SHOT AT DAWN

Greymouth Evening Star, 18 July 1946, Page 8

SHOT AT DAWN

MIKHAILOVITCH EXECUTED

“DOOMED FROM START OF TRIAL” COMMENT ON PROCEEDINGS (Rec. 11 a.m.) LONDON, July 17. According to a Belgrade message General Mikhailovitch and eight of his co-defendants were shot at dawn to-day. Only military and other officials were present when General Mikhailovitch and eight others were executed this morning, says Reuter’s Belgrade correspondent. The eight shot 'with Mikhailovitch were: Draghi Yovanovitch, Belgrade police chief during the occupation of Milan, Glishitch and Radoslav Raditch, members of Mikhailovitch’s staff, Velibor Yonitch, Ranasje Dinitch and General Jure Dokitch, members of the quisling government, General Kosta Mushicki and a former deputy, Paolovitch. The other two sentenced to death. Peter Zhivkovitch and Mladen Zujovitch, were both tried in their absence. The Associated Press correspondent says that Belgrade people lost all interest in General Mikhailovitch and the others once they were sentenced to death. The authorities were diffident about issuing a statement regarding the executions. Their attitude was that the news thereon was not important. The convicted men, it is believed, were shot at dawn, according to long-standing military custom. Efforts Behind Scenes. , ’ It was earlier reported that the Jugoslav authorities had rejected an appeal by General Mikhailovitch against the death sentence passed on him for collaboration with the enemy and war crimes. “Although Mr. Bevin said that Jugoslav law' must, take its course, efforts are being made behind the scenes which might save General Mikhailovitch, the Chetnik leader, from the firing squad,” said the Daily Express in an earlier report. “The Foreign Office sent all the facts in Mikhailovitch s favour to Belgrade, and last minute pleas were made tactfully but unofficially by diplomats to Marshal Broz-Tito.’ . The Daily Telegraph reported that the former King Peter of Jugoslavia had appealed to His Majesty, President Truman, and Mr. Bidault to intervene bn behalf of General Mikhailovitch. New Regime’s Methods. The Belgrade correspondent of The Times said “The trial in which General Mikhailovitch—whom the British saw for some time as a romantic warrior and a mountain hero —was sentenced to death as a traitor and a war criminal, was not the kind of trial known in England. General Mikhailovitch, from the moment, he entered the court, was a doomed man. “The new retroactive law under which he was tried considers a man guilty until he is proved innocent. Therefore, the president, whose attitude was nearer that of a prosecutor than that of any English Judge, behaved strictly legally. It accounts for the cheers which always greeted him and the public prosecutor, and for the hisses that always greeted the accused and the defence counsel. It also accounts for the rejection of foreign evidence which would have shown that General Mikhailovitch several times took action against Germans and saved hundreds of American airmen from thorn. Once collaboration was established in certain instances, the evidence of resistance in. others did not matter. Evidence of Collaboration.

“In one of his moments of rare emotion, General Mikhailovitch denied that he ordered the massacre of his countrymen, refused to admit that he organised collaboration, and convincingly explained away his meetings with the Germans. However, overwhelming evidence emerged that his units almost from the beginning to the end lived on terms with the invaders, shared the stores of villages with them and went into action with them.”

The correspondent considers that the British Government came out well at the trial. Many documents bore witness to the efforts made to bring the two Jugoslav armies together. Through the troubled story moved the shadowy figures of British liaison officers on various missions, tactical and political. General Mikhailovitch in. his final speech explained that he had been something of a progressive. He had hated the old Jugoslavia, tried to rouse the people against the Nazis, and endeavoured to modernise the army.' He had been a friend of the Russians when no one else -would talk to them. Perhaps his best actions were to have stayed in his country twice when he could have fled—first when* the Germans came, and then when they left. He spoke without spite, though there were many he could have dragged down with him. American Airmen Protest.

Four American airmen who were shot down in Jugoslavia and rescued by Chetniks picketed the Jugoslav Consulate in New York as a protest against the death sentence on General Mikhailovitch. One carried a placard reading, “Five hundred American airmen know the truth about Mikhailovitch, but Broz-Tito will not let us talk.” They also sent a telegram to Mr. Truman urging him to intervene to prevent the execution of a man. “whose only crime was that he fought for democracy against all dictatorship.” Senator A. H. Vandenberg (Republican), addressing the United

States Senate on the Paris conference, said: “The need for protection of the autonomy of the Central European Powers will not be lessened in enlightened world opinion by the bitter tragedy of the order for the "legalistic assassination of General Mikhailovitch.”