Chetniks

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The Chetniks (Serbian: четници or četnici) were members of a Serbian nationalist and royalist guerrilla organization named after a 19th century Serbian movement opposing Ottoman rule. The term is also applied to the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland, a guerilla force during the Second World War.

1 Origins
2 Modern era
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Origins

Chetniks originally formed as a result of the Macedonian struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Soon, other ethnic groups in the Balkans created their own chetnik detachments: Serbs, Bulgarians, Greek Andartes and Albanian Kacaci. At first, the Ottoman rulers offered little resistance to them, as the various groups were primarily occupied in conflicts with each other. In Herzegovina, they fought the Turks, in northern Macedonia against Turks and pro-Turkish Albanians.

At the start of the Balkan wars there were 110 IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization), 108 Greek, 30 Serbian and 5 Vlach detachments. They supported their respective sides in the Turkish rear in the First Balkan War. Chetnik general and father was Draza Mihajlovic.

[edit] Modern era

Vojislav Šešelj, a leader of the Serbian Radical Party, held a rank of voivoda of the Chetniks, given to him in 1989 by Momčilo Đujić, a surviving leader of the WWII Chetniks who fled to the U.S., although he revoked this title in 1998 because Šešelj collaborated with the Serbian Socialist Party of Slobodan Milošević.

During the Yugoslav wars, several paramilitary formations, boasted Chetnik insignia and some of them committed crimes against non-Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia. This has contributed to the even more negative image of Chetniks in Croatia and Bosnia who brutally killed many residents in Vukovar and Srebrenica. Srebrenica massacre that took place in 1995 has been officialy declared as Genocide.