to no avail. Towards the end of 1941, they decided to remove him by addressing a collective let- ter of resignation to King Peter motivated by the prime minister's mishandling of government. Refusing to give in, Simovic had to be dismissed by the sovereign on 11 January 1942.

Paradoxically, Simovic had created a measure of agreement among the ministers. The belief had prevailed that it was time to tackle some of the awkward political problems they had brought with them from Yugoslavia and that they stood a better chance of doing it among themselves, without the generals who had done their bit by handing power over to the party leaders. They were ready to take over immediately as a new administration under Pro- fessor Jovanovic, an influential intellectual and their senior.

Jovanovic's original appointment as vice-premier, along with Ma6ek, had been due to the respect that he inspired generally. He was meant to be a Serbian counterpart, above the several parties, to the overall leader of the Croatian majority. A combination of constitutional lawyer and historian, he looked at politics through scholarly spectacles tinted with positivist, non-romantic liberalism.

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With age, he had become antipathetic to fascists and communists even more than he had been to radicals in earlier days, but he had no direct affiliation to any political party. Along with the exclusion of General Simovic and of General Ilic, who had been army minister, the only other change in the cabinet team was the inclu- sion as army minister of General Mihailovic. Since he was in Yugoslavia, the government was again safely in the hands of civilians.

Another potential source of conflict resulting from the events of late March-early April 1941 was the latent division among the officers between the generals (backed, to a certain extent, by the air- force officers - for both Simovic and Mirkovic were airmen) and the younger, mainly army, officers who had actually carried out the coup. When the government had moved to London in the summer of 1941, the army minister General Ilic had been left in Cairo with the additional appointment of chief of staff to a resurrected Supreme Command, to supervise what existed of the Yugoslav 'forces' concentrated there. The emigre command had started off with dreams of creating an army in exile by enlisting volunteers from the Yugoslav immigrants in America. Having quickly woken up to reality, it had to satisfy itself with rt uiting volunteers from Slovenian-Italian POWs in the Near East. Although an infantry battalion had thus been formed by the beginning of 1942, it could obviously not be used in operations agr:nst Italian troops, and in terms of military forces available outside its occupied national territory, Yugoslavia was to be the least important of the Allies.

When Generals Simovic and Ilic were dropped from the government, the latter was also replaced as chief of staff, and so was General Mirkovic, the officer commanding the Yugoslav troops in the Near East. All the stresses latent in the small officer corps there, out of touch with the war, suddenly emerged. The junior army ex- ecutants of the March coup, resentful of the ineptitude of their seniors during the April campaign and feeling the shame of defeat, sided with the politicians against Simovic. The generals in Cairo panicked and refused to relinquish their posts, generally supported by the air-force officers, more numerous and more likely to become involved in combat, who sided with Simovic against the politicians. The government was powerless to enforce its will except through the British. The chief mutineer was General Mirkovic who enjoyed British sympathies going back to before 27 March 1941, quite apart from the fact that the crisis of the Yugoslav military set-up in Egypt

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was taking place during the summer of El Alamein. With the British military on the spot reluctant to intervene against, if not actually in sympathy with, the mutineers, the affair was not settled until November 1942. By that time, the simplified command struc- ture that had been introduced was more in keeping with the modest size of the forces involved, but the consequences of the crisis were far-reaching. The military were even more demoralized, their chances of contributing to the Allied war effort were even more remote, and the prestige of the emigre administration had fallen sharply.

Until October 1941 the government had not been able to obtain any precise information about events in the country, let alone exert any influence over them. When Colonel Mihailovic was first heard of during the summer, his movement was reported as consisting of officers resentful of the ministers and generals who had brought about the defeat and fled. The Yugoslav military in exile were quick to perceive the importance and the danger of Mihailovic. The generals needed to tie him to the government, in order to defuse the potential subversiveness of his movement, but also in order to make up for the capitulation and for the lack of military contribu- tion to the Allied cause. This led to his first promotion and to the first approaches to the British government for help. But the younger conspirators of the March coup now abroad were classmates of their colleagues in the resistance whose grievances against the generals they shared. They too were anxious to support Mihailovic.

A professional soldier with no wish to assume a political role, he expressed his allegiance to the Yugoslav government. The news of the uprising in Yugoslavia was a great morale booster for the Allies at that time, and Mihailovic was soon being built up by Yugoslav and British propaganda into an Allied superman. The politicians no longer needed Simovic. In Mihailovic they had another figure to maintain the Yugoslav image. His second appointment, on 10 June 1942, as chief of staff of the Supreme Command, transferred back to the occupied homeland, coupled with his third promotion in six months, to full general, resurrected the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and reduced to scale the awkward affair of the military in the Near East. There was no other instance of the leader of a resistance movement being taken directly into an exiled government while remaining in the occupied national territory. The territory from which Mihailovic operated appeared to have become impor-

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tant for the outcome of the war in Africa. The Yugoslav government could thus contribute his organization to the cause of the Allies, while it gained a military arm at home.

The new prime minister was anxious to strengthen the link between Mihailovic and the government so as to improve the standing of both partners and of their country's cause, as he saw it. Jovanovic feared that, as a result of the collapse and its aftermath, the Serbs had lost faith in their government, in their armed forces, in the possibility of ever restoring a Yugoslav state, in the Western Allies, in democracy perhaps, in themselves even. Mihailovic's views and aims seemed to correspond to Jovanovic's: a pro- Western, anti-fascist and anti-communist line, and the defence of Serbian interests in a restored state community with the other Yugoslavs. Mihailovic could help to restore some of the confidence that had been lost. He was also needed to preserve the legal and the social (though not necessarily the political) continuity of pre-war Yugoslavia. The government abroad could perform some useful functions for his movement, and this would provide a way of exer- cising control over it.

In the last analysis, both partners were to be disappointed in their expectations. The government could not be sure it had successfully bound Mihailovic's movement (as opposed to the general himself), with its important element of resentment against all politicians, even less so the various fellow-travelling cetnik groups that had more or less hitched their waggons to his star. Anyhow Mihailovic himself was soon the subject of accusations of collaboration which compromised the government through its association with him, while accusations of cetnik vindictive atrocities made his movement suspect to non-Serbs, especially Croats, and this again was to compromise the government.

Cooperation between the government and Mihailovic was made difficult by the fact that the British denied the Yugoslavs the right of uncontrolled radio communication. This did not create any military difficulty since, in 1942, there was, on the whole, no dif- ference between the British and the Yugoslav governments' concep- tions of Mihailovic's military role. But whereas the Yugoslav government in London for a long time saw Mihailovic's movement mainly in its militarty aspect, in Yugoslavia it was quickly seen as a political movement also, and the government was not able to obtain enough information about that aspect.

At any rate, for most of 1942, the government did try to provide

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Mihailovic with official guidelines, but this was at a time when its stand agreed with the British. On the question of resistance to the occupation forces, Jovanovic's instructions were clear. Mihailovic was to avoid premature action. He was to prepare for D-Day when the Allies would land, either in the Balkans or elsewhere in Europe, when he would launch a general rising. In the meanwhile he was to link the various armed underground groups so as to keep under pressure a greater number of Axis troops, but in such a way as to minimize reprisals on the population or the disruption of his own forces. Otherwise he was to transfer westward as many of these as possible, to protect the Serbian population in the NDH from further massacres.

Jovanovic was conscious of the danger involved in the break between Mihailovic's men and the communist-led partisans. His policy was to try and stop the civil war from developing and to reconcile the two rival movements under Mihailovic's command. If that were impossible, fighting between the two should at least be prevented and some sort of coordinated action obtained against the common enemy. The government could hope to influence Mihailovic to a certain extent, but not the partisans, and so it tried to enlist the help of the Soviet government who, at that time, was interested in any guerrilla action so long as it kept German troops busy outside Soviet territory. This relatively conciliatory attitude towards the partisans was kept by the Jovanovic government until the communist propaganda campaign began against Mihailovic in late 1942, and the political cabinets were, until the very end, willing to go along with plans for placing him directly under the British Cairo command.

It is not yet clear when the government realized all that was going on under cover of nominal allegiance to Mihailovic, particularly in the Italian-occupied territories. While it is possible to argue that it was in good faith during the latter half of 1942 when it protested against official Soviet followed by official British accusations, it must be admitted that, by the turn of 1943-44 the government did have a clearer idea of what was going on. Its denials then of accom- modations here, of passivity there (although they were no better or no worse than misinformation issuing out of the partisan movement and its supporters abroad, Yugoslav or British), were to be a powerful factor in the erosion of its credibility among Allied governments and public opinion following on the erosion of its prestige.

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The attitude towards the resistance adopted at the end of 1941 and pursued throughout 1942, still appeared legitimate to the Yugoslav government in 1943. It saw no reason to change its attitude at a time when the British had changed theirs to one of ac- tivism. When the policy whereby it had tried to stop the civil war with the partisans had failed and Mihailovic had become the target of accusations, the government proclaimed its solidarity with its army minister. To their critics, Mihailovic's supporters in the cabinet would say that they were in no position to impose anything on him, while they appeared to have come round to the opinion that it would be no bad thing if the armed communist movement were destroyed before the end of the war. At the same time there is no evidence that Mihailovic was ever openly told of any new line. This was partly because the government could not have told him anything by radio which went against the British line, even if it had wanted to, and partly because it was no longer able, from the end of 1942 onwards, to agree on any official government policy whatever. By the time that radio contact outside British control had been established under the Puric administration, it was too late to do either partner much good.

The question of communications was only one of the problems on which divergences of views developed between the British and the emigre Yugoslav government, and it was not a specifically Yugoslav issue. While the ultimate British consideration was one of military efficiency, for the exiled leaders it was perhaps primarily one of political importance. The Yugoslav government was not able to receive honest political evaluations from Miahilovic on the situation at home, or on his relations with the British. Miahilovic was not able to receive honest political evaluations from his government on the international situation, or on its relations with the British. Any communication on vital but delicate matters, not for British ears, between the expatriate government and its supporters in the occupied homeland was almost out of the question.

Bearing the brunt of the struggle for the survival of Europe, the British assumed a total identity between their own war aims and those of their, more or less dependent, lesser allies. For a long time they did not realize that resistance movements were only to a point concerned with liberation, and that they were also, and increasingly, concerned with seizure of power in the wake of an Allied victory. They insisted on overall control of the resistance movements

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until at least the end of 1942, but were at the same time more generous in promises than in actual supplies. We now know that this was mainly due to technical reasons, and that Yugoslavia was never more than a side-show, at times quite relevant and at other times almost totally irrelevant, in the context of the overall war situation.

Yugoslavia and Great Britain were not tied by any formal alliance which would have given the emigre government certain claims on its hosts, nor did they, in spite of negotiations to this effect under the political administrations, ever conclude an agreement concern- ing the status of what Yugoslav armed forces there were with the Allies. The very impotence of the exiled Yugoslavs, living off and rapidly exhausting their moral credit with the British, allowed the latter to adopt a far more proprietary attitude towards them than towards other allies. The Yugoslavs reacted by stressing their 'sovereignty' to make up for their humiliating dependence, a behaviour which simply increased British irritation. On the Yugoslav side, British actions were never taken at their face value. We now know that many of them can be explained by expediency, weakness, incompetence, confusion, lack of unity even. But the Yugoslavs could not accept that the British were in any way like them, and always had to explain everything by some hidden motive or a vast political manoeuvre. As for the British, who had been only too happy to build up the exiled government of 27 March 1941 into gallant heroes and Mihailovic's men into a powerful Allied force, they were to lay their disappointment in 1943 exclusively at the door of the Yugoslav government.

The atmosphere still had much of the original trust and admiration when the Yugoslav and Greek governments signed, in London, on 15 January 1942, an agreement laying the groundwork for one of the regional projects the British were promoting at the time as a way of ensuring the small states of central and eastern Europe against future Great-Power domination in the area. It established the basis for a post-war Balkan community, but the friendship between the two exiled governments, based on a tradition of good neighbourliness and on the events of 1941, was to have little effect on the situation in their occupied homelands. It did, however, fit right into Foreign Minister Ninfic's views. He was anxious that his

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country should become part of a wider bridge between the oppos- ing interests of the Great Powers, and not the instrument of any one of them.

That is why Nin&ic did not want to be tied exclusively to Great Britain. His policy also led him to want good relations with the USSR, for such long-term purposes, but also for short-term purposes, in order to obtain Soviet help in coming to terms with the Yugoslav communist partisans. Yugoslavia was already somehow linked to the Soviet Union by an unratified treaty which had been meant to demonstrate Stalin's displeasure with increased German involvement in the Balkans. It had been signed in Moscow at the last moment, early on the morning of the day of the Axis attack on Yugoslavia, and the Soviet government had continued to recognize the Yugoslav government for a month after the German conquest. It had then returned to a policy of accepting faits accomplis in German-occupied territory, and sent away the Yugoslav minister. But when it had in turn been invaded, the USSR resumed diplomatic relations with all the emigre governments of the Euro- pean continent, including the Yugoslav. The Soviet Union was in a desperate military situation. Anything which tied down Axis troops, that could otherwise have been sent to the Russian front, was welcome. It also resented the anti-Soviet potential implications of the British-sponsored East European regional pacts.

These were the probable explanations for its approach to the Yugoslav government, on the heels of the Greek treaty, about a revival of the Yugoslav-Soviet agreement of April 1941. The over- ture was eagerly taken up. The British Foreign Office, which had originally raised no objection to the idea, later objected, when the drafting stage was reached, several weeks later, to what was basically a treaty of mutual assistance with a government devoid of territory or armed forces.

The Soviet government preferred not to tone down the draft, which was then quietly dropped by the Russians whose friendly attitude towards the Yugoslav government was nevertheless main- tained. In August 1942 legations became embassies on Soviet in- itiative, following in the wake of similar British and American moves. Even though this coincided with its first accusations against Mihailovic, the Soviet government was careful not to identify him with his government, so that NinSic continued to believe the Rus- sians were anxious for direct contacts. The political administrations were always of the opinion that the Soviet government could, if it

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so wished, get the Yugoslav communists to take orders from Mihailovic or, at least, desist from the civil war. They were anxious to maintain friendly relations, while the Soviet government eventually retreated into an equivocal attitude until the summer of 1944. Once again, the probable explanation is that Yugoslavia did not have a high claim to consideration by the Soviet leadership, who never really expected a communist revolution to succeed there until quite late - perhaps as late as the summer of 1944.

The Yugoslav government similarly hoped to get American help in order to break away from its dependence on the British. There appeared to be a tremendous amount of goodwill to be exploited across the Atlantic, and the government invested much energy to exploit it. Part of the cabinet was established there as a ministerial mission, in order to obtain political and material support. There was a public relations campaign to 'sell' Mihailovic to the American public and to mobilize the Yugoslav-Americans. All this was successful at first. King Peter's visit to the USA in June 1942 was followed by a lend-lease agreement. In addition, in the latter half of 1943 the government also began to look to the US for pro- tection against British pressure to discard Mihailovic and then to establish a 'coalition' administration with Tito's movement.

These repeated requests brought forth expressions of sympathy and promises of aid, but remarkably little real benefit for the Yugoslav government. To start with, it was not able to wield enough sustained political influence. Ambassador Fotic was liked and respected, but he seemed to be losing faith in the very concept of Yugoslavia, and part of his government wanted him dismissed. The members of the ministerial mission were soon at odds with him and between themselves. From November 1941, when the news of the massacres in the NDH split the Yugoslav-American community into bitterly feuding factions, Yugoslav government ministers and officials in the US were themselves divided by the same issue. From the summer of 1942, a new split began to form on the issue of communist charges against Mihailovic. All this had its repercussions on the attitude of American public opinion to Yugoslavia.

Then there was a persistent misunderstanding by the Yugoslav government of the practical limitations of American goodwill. The USA were not interested enough in the Balkans to want to get involved in a side-show which they accepted anyhow as being a British responsibility. While the Yugoslavs undoubtedly realized that, in trying to obtain American interference, they incurred

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British displeasure, they were never told the truth about their chances. To the very end, US officials kept making small gestures that did not affect real issues, but fed the wishful thinking of emigre Yugoslavs who continued to believe that their country would not be abandoned to communism.

Tension had dropped as soon as the government had passed firmly into the hands of the party representatives. Jovanovic was to preside over the London-based administration without any apparent crisis for the whole of 1942 and again, after a first crisis, for another six months in 1943, though in more difficult circumstances. The ministers had some reason to be satisfied. The British had been pleasantly surprised to see that Serbo-Croatian concord had not only been preserved, but actually seemed to have improved with the fall of the generals. The belief that Anglo- American influence would be decisive during and after the war was helped by the British-sponsored programmes involving economic reconstruction and political federation. Serbs tended to think that Mihailovic was, in one way or another, their defence against all the dangers that threatened them. Croats were satisfied that they could weather the storms of the war by sitting it out in the government until the end, after which the Serbo-Croatian problem would be sorted out on a new basis with Allied blessing.

But there precisely was the rub. In exile and under the shock of recent events in the occupied homeland, party leaders were faced again with the pre-war Serbo-Croatian issue, hideously magnified. The first clashes had occurred in Athens and in Jerusalem. Ma~ek's decision to stay behind had been accepted with some distrust by Serbian ministers. Croatian ministers had reacted nervously to accusations that they had favoured the pact, and that the treachery of Croatian military personnel was one of the causes of the debacle. This sort of recrimination could have subsided had it not been for the massacres. In London, however, many contradictory reports reached the government about the tragic developments in Yugoslavia until, by the autumn, they were clear enough and created an atmosphere of desperation among Serbian ministers, officials and refugees in general who began to visualize complete 'genocide'. Of the Croatian ministers, some believed the reports to be exaggerated, while all suspected their Serbian colleagues of wanting to use the news as a means of discrediting the Croats. The

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Serbo-Croatian problem, from a mere political or constitutional issue, turned into a fundamental one about the very existence of the state.

So it had appeared during the stormy cabinet meetings of Oc- tober and early November 1941, but having reached the brink the two sides had then realized that a break between the London representatives of Serbian and Croatian political groups could only worsen the situation at home, and they recoiled. On 15 November 1941 Simovic had, in a broadcast, repeated that the programme of the government remained the restoration of Yugoslavia, stressing that there lay the only chance of salvation for all its components alike. Simultaneously, the three deputy prime ministers, the Serb Jovanovic, the Croat Krnjevic and the Slovene Krek, got together to draft a declaration for the future constitutional pattern of Yugoslavia based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter.

Not all the Serbian ministers had been keen on that part of the Jerusalem Declaration of 4 May 1941 which had stated explicitly that the 1939 Sporazum remained 'one of the cornerstones of state policy'. Of the Serbian parties, only the smaller NDS and SZS had endorsed it at the time. Just as most Croats had felt politically alienated by the introduction of the first constitutional instrument, that of 1921 which had set up a parliamentary yet centralist system of government, so most Serbs had felt politically alienated by the last constitutional change, that of 1939 which had not federalized the authoritarian system of 1931, but introduced a Croatian corpus separatum in an otherwise centralist state. The HSS ministers had enjoyed a position of strength in Cvetkovic's government. They could claim justifiably to represent the Croatian nation in a cabinet otherwise bearing the colours of an artificial and heterogeneous government movement whose founder Stojadinovic was no longer there to lead it. In Simovic's government, they faced the leaders of parties which, although they could not compete in organization and mass following, were nevertheless true political parties. They realized that the March coup had been carried out partly in reaction to the Sporazum, even if this was not admitted. And the partners with whom they had struck the bargain - Prince Paul, Cvetkovic and the JRZ - were no longer there. So they had to press for an official public confirmation from the new government at every turn.

Yet new factors were constantly intruding to alter the picture. The Axis Powers had granted extreme Croatian nationalists a state of their own. Before the Yugoslav government had even flown out

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to Greece, Ma&ek had appealed over the wireless to Croats to obey the new regime. The right wing of the HSS had then joined the ustasa movement. Krnjevic was on the defensive, fearing that all this would give the Serbs an excuse to disqualify his party. He and the finance minister ?utej were the only two HSS ministers who had gone abroad with the government, and they had the feeling of being greatly outnumbered. When ustasa killings and atrocities became known, Krnjevic could not accept for a long time that there really had been massacres on such a scale. He apparently believed that it had all been grossly distorted in order to blacken the Croats yet further in the eyes of the Allies. He was anxious that the Croats in general and the leadership of the HSS in particular should in no way be made responsible for what had happened. He found it difficult to speak out against the atrocities, and he failed to express real sympathy for the plight of the Serbs under ustaSa rule, but at the same time continued to insist on obtaining from the government an ironclad constitutional guarantee of the post-war safety and privileges of the Croatian people.

As a result, most emigre Serbs became convinced that Krnjevic too secretly aspired to a separate Croatia, a peaceful version of Pavelic's bloody NDH, especially as he had belonged to the more intransigent wing of the HSS. Thus was created a gulf of suspicion that proved impossible to bridge. Most Serbian ministers had been converted to a post-war federal reorganization of Yugoslavia, but in view of the recent tragic experiences, this was no longer so much to satisfy the Croats as to protect the Serbs. They had confirmed the Sporazum once, in Jersualem. Now, with the horrors

perpetrated over the Serbs under Croation rule, they refused to revalidate it yet again. They felt it would lose them the confidence of Mihailovic's movement and of outraged Serbs at home generally. Even the representatives of the SZS, which had drawn its support precisely from the Serbian peasantry of those Bosnian districts attributed to the Croatian Banovina, no longer wanted to com-

promise themselves in 1942. The Sporazum was anyhow, in constitutional terms, only a temporary measure to be looked at again after a post-war general election. The most important problem for the reorganization was seen rather in terms of guaranteeing the

physical security of the Serbs by making sure that no important number of them would ever again be under Croatian rule. Even those Serbian politicians who were still willing to understand their Croatian colleagues' point of view and to meet them half-way

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deemed it essential that the latter should clearly and loudly con- demn the massacres, without any qualifications. The more the Serbs insisted on this, the more the outnumbered Croats fought back with charges of 'Serbian chauvinism'.

What did Krnjevic really think? One can only surmise on the basis of indirect evidence, since he has never said so himself. It seems that, concerned exclusively with the rights and privileges of Croatia, he wanted to keep his freedom of choice for the future, on the basis of an acknowledged Croatian political unit. The Second World War had destroyed the factual existence of the Yugoslav state that had emerged from the First World War. If it were to be restored, it would be negotiated all over again, and since the Serbs would, once again, be in an advantageous position as initial victims and final victors of the war, it was as well that the Croats should stand on as well-acknowledged a position as possible. If Serbs and Croats failed to agree and parted company, then again a well- established starting position would be an advantage for Croatia.

He considered himself to be the plenipotentiary representative of the Croatian nation in the Allied camp, but he could only act as such from his position as vice-president of the government of Yugoslavia in London. The events of March-April 1941 had shattered the impressive unity of the HSS. It was difficult to know what the Croats at home wanted, or even the HSS which was in a difficult situation, for Krnjevic too had his communications problems. These meant trying to contact HSS cadres at home without any British or Serbian control, while trying to get to know what Serbian ministers would not trust him with. Fearing that Mihailovic's movement could turn out to be an instrument of Ser- bian predominance if not of Serbian revenge, he tried to minimize its importance and then to discredit it. He refused to engage in any genuine debate regarding the future of Yugoslavia, believed that he would fare best in an atmosphere of strained relations within the cabinet which prevented Serbian ministers from leaguing up against the Croats, and ended up by fixing himself in an intransigent posture which greatly contributed to the paralysis of the emigre government.

Serbian politicians, on the other hand, did not form a monolithic majority bloc in the government. The JNS and the NDS saw things from a Yugoslav point of view, above Serbo-Croatian quarrels, while the SZS, which had veered to a more Serbian stand, tended to keep itself for post-war action. The most active of the Serbian

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ministers in the wartime government were the representatives of the two big parties. The NRS defended Serbian interests and attacked the Croats, but it did not conceive of a Yugoslav government without HSS representatives, even though it would gladly have done without some of the 'Yugoslav' intermediaries. The DS too stood for Serbian interests, but it wanted to try and build bridges, and thought that, in view of the dangerous situation brought about by the war, it was imperative not to make the conflagration worse. All of them agreed that it was not the time to go back on the Sporazum or to deny it, but that it was not the time either to make what they saw as new concessions to the HSS. All of them believed that the common state was still in the interests of the Serbs (as indeed they believed it to be in the interests of the Croats and Slovenes too), but most of them wanted it as a three-unit federation.

The horrors of the war did, however, cause some of the Serbian members of the government to become increasingly bellicose in their nationalistic approach. A few probably began to hesitate between a three-unit federation and rejection of any further association with the Croats - although they never said so and there is no record of it. This in turn led to a split between these Serbian ministers, and others who began to fear for the survival of Yugoslavia, but the split was hardly along party lines or even entirely along regional lines. Since Sutej was less uncompromising than Krnjevic, and since there were other, lesser and more conciliatory, Croatian politicians outside the cabinet, some Serbian party leaders did cooperate with Croats against other Serbian leaders throughout 1942. Their attempts to get some compromise afloat were usually blown off course by attacks on the Croats in the Allied press believed to be insidiously inspired by Serbian colleagues, before being wrecked by what was seen as the implacable intolerance of the HSS vice-premier.

As chairman of the Serbian Cultural Club, founded in 1937 by a number of political and intellectual opposition-minded personalities to work as a pressure group in favour of Serbian interests, Jovanovic had been against the Sporazum, but he did not think that a Serbian nationalist approach would help Serbian interests any more than had the previous unitarist position, and he had wanted to reach a negotiated compromise between Serbian and Croatian interests acceptable to both sides. The war had reinforced his belief. Ustasa massacres and the Serbian reaction to them had

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finally destroyed any idea of an integrated Yugoslav national feeling, but it was in the interests of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes alike to salvage at least the concept of a joint state, for it was only in a Yugoslav community that the three groups, now dismembered severally as well as disunited collectively, could be reunited in one same country to advance both their respective and their collective welfare. Little hope would be left if Yugoslavia's exiled politicians were to fall out among themselves.

He agreed with the British government that it was essential for the Yugoslav government to issue a declaration placing above any doubt that it was the government of Yugoslavia. To state clearly its commitment to federation and democracy would answer criticism from the Croats that the Serbs, in so far as they wanted Yugoslavia, wanted it simply as a cover for Serbian hegemony, and from the communists that the exiled politicians simply wanted to get back to the authoritarian status quo ante bellum.

Most politicians agreed, and yet the issue dragged on. Jovanovic was the right man to be in the chair, but he was not a leader and proved unable to create a team spirit where none existed. The Yugoslav politicians had taken with them into exile all their unresolved conflicts, not to mention their personal animosities. By the end of 1942, as no progress had been made on the collective declaration, the prime minister went ahead on a number of measures to make it clear that the government was committed to renewing the Yugoslav state over its whole territory, on a federal basis, in the interest both of its different components and of that of Europe as a whole. Such was the gist of the King's speech broadcast on Unification Day (1 December) 1942, of Jovanovic's firm direc- tives to Mihailovic on 5 December, and of his strongly worded instructions of 14 January 1943 to Ambassador Fotic in Washington, followed by a direct rebuke on 11 February. By that time, however, the two extremes had hardened to the point where the Serbian end was confident that the Americans would intervene to let the Serbs decide on the future of Yugoslavia, and the Croatian end thought that the British would intervene to arbitrate between Serbs and Croats. The attempt to make the declaration acceptable to all produced only generalities, and even so the debate over its formal approval degenerated into personal clashes and squabbles over words.

The result was that the cabinet could not tackle any of the real major problems. It could not put an end to the mutual recrimina- tions between Serbs and Croats, or put forward a single propagan-

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da line to occupied Yugoslavia, or attempt to coordinate its policy with that of the Great Allied Powers. It was unable to give Mihailovic the amount of guidance he was entitled to expect from his government, or the population anything to counteract the psychological impact of the partisans. It failed to provide leadership for the pro-Yugoslav moderate forces from the different regions of the occupied homeland, wedged between fascism and communism, that looked to their exiled leaders. Increasingly, from the end of 1941 and throughout 1942, messages from Yugoslavia reached the government in London, urging it to speak with a single voice and to adopt policies designed to put an end to the war of mutual extermination, because the forces of separatism, left to their own devices, were playing into the hands of the enemies, foreign and domestic. But the emigre government was fast losing the possibility of doing anything constructive to bring the civil war to an end, or even to establish a common front against the communists, and all the time it was losing prestige in British eyes.

Such a climate produced cabinet crises only remotely connected with developments in Yugoslavia or in the councils of the Allies. It eventually destroyed the Jovanovic government - ironically at a time when Tito's movement, also going through a crisis, was willing to stop fighting the Germans in order to concentrate all its energies on its native opponents and, if necessary, oppose a landing on the Yugoslav coast by the Western Allies.

In the first week of 1943 the cabinet was thrown into a crisis from which it emerged with the same prime minister, a few concessions here and there, and a feeling of sobered satisfaction. To start with, it was reduced to 10 members, all from the outgoing government: Jovanovic president, Mihailovic army minister, Krnjevic and Sutej for the HSS, and one representative each for all the other parties. It was realized that, as a result of ethnic massacres, the communist- led partisan movement had obtained a hold on the mixed areas. It was necessary to repair the emigre government's prestige, and it was thought desirable to bring together Mihailovic and Matcek. Sensing a new feeling of urgency, the British government put pressure in the spring with a formal plea for unity, for the formation of a unified resistance movement, and for a declaration on the future of Yugoslavia.

In May, Prime Minister Jovanovic had completed his draft of a

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'Declaration on the War Aims and the General Aims of the State Policy of the Yugoslav Government'. This solemnly committed it to the liberation and the reunification of the dismembered parts of Yugoslavia, to its federal reorganization, and to the revision of its political institutions in a democratic spirit. It was submitted to the cabinet, debated at length, and approved by all its members, in principle. Krnjevic, however, then added a personal proviso: Jovanovic was not the right man to carry out, as prime minister, the new policy embodied in the Declaration. He asked that formal approval of it be postponed until the government had been reorganized by a new prime minister. Disillusioned, Jovanovic resigned on 17 June. In spite of appearances at its birth, his second cabinet had not been able to formulate any policy or start on any course of action, and the British, in the meanwhile, had decided to establish relations with the partisans.

The King's consultations with the party leaders on the formation of a new cabinet took almost a fortnight. Eventually they came up with two nominees for the premiership, an NRS and a DS. The monarch chose the Radical MiloS Trifunovic, at first sight a strange choice. Very much a pre-1929 politician, he was 72 and had been out of office between 1927 and 1941. As an old Radical he had both opposed the Sporazum and constantly put Serbian interests first in the emigre government. But the NRS had, after all, been the largest party in the days of parliamentary rule, and Krnjevic had actually expressed his preference for Trifunovic, saying that at least he knew where he stood with his former opponent. On 26 June 1943 Trifunovic assembled two representatives from each of the parties except the NDS, with Mihailovic again as army minister, and keeping Jovanovic on as an additional deputy premier. It had been expected that the adoption of the Declaration was to be a mere for- mality, which the new government duly performed, only to be faced immediately with a set of HSS amendments, including a reference to the Sporazum as 'one of the cornerstones of state policy'. Krnjevic justified them with the argument that the new prime minister had stated privately that he did not recognize the Sporazum. It was thus necessary to spell out a few points, and to go back on the previous agreement that the Declaration should be limited to a statement of general principles. It all had to start from scratch again, and the whole of July was spent in exchanging new drafts.

The main issue was complicated by side issues, taken over un-

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solved from Jovanovic - ambassadorial appointments, the British request for the government to go to the Near East, and the King's wish to marry. Naturally it was impossible to settle the other problems raised by the British government, such as demands concern- ing the resistance. The Croatian ministers ended up by stating that they considered any further collaboration with their Serbian colleagues impossible, but that they would not resign. Yugoslavia could not possibly survive with its pre-war personnel. Trifunovic resigned on 10 August 1943, after 45 days in office. As a last- minute attempt was being tried to obtain an exchange of concessions - Krnjevic accepting the Declaration in exchange for the Serbs sacrificing Ambassador Fotic - a new cabinet was sworn in, two hours after Trifunovic had handed in his resignation.

United against the generals, the politicians had won the day at the beginning of 1942, but they had quickly found themselves divided on other issues, with the result that their cabinets survived at the whim of the immature monarch who had inherited the shadow of the powers of his father's made-to-measure statute.

King Peter was both exploited and flattered. Serbian ministers' seemed, on the whole, unable to resist him, and the Croats showed every sign of wanting to continue the practice of dealing directly with the Crown. His propensity to be swayed this way or that by persuasion or pressure soon made the King the focus of political in- trigue. Peter II himself appears to have enjoyed the shadow play of 'ruling', as much as he disliked the dreary duty of 'reigning', ever since he formally came of age in September 1941. It was because he resented Simovic's tutoring that he readily gave in to the politicians' request and dismissed his first prime minister. Then again, it was due to the King's intervention with Churchill and Eden in December 1942 that NinEic's opponents obtained the head of the foreign affairs minister. If the full 'parliamentary' ritual of con- sulting group leaders through one or more 'mandators' was observed before a new cabinet was formed on Jovanovic's resignation, no such forms were observed after Trifunovic's fall. The British government, having lost confidence in the sense of reality of the Yugoslav politicians in exile, had decided to neutralize them by exploiting, in its turn, the King's constitutional position.

Peter II contributed powerfully to the chaos within the emigre administration by insisting on getting married despite opposition from most of his ministers. Blown up out of all proportion to reality in the rarefied atmosphere of London, this helped to bring about

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the fall of the Jovanovic government. The King wanted to get rid of Jovanovic and of those ministers who opposed his marriage, and he kept complaining about them to all those who, for other reasons, were beginning to be fed up with them and ready to exploit the King's dissatisfaction. A paradoxical conjuncture of reasons ad- vanced by the King of Yugoslavia, the Prime Minister of the UK and the Secretary General of the HSS eventually brought about the demise of the emigre political administration.

Trifunovic's cabinet was no more than a transition. Jovanovic's successor understood well enough that the monarch considered him as a mere stop-gap before finding a government of new men willing to approve his marriage. Just as Krnjevic was coming up with his amendments to the Declaration, King Peter asked Trifunovic at least to make an official announcement of his engagement. The latter gave in to this request, in order to gain time. After the fall of Jovanovic's administration, General Simovic had again offered his services to the King and suggested a working government without the senior politicians. The idea was gradually to catch on, both with the King and with the British. No sooner had the royal engagement been announced, at the end of July 1943, than both Trifunovic and Krnjevic had outlived their usefulness, as far as the King was concerned. The British were, by that time, insisting on the appointment of an emergency, non-political, purely administrative government, ready to follow their advice, and they were putting forward names. With Trifunovic's cabinet stuck in an impasse, the King's personal government of civil servants emerged, sanctioned by Churchill. It was ready to be sworn in by the time Trifunovic resigned.

The new prime minister was Bolidar Puric, a senior diplomat and, until 1941, Yugoslav minister to France. The King wanted him to underwrite his marriage. Churchill wanted him to drop Mihailovic. Actually Puric wanted to do neither, but he accepted the fact that there was nothing to be done against the King's absolute determina- tion to marry, except stall for as long as he could. On the other hand, it was on the express condition of keeping Mihailovic on that he agreed to form a government. Puric's non-political 'working party' was to be the most thoroughly committed to Mihailovic of all the emigre cabinets. If it had any governing principle, it was that the latter must at all costs remain a member of the cabinet, and so Mihailovic was reappointed minister, along with a serving naval of-

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ficer and four other civil servants representing the usual ethnic spectrum. With no political authority whatsoever, the government suffered a further fall in prestige, while its existence now depended entirely on the confidence of a 20-year old monarch in exile, playing at being an autocratic ruler, who merely wanted a cabinet to approve his marriage, and, increasingly, on the toleration of the British prime minister.

The first acts of the Puric cabinet were to extricate itself from the tangled situation of the Declaration by shelving it, with the argument that it would be worthless coming from a team of civil servants; to decide to go to Cairo; and to appoint at last an ambassador to London. No sooner was it in office, however, than complications started. The Yugoslav political establishment in exile was alive with opposition to Puric. It was thus not difficult for the King to threaten to get rid of him, no sooner had Puric tried to ad- vise the monarch to postpone his marriage until his return to Yugoslavia.

King Peter had met Princess Alexandra of Greece, niece of King George II of the Hellenes, in London in April 1942, and had immediately proposed to her. The Yugoslav government did not ob-

ject to the choice, but Prime Minister Jovanovic and all the Serbian ministers considered that to announce the engagement, let alone to

perform the marriage, would be inopportune in time of war. The

King did not raise the question formally again until April 1943, when he requested that General Mihailovic be consulted and, in the meantime, asked all members of the government for their opinions in writing. The Serbian ministers repeated their objections, and Mihailovic answered that no announcement should be made until he had had time to prepare public opinion for it. Having obtained the announcement of his engagement from Trifunovic, King Peter took the matter up again in Cairo. Puric advised postponing and it was only when he had been invited back to London for talks with the British government, that he relented. The royal wedding was

performed in the British capital on 20 March 1944. Peter II and his government had left for Cairo just after Italy had

withdrawn from the war and thereby greatly strengthened Tito's movement in Yugoslavia; and after the Cairo and Tehran con- ferences there had been, in December 1943, another change in British policy towards Yugoslavia. Pressure on Puric increased to

get him to negotiate an arrangement with the partisans. Puric disputed the validity of Churchill's assessment of the situation in

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Yugoslavia. He hoped that he could improve Mihailovi6's position by obtaining American backing, by mobilizing the freed Yugoslav POWs and internees in Italy, by a rapprochement to the Soviet Union even. When it became obvious that he could not be budged, British pressure switched to King Peter, at the time of his return to London from Cairo, to appoint a more reasonable prime minister and to give up Mihailovic. Churchill believed that he could, through the King, retain a measure of continuity and a measure of British influence in Yugoslavia, a belief that fitted in with his no- tion of 'client' monarchies elsewhere in the Mediterranean area whose main function would be to serve as anchors for the continua- tion of British influence.

The spring of 1944 saw the British trying to get Tito to recognize King Peter, and King Peter to dismiss Puric, who had, in his turn, outlived his usefulness. Losing his bearings, ruthlessly pressed by the British, afraid of what he had done, King Peter returned for advice to the senior party leaders. A feeling of panic brought them together for a while. Jovanovic had talks to see whether an all- party government could not be put together again, but the representatives of the two main Serbian parties, NRS and DS, could not team up.

Churchill, anyhow, had suggested Ivan Subagic, HSS ban of Croatia since 1939, who was in the USA. After the marriage, the King summoned him for consultations. Churchill proceeded to in- form Tito that Suba?i6, who had arrived in London in May, would be appointed prime minister; then the House of Commons that King Peter had accepted the resignation of the Puric government, and that he was in the process of forming a new one, without Mihailovic, in which gubaSic would be an important factor - all that at a time when, in fact, Puri6 had not resigned and the King was still refusing to dismiss him. Broken, King Peter eventually gave in, almost a week after Churchill's announcement, and without the previous resignation of Puric or of his ministers.

The young monarch, who had tried for 10 months to play a political role over and above the heads of his country's traditional parties, now became a simple instrument. Subasic was appointed and sworn in, on 1 June 1944, as the entire government, combining the presidency of the Council of Ministers with all 14 ministerial portfolios. The main factor in ?ubasic:'s favour was that, along with the King, he, as the pre-war royal-appointed head of the exe- cutive of the Croatian Banovina, represented the legitimacy of the

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state. He was also willing to talk with Tito. A Croat and a promi- nent member of the HSS, he was more docile than Krnjevic. Loyal to the dynasty, he had been Prince Paul's nominee for the office of ban. In 1935-41 he had acted as intermediary between Ma&ek and the Belgrade government. In 1944, he was to act as intermediary between Churchill (nominally King Peter) and Tito. His one-man government had been called into being for the express purpose of coming to an arrangement with Tito, although he vainly thought that he had, once again, been called to reconciliate all the parties in Yugoslavia, and boasted that he could do so.

Ten days after his appointment, he left for the island of Vis to begin the long series of negotiations with Tito, intended to lead to the formation of a coalition government. Tito granted that the issue of the monarchy would not be raised before the war had come to an end. The King's government recognized the provisional administration set up by the People's Liberation Movement as the only authority on Yugoslav territory and the People's Liberation Army as the only fighting force. Subasic would form a cabinet made up of progressive elements that had not taken up a stand against the People's Liberation Movement. Its main task would be to organize support for the partisans from abroad, and Tito put forward the names of two personalities he wished to be included. An agreement was drawn up on these lines and signed between Subasic and Tito on 16 June 1944. ?ubasic had consulted nobody, not even the King. He had acted alone and, except for a few temporary concessions of form obtained from Tito, the 'Tito-Subasic Agreement' was a complete capitulation by Subaisic.

On his return, and after 37 days as prime and sole minister, Subasic appointed five other ministers. Along with Tito's two nominees, there were three emigre politicians now drifting to a policy of compromise with Tito, one of them being Sutej. Mihailovic was not reappointed army minister. He refused to recognize Suba'sic's cabinet, yet he did not organize a counter- government and proclaimed his loyalty to the King. During August there started a purge of all those who did not approve of the new trend among the civil servants of the emigre administration. Mihailovic was dismissed from his remaining office of chief of staff to the Supreme Command on 29 August. Finally, on 12 September, the King broadcast an appeal to all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to rally round Tito, adding that 'the stigma of treason' would stick to all those who did not answer the call. Having joined Tito in

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liberated Belgrade, ?ubasic signed another agreement with him on 1 November. Pending a plebiscite on the monarchy to be organized after the complete liberation of the country, the King would remain abroad and delegate the exercise of the royal prerogative to a regency council appointed in agreement with Tito. A provisional government would be set up from ?ubaric's cabinet and from Tito's committee. When the prime minister returned to London, the King refused to accept the new agreement, tried to resist and actually dismissed Subasic on 23 January 1945, only to reinstate him reluctantly under strong British pressure six days later, having swallowed the regency.

Then a fortnight later, Suba?ic and the members of his cabinet left London for Belgrade. When, on 7 March 1945, Tito formed the new provisional government of Yugoslavia, with a majority of 25 to 3 in the merger, the 'Royal Yugoslav Government in exile' was no more.

During the Second World War, all Allied leaders in London, to a greater or lesser extent, had to live with the mistakes of the pre-war situation and with military defeat. The Yugoslavs also took with them the burden of unresolved ethnic questions. A government in exile could support acquiescence in the homeland where a majority of the population recognized a bond between themselves and that government which not even enemy occupation could break. It was obvious that in dismembered and occupied Yugoslavia, there was neither the political consensus nor the homogeneous patriotic feeling which could make such a bond possible for a majority of the population.

Whatever the Yugoslav government represented, it was not unity. It had been formed in the eleventh hour as a government of union, and between that hour and the time when it arrived in Lon- don, one could even say that an element of chance had gone into filling the places emptied by the circumstances of the debacle. Union, like the Yugoslav government of that time, is made up of divergences; unlike the Yusoglav government, it overcomes its contradictions, and starts off by facing them. Not having had the time to set up a common platform, the Yugoslav politicians were frozen by defeat and exile into the attitudes which they had had on the eve of having been brought together, and they were trapped together in a Sartrian huis-clos 'for the duration'. The disaster that destroyed

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Yugoslavia was so great that, among the survivors of her crew who found their way to the safety of the British shore, there were not enough people with enough will even to face these contradictions. The crucial problems that they should have tackled demanded unity and maximum mutual confidence, so that the Yugoslav government proved incapable of concentrating on the real issues. Indeed, for most of the time, most of the politicians acted as if they could only survive the war together by deliberately running away from the real issues. Reduced as they were to trying to save acquired positions, based on past considerations, for sectional and in- dividual points of view, for which they all considered themselves to be indispensable and sacred depositories, their only real policy could be one of wait-and-see, paralysed furthermore by use of the liberum veto.

For long out of office, and then all together in office but without a country, the government leaders in London were already, to a certain extent, men with manners and grievances of another age. The framework in which they operated was one of the past, and the models to which they referred went back to the 1930s, the First World War, the early years of the century, even the 1860s. Without the corrective of a visionary imagination, they did not, in their historicism, realize that their achievements, their ideals and their followings were being destroyed in the chaos of the war.

Usually labelled 'royalist', they were so to the extent that they were the government of HM the King of Yugoslavia, and also to the extent that their political culture knew of no other constitutional form. In fact, the Yugoslav monarchy meant little else in former Austro-Hungarian territories and in Macedonia. In spite of much sentimentalizing about Karageorge, King Peter I and the boy Peter II, the authoritarian and semi-authoritarian experiments of the inter-war period had damaged the image even among Serbs. Royal authority was soon no more than a word to be bandied about by various factions until it lost the legal content everyone still pretended it had.

The British were perhaps the most ruthless exploiters of the con-

cept, and the more so since the Yugoslav 'governmentals' believed that the British - or the Allies at any rate - would settle all their difficulties for them. They admired and feared but did not love the 'English', and in order to gain their confidence, took to revealing most of their secrets and dissensions to them. In exchange for

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which they were despised, and kept in deliberate ignorance of many aspects of British policy towards their own country.

The Yugoslav exiles viewed the 'English' as being - all of them, from King George VI and Churchill down to the last BBC official, SOE country-desk liaison man or M15 agent - spokesmen for the one policy of the mighty monolithic British Empire. Different Yugoslav politicians had different contacts with British of- ficialdom, and every Yugoslav believed that 'British policy' was what his contact told him. British policy was all too often difficult to perceive. Even if its dominant voice is more or less clear to us now, it was not necessarily so to the Yugoslavs in London at the time, and there were always counter-voices to choose from. Cut off from their homeland, with no regular confidential channels of communication, they had to rely on distorted scraps of information. And since there was no consensus and no trust among them, these scraps were not collated, so that each politician came to accept as true only that which fed his wishful thinking, whether about the situation at home or about British policy towards Yugoslavia.

The exiled Yugoslavs were alien to the milieu and to the mentali- ty, of the British. Transplanted to London, the Yugoslavs were utterly lost, and found the corridors of Whitehall (not to mention all the secret addresses) much more insidious than any Balkan highway had ever been. Most of them never really understood why, having been overwhelmed with the emotional avowal of British gratitude on their arrival, they were shoved off the stage as irrelevant nuisances three years later.

In the Foreign Office documents, they all too often appear as mere cyphers, set characters out of a Ruritarian comedia dell'arte or a Levantine shadow play, whereas, in fact, as individuals, they were neither stupid nor dishonest, and were not devoid of political ideals, of acumen or of experience. Hitherto they have been ap- proached from the outside, and labelled away with cliches. The aim of this study is to open the way to an understanding of the men- talities, the motivations, the political culture and the historical framework of a group of personalities who were projected, then re- jected, by the issues over, above and behind them.

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118 Journal of Contemporary History

Notes

This study is intended as a critical evaluation of the wartime Yugoslav government 'from within', so to speak. The author has made full use of sources close to the London-based government, but avoided reference to, while assuming knowledge of, British and American sources.

1. Wayne S. Vucinich, preface to DraglSa N. Ristic, Yugoslavia's Revolution of 1941 (University Park, USA, and London 1966), 13.

Stevan K. Pavlowitch is Senior Lecturer in the History of the Balkans, University of Southampton. He is the author of Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Serbia, 1837-1839 (The Hague and Paris, 1961), Yugoslavia (Lon- don and New York 1971) and Bijou d'Art (Lausanne 1978). He is currently working on Italy in Yugoslavia 1941-1943.

Yugoslav government in Exile London

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