The second session of AVNOJ at Jajce

On the evening of 29 November 1943, in the small Bosnian town of Jajce on the Vrbas, delegates of the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) gathered in the hall of the local Sokol gymnastic society. The session went on into the early hours of 30 November. In its course the partisan council, created a year earlier by the communists of Josip Broz Tito, declared itself the country’s supreme legislative and representative body, set up a provisional government headed by Tito, stripped the government-in-exile in Cairo and London of the rights of a legitimate government, forbade King Peter II to return to the country and announced that post-war Yugoslavia would be a federation of equal nations. Tito was given the rank of Marshal of Yugoslavia.

Jajce was at that time the capital of an extensive area held by the partisans in central and western Bosnia, surrounded by German troops and the forces of the Independent State of Croatia. The decisions of the second session were not yet final – they depended on victory in the civil war and over the occupiers, on recognition by the Allies and on approval by a post-war constituent assembly. They did, however, set the course the country’s fate would take, and for that reason Tito’s Yugoslavia regarded 29 November as its birthday.

A shattered Yugoslavia and two resistance movements

In April 1941 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia succumbed within a couple of weeks to an invasion by Germany, Italy and Hungary, and the king and government fled abroad. The victors partitioned the country: Slovenia was carved up by the Germans, Italians and Hungarians; Croatia together with Bosnia and Herzegovina became the Ustaše state of Ante Pavelić; Serbia came under German military administration; and Montenegro, Kosovo and most of Dalmatia fell under Italian rule or influence. Bulgaria occupied Macedonia.

From the outset resistance developed along two lines. Colonel Dragoljub (Draža) Mihailović gathered officers and soldiers of the royal army on Ravna Gora – the Chetniks, who wanted the monarchy restored with Serbs dominant and who postponed full-scale fighting until an Allied landing. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia under Tito called for an uprising after Germany attacked the USSR and created a partisan movement that took in people of every nationality and combined the fight against the occupiers with revolution. In the autumn of 1941 the two movements clashed, and from then on they waged a civil war alongside their struggle against the Axis.

The government-in-exile backed Mihailović. In January 1942 Prime Minister Slobodan Jovanović appointed him Minister of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the Chetniks were officially named the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland. The government itself, however, was riven by quarrels: Serbian ministers clashed with representatives of the Croatian Peasant Party over responsibility for the Ustaše crimes and the shape of the state, while Vladko Maček, the party’s leader, had never left the country at all. In the summer of 1943 cabinets changed in quick succession, until in August a caretaker government of officials under Božidar Purić was formed, in which Mihailović kept his ministry.

From Bihać to Jajce

The first session of AVNOJ was held on 26–27 November 1942 at Bihać in western Bosnia, where the partisans then controlled an extensive area that also included Lika and part of Dalmatia. The council adopted the principle of a multinational federation but did not decide the political system of the future state. Its chairman was Ivan Ribar, a pre-war politician who in 1920–1921 had presided over the constituent assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. An executive committee was also set up, but Tito stressed that it was not a government. On advice from Moscow – the Comintern urged them not to provoke the Western Allies or come out openly against the monarchy – AVNOJ did not at that point challenge the legitimacy of the government-in-exile. The word “anti-fascist” was added to the council’s name to emphasise that it was a front for the struggle against the occupiers rather than an organ of revolution.

1943 brought the partisans their severest trials. In the winter the Germans, Italians, Ustaše and Chetniks drove them out of Bihać in Operation Weiss; in February and March, on the Neretva, the partisans broke out of encirclement and routed the Chetniks allied with the Italians. In May Operation Schwarz began, and Tito’s main forces fought their way out of the pocket on the Sutjeska, losing one soldier in three. Surviving these offensives, however, convinced both the Germans and the British that Tito’s movement was the most serious armed force in the country.

The turning point came with the Italian surrender in September 1943. In Operation Achse the Germans disarmed most of the Italian garrisons in the Balkans, but the partisans managed to seize the weapons and equipment of several Italian divisions, for a time took control of much of the Dalmatian coast and its islands, and were joined by volunteers from the territories Italy had annexed, especially Istria and Slovenia. According to Yugoslav figures, by the end of 1943 the National Liberation Army numbered some 300,000 soldiers; historians treat these figures with caution, but agree that within a few months Tito’s movement had grown several times over.

British missions and a change of front

British policy was changing at the same time. Until 1943 London had supported Mihailović, whom Allied propaganda presented as a hero of the European resistance. Decrypted German signals and the reports of liaison officers showed, however, that the Chetniks were avoiding combat with the Germans and in many places co-operating with the Italians, and even with the Germans, against the partisans. In May 1943 a Special Operations Executive mission under Captain William Deakin was parachuted to Tito’s headquarters and lived through the Battle of the Sutjeska with the partisans. In September they were joined by Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, the personal envoy of Winston Churchill, whom the Prime Minister had instructed to find out who was really killing the most Germans and not to concern himself with Yugoslavia’s future political system. At the beginning of November Maclean presented a report in Cairo according to which the partisans were the only resistance force that counted, and their movement would decide the country’s post-war fate whether or not the Allies supported it.

Tito was then reckoning with the possibility of an Allied landing on the Adriatic coast and wanted the arriving Allies to find a government already in place. In October the party leadership drew up a plan for a National Committee of Liberation as an all-Yugoslav executive body, while the regional anti-fascist councils elected delegates to the second session.

The session at Jajce

The assembly was convened in wartime conditions. According to Yugoslav tallies, of the more than 300 delegates planned, 142 reached Jajce, and substitutes also took seats in the hall. The eastern part of the country was the least well represented: in occupied Serbia elections could not be held, so its delegates were appointed by partisan units originating from Serbia, while no one from Macedonia or the Sandžak managed to arrive in time. The session was chaired by Ivan Ribar. A few days earlier, on 27 November, his elder son Ivo Lola Ribar, one of Tito’s closest associates, had been killed by a bomb from a German aircraft at a field airstrip on the Glamoč field, just as he was about to fly out at the head of the first partisan military mission to Allied headquarters in Cairo. Two officers of the British mission died with him. Ribar’s younger son, Jurica, had been killed in October in Montenegro.

The delegates heard Tito’s report on the course of the struggle and adopted a series of resolutions that were later described in Yugoslavia as the foundation of the new state:

• AVNOJ declared itself the supreme legislative and executive body, the representative of the sovereignty of the peoples of Yugoslavia;
• the National Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia (NKOJ) was given the powers of a provisional government; Tito became its chairman, with the communists Edvard Kardelj and Vladislav Ribnikar and Božidar Magovac of the Croatian Peasant Party as vice-chairmen;
• the government-in-exile was stripped of the rights of the legitimate government of Yugoslavia, and the international agreements it had concluded were to be reviewed;
• King Peter II was forbidden to return to the country until the people themselves decided the question of the monarchy after liberation; formally, therefore, the question of the political system was left open;
• the future Yugoslavia was to be a democratic federation of nations with equal rights, made up of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro;
• the council declared that Yugoslavia had never recognised the partition of 1941 and supported the incorporation of the lands annexed by Italy after the First World War, including Istria and the Slovene Littoral.

On the night of 29/30 November the presidium of AVNOJ – according to participants’ accounts, at the proposal of the Slovene delegation – conferred on Tito the rank of Marshal of Yugoslavia; some sources date this decision to 30 November. Tito was the only man ever to hold that title. The newly elected presidium of AVNOJ had 63 members, and alongside the communists it included representatives of the Croatian Peasant Party and of the pre-war Independent Democratic Party, which was meant to demonstrate the broad, cross-party character of the movement. Among the vice-chairmen was Moša Pijade, one of the party’s ideologues.

Reactions

The Jajce resolutions took all three great Allies by surprise. They were adopted during the very days when Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were meeting at the Tehran Conference. The sharpest reaction came from Joseph Stalin: Tito had not forewarned Moscow, and the creation of a provisional government, the rejection of the cabinet in exile and the title of marshal ran counter to Soviet advice not to reveal the movement’s revolutionary aims to the West. According to Yugoslav accounts and later research, the Kremlin at first withheld judgement and only after some time, when it became clear that the British were not protesting, publicly endorsed AVNOJ’s decisions.

Britain received them with surprising calm. What mattered most to Churchill was tying down as many German divisions as possible in the Balkans. In the military conclusions of the Tehran Conference, adopted on 1 December, the three powers resolved to support the Yugoslav partisans to the greatest possible extent with supplies, equipment and commando operations. The government-in-exile and the king, who were in Cairo, protested, but no longer had any means of exerting pressure. The Chetniks answered Jajce in January 1944 with a congress in the village of Ba in Serbia, at which they set out their own vision of a post-war federal monarchy and accused AVNOJ of a communist and Ustaše conspiracy against the Serbs.

Significance

The second session of AVNOJ decided the political system of post-war Yugoslavia long before the war ended. In 1944 the British withdrew their liaison missions from Mihailović and ceased to support him. Under pressure from Churchill the king appointed Ivan Šubašić as prime minister, and on 16 June 1944 on the island of Vis he concluded an agreement with Tito that in practice recognised the authorities created at Jajce, in return for postponing the decision on the political system until the end of the war. In October 1944 the partisans and the Red Army liberated Belgrade, and in March 1945 a joint government was formed with Tito as prime minister. The third session of AVNOJ in August 1945 turned the council into a provisional national assembly. After the elections of 11 November 1945, boycotted by the opposition, in which only the list of the communist-led People’s Front stood, the constituent assembly on 29 November – the second anniversary of the Jajce session – abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. Mihailović, captured in March 1946, was sentenced and shot in July of that year.

The federation of six republics established at Jajce lasted until the 1990s, and 29 and 30 November were celebrated in it as Republic Day. The internal borders drawn at that time, known as the “AVNOJ borders”, were intended to be administrative. After the break-up of Yugoslavia, however, they became the borders of independent states, and their rejection by Serbian nationalists was one of the causes of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia. The building in which the session was held now houses a museum.