Posted on 05/26/2013 10:04:15 AM PDT by Perdogg
Edited on 05/26/2013 10:14:39 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
Hundreds of mourners including Serbian government officials have attended a state funeral for deposed King Petar II Karadjordjevic decades after his death in exile.
The reburial of the king and other members of the former royal family is seen as an important act of national reconciliation.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sky.com ...
ping
Now we see this, interesting....
Sorry here is the link
http://news.sky.com/story/1095858/funeral-for-serbian-king-70-years-after-death
My stepfather was good friends with the prince Andrej. I know there is a large group Nasa Kruna that supports restoration. Having lived there, I would love to see it happen.
He died in 1970, which is not 70 years ago.
Every nation that has a legitimate monarch anywhere should work overtime to bring him home and restore his throne. It is no longer a matter of justice; it has become a matter of national survival of all.
The error is whoever's writes headlines to Sky News. The body of the article has it right:
...nearly 70 years after King Petar Karadjordjevic was proclaimed a traitor by communists....
After Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, Petar fled the country and spent the most of World War Two in exile in Britain. After the war, Petar was proclaimed a traitor by the communist leadership, which also abolished the monarchy.
His property was confiscated and he remained exiled until his death in 1970, aged 47, in the United States.
He was buried at a Serbian Orthodox Church monastery in Libertyville, Illinois - the only European monarch laid to rest on US soil.
2013 - nearly 70 = nearly 1943. 1944, probably, when Tito got on top.
He went to the United Kingdom in June 1941, where he joined numerous other governments in exile from Nazi-occupied Europe.[3] The King completed his education at Cambridge University and joined the Royal Air Force.When the Yugoslav Army collapsed, two rival resistance groups formed to fight the occupying forces. The first were the Partisans, a Communist-led left-wing movement encompassing republican elements in Yugoslav politics, led by Josip Broz Tito. The other were the "Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland", commonly known as Chetniks, a predominantly Serbian movement led by royalist General Draža Mihailović, who was proclaimed the Minister of Defence by the government-in-exile. Starting in November 1941, Mihailović attacked the Partisan strongholds, the liberated territories. A Chetnik splinter group, under the leadership of Kosta Pećanac soon ceased operations against the occupation altogether, and focused on defeating the Partisans. In this they found a common cause with the enemy and occasional and opportunistic collaboration between them and the Axis troops began, aiming to stamp out the Partisans.[4][5]
There was no shift of allegiance from Ultra intercepts to be learned in any which way,[citation needed] however, the Allies, with Churchill's insistence, decided to switch their support to the Partisans by November 1943, as their sources came to indicate that by supporting Joseph Stalin and the Comintern the war could end earlier than expected.[citation needed] Through this support of Stalin, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia were allowed to pass into the Eastern sphere of communist influence. The Partisans soon gained recognition in Tehran as the Allied Yugoslav forces on the ground. In 1944, the Partisan commander, Marshal Josip Broz Tito, was recognized as the Commander-in-Chief of all Yugoslav forces, and was appointed Prime Minister of a joint government.
Peter II of Yugoslavia (links, footnotes at source).
Since 1941, the Second World War was just a series of tragic blunders by Britain and the US. This is one of them.
Very Well Said Annalex.
May Serbia restore what once was.
I think it would have been a little later. In late 1944 the British government pressured King Peter into calling for all of his subjects to support Tito’s resistance (rather than the Chetniks), and some members of the government-in-exile joined the Tito-led government in Belgrade after the Partisans took Belgrade with the help of the Red Army. Those ministers quickly learned they had no power at all. I think it was in late 1945 that the monarchy was officially abolished so the confiscation of the king’s property probably took place after that.
This source, by the way, makes a point that the "abolition" of the monarchy was illegal, by a mere decree, like everything else the communist gangs do.
There are some interesting documents in the volumes of The Foreign Relations of the United States published by the State Department, for these years, about the back-and-forth between the various parties involved and US officials. The Tito regime was very Stalinist in its methods and imposed a dictatorship pretty quickly. Ljubo Sirc, a young Slovenian former Partisan, tried to organize a political party to compete in the election and for that spent about 7 years in prison. (He later managed to leave the country and became a professor in England.)
It's hard to say what would have happened if the Allies had aided Mihailovic and he had defeated Tito, or if Tito had been killed during the war. Maybe the Soviets would have installed a compliant Communist regime like they did in other Eastern European countries. Maybe there would have been a civil war like in Greece. There was some talk of splitting the country. Churchill's famous percentages agreement with Stalin had Yugoslavia a 50-50 deal between Britain and the Soviets, but what was that supposed to mean in practice? One possibility might have been a Soviet-dominated Serbia in the eastern half of the country and a British-dominated entity embracing the western half of the country (but I don't think any serious planning was done along those lines--and that half of the country was very divided ethnically so may not have been a viable state). It can't be assumed that if Tito had been eliminated, Mihailovic would have been able to run a united Yugoslavia under the aegis of King Peter--Stalin probably would not have allowed that.
The link I gave before says that it was not. Regardless, the only legitimate way to abolish a monarchy is to get the monarch to abdicate, not voting about it.
It's hard to say what would have happened if the Allies had aided Mihailovic and he had defeated Tito, or if Tito had been killed during the war.
It would have been the right thing to do, especially if the war was fought, supposedly, on the grounds of high morality. Yes, Stalin might have upset this policy as he had upset many other policies. In that, too, there is a lesson US and Britain did not learn till 1949: helping Stalin win was a mistake all along.
This was a nice thread to read and good news. I grew up in Chicago, dad Serbian, mom Polish. My Dad talked about hearing King Petar speak at a function in Chicago. There were bad feelings while I was growing up between serbs and croatians and I was not alowed to socialize with croatian guys. Dad said one of the things Peter said was “You are in America now” and to leave that behind.
What a memory. Thank you. I have a soft spot for all Southern Slavs, and am in America now.
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