Tito proclaims a provisional government

On 4 December 1943 news reached the world that the Yugoslav partisans of Josip Broz Tito had set up their own provisional government and refused to recognise the royal government-in-exile. News-agency dispatches and contemporary publications, based on partisan communiqués and broadcasts by the Free Yugoslavia radio station, presented this as the proclamation that day of a “provisional democratic government of Yugoslavia”, sometimes adding that it was headed by Ivan Ribar. Both statements are inaccurate. The government was not formed on 4 December but a few days earlier, on the night of 29/30 November, at the second session of AVNOJ at Jajce in Bosnia, and it was not a government-in-exile – on the contrary, it operated inside the country, in the territory held by the partisans, and set itself against the royal government residing in Cairo and London. Its chairman was Tito himself; Ribar, by contrast, presided over the presidium of AVNOJ, which acted as a collective head of state.

What was decided at Jajce

The AVNOJ council declared itself the supreme legislative and representative body of Yugoslavia and set up the National Committee for the Liberation of Yugoslavia (NKOJ) – an executive body with the powers of a provisional government. It was headed by Tito, who also took charge of defence; one of the three vice-chairmen was Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s closest associate in the communist leadership. The remaining posts of commissioners were filled so that the government included representatives of the various nations of Yugoslavia and people from outside the Communist Party, although everything was decided by the communist leadership. AVNOJ stripped the government-in-exile of the rights of the legitimate government of Yugoslavia, forbade King Peter II to return to the country until the people had expressed their will on the political system after the war, and announced a federal structure for the state. Tito was given the rank of Marshal of Yugoslavia.

The NKOJ was based at first in Jajce and later in Drvar. The committee had neither a capital nor a stable territory: during the very days when the world was learning of its creation, the German 2nd Panzer Army was conducting Operation Kugelblitz against two partisan corps in eastern Bosnia and the Sandžak. In military terms, however, the partisans were by then the strongest armed force in the country – numbering, depending on the source, anything from over 100,000 to about 300,000 men (the higher figures come from partisan data) – and were tying down more than a dozen German and allied divisions.

The royal government’s reaction

The government-in-exile of Prime Minister Božidar Purić, which was in Cairo together with the king, responded with a sharp protest. It declared the Jajce resolutions illegal and Tito and his movement to be usurpers seeking to impose communism on the country. For a government that was still formally recognised by all the coalition powers, and in which General Dragoljub Mihailović had been Minister of War since 1942, the decisions taken at Jajce challenged its right to represent Yugoslavia. King Peter II counted on the support of the British, who had given him hospitality and assistance since the beginning of the war.

The weakness of the royal government’s position was, however, plain to see. The cabinet was divided – disputes between Serbian and Croatian ministers had led to several changes of prime minister in 1943 – and it had no influence over events in the country. Its only armed force in Yugoslavia was Mihailović’s Chetniks, and the Allies were learning more and more about their co-operation with the Italians and Germans against the partisans.

The British, the Russians and the Americans

The most important reaction was that of Britain, which since 1941 had been the main patron of the Yugoslav government and the only great power with military missions both with the Chetniks and with the partisans. Since the autumn of 1943 the mission of Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean, Winston Churchill’s personal envoy, had been attached to Tito’s headquarters, and before that Captain William Deakin, who had witnessed the fighting on the Sutjeska, had been with the partisans. Maclean’s report of November 1943 argued that the partisans were the most effective force fighting the Germans in Yugoslavia and that it was they, not the king, who would rule the country after the war. At the Tehran Conference the three powers resolved on 1 December to support the partisans to the greatest possible extent.

The news from Jajce therefore provoked no protest in London. Churchill, who after Tehran stopped in Cairo for further talks with Roosevelt and the Turks, heard Deakin’s and Maclean’s accounts there in the first half of December. According to participants’ accounts and later research, it was then, around 10 December, that he decided to stop supporting Mihailović and to back Tito. From then on the British demanded that the king remove Mihailović from the government. On 7 December the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, spoke with Prime Minister Purić for the first time since Tehran. The British government did not recognise the NKOJ, but nor did it intend to defend the royal government against Tito.

Moscow reacted belatedly. Joseph Stalin was displeased that Tito had not forewarned him of his intentions, and feared that the revolutionary moves of the Yugoslav communists would alarm the Western Allies. When it became clear that the British were not protesting, the USSR in mid-December spoke publicly and approvingly of AVNOJ’s decisions and announced that it would send its own military mission to Tito’s headquarters; the mission reached Yugoslavia in February 1944. The United States remained cautious: the Americans kept liaison officers of the Office of Strategic Services with both sides and did not want to prejudge Yugoslavia’s political system before the end of the war.

Mihailović regarded the Jajce resolutions as a communist conspiracy. At the end of January 1944 the Chetniks answered them with a congress in the village of Ba in western Serbia, at which they presented their own programme for a post-war federal monarchy. By then this no longer changed the Allies’ position.

Place in the war

The announcement of Tito’s government ended the period in which the Allies could treat the war in Yugoslavia as a dispute between two resistance movements over how to fight the occupiers. From then on it was also a rivalry between two governments for power in the post-war state. At the beginning of January 1944 Churchill wrote personally to Tito, and his son Randolph joined Maclean’s mission. In the spring of 1944 the British withdrew their officers from the Chetniks. Under pressure from Churchill, at the turn of May and June 1944 King Peter II replaced Purić with Ivan Šubašić, who on 16 June concluded an agreement with Tito on the island of Vis that in practice recognised the authorities created at Jajce. In March 1945 the NKOJ and the government-in-exile merged into a joint provisional government with Tito as prime minister, and in November 1945 the constituent assembly abolished the monarchy. King Peter II never returned to his country.