KING PETER OF YUGOSLAVIA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 88, Issue 126, 29 May 1944, Page 5

KING PETER OF YUGOSLAVIA

“CHANCES OF RETURN ARE SUM” THREE MAIN REASONS >Recd. 6.30 p.m. Landon. May 27. "Unless there is some unforeseen I development, King Peter's chances of • returning to his country as a ruling I monarch are very slim,” says a representative of the Combined BritishI American Press in Yugoslavia. ! “There are three outstanding argu-. i ments supporting this conclusion. ! “Firstly, the constant association of • the King’s name with General Mik'hailovitch (leader of Yugoslav | Patriots), who is regarded throughout the Liberation movement as the country’s greatest traitor. “Secondly, the King has been sur- * rounded by governments composed mostly of reactionary Serbs, representing the exact opposite to what the Partisans are fighting for, namely, a free Federated Yugoslavia. The King’s recent declaration on this point came too ]ate and merely reiterated Marshal Tito’s earlier proclamation. “Thirdly, the Royal House is closely associated with the repressive dictatorship established by King Peter’s father, Alexander.” BUT ONEJLEADER TITO FOR YUGOSLAVIA STORIES OF QUISLING CRUELTY Reed. 8 p.m. Rugby, May 27. ' “Successive Royal Yugoslav Governments in London seem very far away to these peoples of the liberated territories," writes a correspondent representing the combined British and American Press. “Indeed, these Governments might not exist, except in so far as they prove a stumbling block to Allied recognition of the National Committee. “From ehere, in Free Yugoslavia, there is but one Government, and that is the Government of Marshal Tito. There are without doubt people in the liberated territories who still cling to the relics of days when Yugoslavia was a kingdom. I, personally, have seen pictures and photographs of the Royal Family, including King Peter and his brothers, on walls of country farms, but all these people are Yugoslavs. Before anything else, their one aim is to rid their country of the Germans, and to achieve this they see but one leader, Tito.” Another correspondent writes of Axis crimes against the Partisans in occupied Yugoslavia. He says: “Every day I hear, or read accounts, of systematic mass crime committed bv Germans and Croatians and Serbian Quislings on the population. Stories are of incendiarism, rape, sadism, the bayoneting of children and wholesale slaughter; stories so gruesome that my typewriter revolts at having the details to put down. “Adjoining the district where my family comes from there is the province ot Knordun, where 80,000 Serbian peasants lived before the war. No less than 40,000 have been massacred by a Croatian Quisling in Ustashl. The figure has been checked, because the province has been liberated. Whenever Partisans get their hands on a war criminal they take him to the place of his crime and try him, with a public prosecutor and defence counsel delivering their speeches in front of hundreds of local witnesses. "The tolerance of mass crime on the part of a Quisling official is, in itself. a war crime. In the last few months five large-scale public trials of war criminals, among them two governors of the Qusling Pavelich, took nlace in this part of Yugoslavia. In Ustashi, Commander Ivan Medjumirrac was hanged in public for having killed, with his own hands. 30 Serbian old men, women and children. So was another Ustashi commander, Franjo Vor“l. who had boasted of having drunk Serbian blood."