World War I and The Kingdom of Yugoslavia
In World War I bands of Chetniks fought against the Bulgarian Army and organized the Toplica Insurrection, which was quickly crushed by the Bulgarians.
After the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Kingdom of Yugoslavia) and the arrival of peacetime, the Chetnik movement ceased functioning as a guerrilla force, and became a civilian organization. In 1921 the Organization of Chetniks for the Freedom and Honor of the Fatherland (Udruženje Četnika za slobodu i čast Otadžbine) was formed, and in 1924 the Organization of Serbian Chetniks for King and Fatherland (Udruženje srpskih četnika za Kralja i Otadžbinu), while the formation of the Organization of Serbian Chetniks Petar Mrkonjić (Udruženje srpskih četnika Petar Mrkonjić) also followed. These latter two merged the following year as the Organization of Serbian Chetniks Petar Mrkonjić.
After the unitarianist King Alexander I proclaimed a dictatorship in 1929, the Organization of Serbian Chetniks Petar Mrkonjić was banned while the Organization of Chetniks for Freedom and Honour of the Fatherland was allowed to continue operating. Kosta Pećanac was the organization's leader from 1932 up to the occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941. Between the two World Wars Pećanac was the most prominent figure in the Chetnik movement, and also had a leading role in the Association against Bulgarian Bandits, a notorious organisation that arbitrarily terrorised local Bulgarians and IMRO militants in the Štip region. As a result of Pećanac's move to open membership of the Chetnik Association to new younger members that had not served in World War I, in the course of the 1930s he took organisation from a nationalist veterans' association focused on protecting veterans' rights, to an aggressively partisan Serb political organisation which reached 500,000 members throughout the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During this period, Pećanac formed close ties with the far-right Yugoslav Radical Union government of Milan Stojadinović.
Read more about this topic: Chetniks
Famous quotes containing the words world, war, kingdom and/or yugoslavia:
“While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer drink; impressively, even pathetically, wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January,—wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so many things are not provided for. It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)
“No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 9:62.
“International relations is security, it’s trade relations, it’s power games. It’s not good-and-bad. But what I saw in Yugoslavia was pure evil. Not ethnic hatred—that’s only like a label. I really had a feeling there that I am observing unleashed human evil ...”
—Natasha Dudinska (b. c. 1967)