TWO FASCIST IDEOLOGISTS
AND KRIMINALS OF WAR

PROMOTED FOUNDING FATHERS
OF UN ANTI-SERB MONTENEGRO

By KOMNEN BECIROVIC

Translated by Francesca Gillon                                       

It is truly prejudicial to the Montenegrins’ honour and dignity as well as insulting to the memory of all those victims of the fascist scourge in ex Yugoslavia and elsewhere, to see how for many years now  and without international public opinion noticing it two fascist ideologists and criminals of war have been rehabilitated in their own country, namely: Sekula Drljevic, a barrister and a politician, born in 1884 in Moraca and Savic Markovic going by the name of Stedimlija, a publicist, born in 1906 in Piperi.
      This rehabilitation which is now done was first started and conducted  in Zagreb at the time of the nationalist enthusiasm in Croatia before the harmful secession of that Republic from the Yugoslav Federation in 1991, taken up and slyly pursued in Montenegro in the nineties by the anti-Serb weekly Monitor, impudently and ostentatiously continued since Milo Djukanovic established his personal power in 1997 by the half-monthly Crnogorski knjizevni list, the Montenegrin literary newspaper edited by Jevrem Brkovic, the poet and crank writer who spent eight years in Zagreb as a militant for the Croat and Islamic-Bosnian cause. The texts written by Drljevic and Markovic-Stedimlija and pulished in Zagreb and Podgorica, have in fact become founding texts of the anti-Serb Montenegrin state being established by the reigning team of ex-communists led by Djukanovic expecting its consecration on the occasion of the referendum to be held willy-nilly next spring and considered as already won. 

Komnen Becirovic

     It is for quite mean reasons that those two characters changed sides during the thirties of the last century, their anti-Serb attitude being all the more extreme as they had until then acknowledged their serbity ; Drljevic had failed to get the ministerial position he coveted in king Alexander’s government after the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918, and Markovic-Stedimlija had failed to find  a place for his wild imaginings on the Croat nature of Montenegrins in the Serb-Montenegrin press forcing him to make do with ultra-nationalist Croat publications.

      The further Hitler’s monstrous creation sunk into magnum crimen, to use the title of the famous work by the Croat historian Victor Novak on that gloomy period, the more Stedimlija praised the bloody Pavelic as can be seen in the following lines chosen among so many similar ones:

     “For the first time in the life of the Croat people the guide and leader of the people are united in a single person. The Poglavnik, Dr. Ante Pavelic, having spent the most difficult times in fighting for the liberation of Croatia and the recovery of its independence and having made the greatest efforts has succeeded thanks to his specific virtues and his spiritual strength. He has most deeply understood the Croat people’s destiny, has perceived its qualities and capabilities, realized the meaning of its way through history and has discovered the mystery of its suffering so that he has decided to satisfy its greatest need by the means that the very people will give Him when He will ask for it. He has thus become the supreme Guide in whose will and thought the whole people’s will and thought are to be found. Through his determination and relying on what is best in his people when it was most necessary, the Poglavnik has by a revolutionary act liberated Croatia from the foreign yoke and re-established its independence thereby laying the basis for its development in liberty, happiness and well-being… Thanks to His clairvoyance, He has been able to see the advent of the New European Order proclaimed by fascism and nazism and to understand how the system put in place by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy perfectly coincides with the wishes of the Croat people by offering it the means to develop into a great, powerful and civilized people within its own State which will occupy its due place in the new European order…”

     Beyond those blaring words one will notice that the man who praises Pavelic the executioner writes the personal pronouns with capital letters whenever he refers to the latter as it was done in the past for the names of kings, emperors or God himself. And while hundreds of thousands of orthodox Serbs were perishing under the knives of the Ustashi Croats, ended up at the bottom of mountain abysses or in the death camp of Jasenovac or were forced to convert to Catholicism, the impious Stedimlija, acting as the deputy of the fake Serb bishop Germogen appointed by Pavelic and as director of a so-called Orthodox calendar rejoiced: “ The souls of orthodox Croats are overjoyed according to the many letters written both by the congregations and the members of the clergy. Their hearts are filled with happiness and gratitude for the Poglavnik’s work. They say in their letters that with joyful tears they invoke Him who governs the world and the centuries to bless Poglavnik and the Ustashi Croat state having understood the path taken by the Poglavnik and the independent Croat state.”

     Drljevic greeted the occupation of Montenegro by Mussolini’s army as a liberation from the Serbs and in the presence of the military governor Serafino Mazzolini, surrounded by black shirts exclaimed on July 12th 1941 in Cetinje, the day when the so-called sovereignty of Montenegro was re-established: “God bless His Majesty, Victor-Emmanuel III, the glorious King and Emperor of the powerful and friendly Italian Empire. The Montenegrin people are proud of the fact that the advent of a free Montenegro is associated with the immortal work of the Duce, the inspired creator of the fascist Empire, and with the exploits of the glorious and victorious Italian army.” It is to be remembered that when Yugoslavia was shared between Hitler and Mussolini in 1941, Montenegro had been awarded to Italy as a sort of belated dowry for queen Hélčne, Victor-Emmanuel’s wife and daughter of king Nicolas of Montenegro whom Drljevic had betrayed when opting, against the wish of the old king who had appointed him minister, for the integration of Montenegro into Yugoslavia, option he was later to fight against. And yet when the Italians let him down, the unsavoury individual who believed himself to be Montenegro providential man turned to other masters, the nazis, praising them at the very moment when Europe was transformed into the theatre of their crimes, when extermination camps were working at full capacity and when bruised peoples were bleeding and moaning in their superhuman fight against the curse. Drljevic was writing in particular:

     “The national-socialist revolution will have been by far less bloody than any other previous significant revolutions because the national-socialist ideology was not imposed by terror or blood upon the people but accepted by the great majority of the people prior to becoming a prevailing ideology. Adolph Hitler, the guide of the national-socialist revolution became the Führer of the German people prior to becoming the Führer of the Great German Reich.”And when a group of officers dared on July 20th 1944 raise their hands to their idol, Drljevic could not stop wondering: “Is it possible that in the German army whose fate would be envied by the greatest heroes of any century could be found officers determined to commit a crime just for the sake of taking hold of power? And what makes the conjurors’ crime all the more serious is the moment chosen by them to make an attempt on the Führer’s life with all the resulting consequences. According to their own confessions, they were thus ready to transform a people of one hundred million men into European slaves who would have made their sweat bear profit to Jewish capitalism free of charge for another century at least.”

     And the Führer’s flatterer congratulates himself that the saved life of the former will be his rampart as he persevered in his adulation for Hitler and Ante Pavelic, the hideous satrap of his. The latter gave Drljevic au audience as late as the end of February 1944 to confirm the support and assistance of the Ustashi Croat government to his “Montenegrin council” and make it possible to publish and distribute his anti-Serb pamphlet entitled Balkan Conflicts which the Croats will hastily republish in 1990 just before the break-up of Yugoslavia by them. Drljevic was not only in favour with Pavelic but also with Ustashi Croat dignitaries and particularly with Andrija Artukovic, in charge of home affairs and so successful at it he was nicknamed “the death minister”, obviously for as well as by the Serbs and Jews alike. Whenever Andrija Artukovic visited Zemun, the town where Drljevic officially lived in the street Adolph Hitler, the latter embraced him at the station.

     However the Montenegrin Quisling committed a most hideous crime in collusion with his Croat masters when at the beginning of April 1945 thousands of Montenegrin royalist combatants, the Tchetniks, under the leadership of Pavle Djurisic, retreating before Tito’s communist troops arrived in northern Bosnia in the plain of Lijevac at the bottom of mount Kozara and were confronted with Ustashi troops more numerous than themselves. Drljevic offered them an armistice or even a safe conduct to the West if they surrendered and signed an agreement with them to this effect. They believed him but as soon as they had handed their arms over some three hundred officers along with Djurisic, their commander, were taken to Jasenovac to be murdered there while the sinister clown proclaimed himself commander of the remains of this army of distressed men which he believed himself capable of leading, within the framework of the Croat army and the Wehrmacht, to liberate Montenegro from the so-called Serb slavery so obsessed had he been by the myth of Nazi Germany’s invincibility. He however never got the time to prove his talents as man of war which would have proved even more pitiful than his talents as politician since the just retribution did not fail to catch up with him in the middle of the general rout at Judenburg in Austria where one of survivors of the massacre he had plotted against him served him back the same fate.

     His associate Stedimlija, a skilful and sly individual not without wit and speaking German well was sent towards the end of the war as Croat diplomatic representative to the Reich headquarters for Balkan affairs in Vienna to give a new life to Germany’s weakening support to Croatia as well as to Montenegro such as Drljevic and himself conceived it. His very detailed reports sent to Zagreb show how the Germans who were assailed from everywhere, cared little about it. On the contrary, when Stedimjila insisted upon Theodor Wührer, a high dignitary, for greater assistance to Croatia he was openly reminded that the Croats were responsible for their self-inflicted disaster as the Germans had never ordered the murder of seven hundred thousand Serbs committed by the Ustashi Croats thus provoking the Serb uprising. Coming from a German dignitary, this assertion is most interesting for all kinds of revisionists and negationists of the genocide carried out against the Serbs in Ustashi Croatia.

     When Vienna was occupied by the Russians, Stedimlija was taken prisoner and remained there for ten years before being extradited towards Yugoslavia where he was judged and sentenced as a criminal of war by the Zagreb tribunal to eight years imprisonment, a sentence he did not serve benefiting from complicities within the Croat communist power. From then on he adopted a low profile and signed his texts, mainly essays, under pseudonyms although he made himself heard with his usual vehemence and under his real name of Savic Markovic on the occasion of the affair of the Mount Lovcen sanctuary in 1970. In the Zagreb daily Vjesnik he made his contribution to the profanation and destruction undertaken by the communist regime of the chapel at the top of the Mount Lovcen sheltering the ashes of the greatest Serb poet, Peter Petrovich Niegosh, the metropolitan prince of Montenegro. It had already been desecrated and destroyed as national symbol a first time by the Austrian-Hungarians during World War I but restored by king Alexander on the liberation and creation of Yugoslavia. On restoring the sanctuary on Mount Lovcen and returning Niegosh’s ashes to the solitary place chosen by the poet prince, king Alexander had simply carried out a national as well as a familial duty, Niégoch being his maternal great-great-uncle. And yet the humble chapel of Lovcen representing the seal of the famous grand-Serb hegemony in the perverse mind of the fascist old campaigner Stedimlija and his associates as well as in that of the communists, they had no difficulty in agreeing in some monstrous solidarity to having it destroyed and replaced instead by the dismal blockhouse designed by a Croat artist which since stands on the disfigured summit of the Lovcen as the symbol of the most perfect fusion of the two totalitarian evils of the twentieth century, the fascist and communist, ones which have tormented the Serb people among others. This crime, which was committed simultaneously against nature, history and culture and which such eminent people as André Malraux, Gabriel Marcel, Jean Cassou, Pierre Emmanuel and others vainly tried to prevent by a direct appeal to Tito, was a spectacular blow dealt to the Serb identity of Montenegro. Obviously the present Montenegrin political leaders, as faithful heirs of their elders are proud of this monstrous building which the elements never fail to damage, and refuse the idea of giving back something of its original aspect to the summit of Mount Lovcen.          

     However, even if Stedimlija, who died in 1970, and Drljevic had both been flattered, rewarded and honoured while being kept in check by their Croat masters, they did not enjoy a similar treatment from the Germans despite their flattering gesticulations in praise of Hitler and the third Reich. On the contrary they never failed to express their contempt for the two renegades  as Rastislav V. Petrovic, the historian, has proved it in his well documented book entitled The Ustashi Croat Montenegrins published in Belgrade in 1997 which is the basis for this present text. Thus Hermann Neubacher, the Reich minister for south eastern European affairs, would qualify Drljevic of “insignificant and villainous individual first in the pay of the Italians, then the Croats and even of a Croatian whore ”; Hans Helm, the German representative to the Ustashi Croat government treated Stedimlija similarly when the latter was chosen for the key role of the genocide propaganda, wondering ironically what possibly could be his name and surname. And even though, according to Antoine Sidoti, the author of Montenegro and Italy during World War II, published by CNRS in 2004, Mussolini himself had ended up feeling compassion for the fate of the Croatian Serbs, declaring he would never forgive Pavelic for having killed one million of them, the two Ustashi Croat mercenaries, the only ones Montenegro ever to have produced, remained to the very end indifferent to such massacre and immured in their inhumanity  fed on the cursed food of treason.

     Unfortunately, these are the two unfortunate devils, Sekula Drljevic and Savic Markovic, the master and the disciple, that the present determined anti-Serb regime, by-passing the most illustrious Montenegrins including Niegosh himself precisely on account of their Serb identities, has gone and fetched on the rubbish pile of history to be the forerunners, the theoreticians “the coryphaei of the Montenegrin nation”, to use the term employed by Jevrem Brkovic, the most zealous of their followers. Their infamous writings are today used as a reference in the fields of politics, history, ethnology, linguistics as well as theology. Besides the popular poem plagiarized by Drljevic, an even more pitiful poet than politician, Ō, luminous down of Montenegro ! , is raised to the status of “national anthem” being daily sung on Montenegrin television. In number 84 dated June 1st 2004 of the more slanderous and heinous than literary sheet edited by Brkovic and financed by public funds, one can also read an appeal by the fanatically separatist historian Novak Adzic for the repatriation of Drljevic’s remains from Austria to Montenegro so that they may be solemnly inhumed. With due proportions, this reminds us that Croat president Franjo Tudjman had formerly suggested to have Pavelic’s remains transferred to Zagreb and given national funerals.

     In short, Drljevic and Stedimlija have truly become the henchmen of present Montenegro. Needless to say that most Montenegrins whose names in history is identified with liberty and dignity resent this revisionist charade making the already unwholesome climate in the country even worse, considering it not only humiliating but even worse prejudicial to their millenary Serb identity. Besides the fact that they cannot accept their country to be haunted by the ghosts of a monstrous past despite this nightmarish propaganda, they find their union with their brothers in Serbia almost a century old all the more natural as they share a common history, language, culture and religion not to mention the multitude of Montenegrins having migrated and become Serbian citizens. And even if one had to accept a sovereign Montenegrin state, such a state having existed on several occasions in the past but always as a Serb state, one cannot but be indignant and anxious at the idea that may see the light a state whose pillars would not be illustrious Montenegrin figures but those two poor devils instead with their sorrowful inheritance of criminal, chauvinistic and racist acts and phantasms having thrived in the shade of nazi abomination.

     To consecrate such a state, whose failings are not limited to the above, by giving it international recognition would be a grievous mistake, an act against nature, ethics, history.

Translated by Francesca Gillon                                 

B. I.  (Balkans-Infos)

N° 106, janvier 2006

 See also by Komnen Becirovic:  La serbite des Montenegrins, B.I. n° 54, avril 2001; La grande figure du prince-poete Niegoch, B.I. n° 52, fevrier 2001; Montenegro: les aberrations du separatisme antiserbe, B.I. n° 94, decembre  2004.

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