On May 8 and 9, Serbia celebrated Victory Day in World War II with a series of events around Belgrade including wreath-laying ceremonies, concerts, film screenings, fireworks and the livestreaming of a military parade in Moscow.

As well as the victory over fascism, Serbian officials celebrated their alliance with Russia, the co-organiser of the festivities.

The weekend culminated in an official event at the National Theatre, broadcast live on national television and online, with poetry, songs and speeches by President Aleksandar Vucic and Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik.

Some of the verses that actors read at the main celebration sparked public debate because they are associated with Zbor, the Serbian fascist movement that collaborated with Nazi Germany.

The organisers’ response to these accusations came from historian Dejan Ristic who falsely denied any connection to Zbor and its leader Dimitrije Ljotic, and said that the patriotic verses dated back to “long before World War II” and poet Momcilo Nastasijevic.

The truth is, however, that the verses of the marching song ‘Vi mrtvi niste’ (‘You are Not Dead’), which was read on May 9, were first published in a Zbor poetry collection in 1944, and the song became an anthem of the Serbian radical right. So far it remains unclear how it wound up in the Victory Day programme, and no government official has explained it.

Chetniks reinterpreted as anti-fascists

Chetnik leader Dragoljub ‘Draza’ Mihailovic. Photo: Aleksandar Simic – Museum of Yugoslavia/Wikimedia Commons.

The reciting of the marching songs of fascist groups to celebrate the victory against fascism was not the only controversy of this year’s Victory Day in Serbia.

Within the archival footage that was shown on a video wall at the central event was an image of Dragoljub Mihailovic, the commander of the collaborationist Chetnik movement. Mihailovic’s image was displayed next to that of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the People’s Liberation Movement – the Partisans – a mass resistance movement led by the Communist Party that liberated the country and established socialist Yugoslavia.

The process of the official recasting of the Chetniks as a Serbian resistance movement took off after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. In 2004, changes to the Law on Veterans’ Rights equated the Chetniks with the Partisans as anti-fascists, even though the two movements had fought against each other during World War II, with only one of them consistently anti-fascist.

During this period, Serbian political elites did not celebrate Victory Day or other World War II liberation anniversaries, revaluating them as the beginning of communist occupation. In this context, the Chetniks did not only become equal, but they replaced the ideologically unsuitable Partisans as a new resistance movement.

The shift towards celebrations of the victory against fascism started in the wake of the Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008 and due to increasingly closer relations with Russia. After the Serbian Progressive Party came to power in 2012, it fully embraced and appropriated the World War II liberation as a Serbian victory.

Current state officials, who revel in the victory celebrations and represent themselves as the bastion against historical revisionism today, fully endorsed the radical revision of history and Chetnik rehabilitation. While only Milorad Dodik spoke openly about the Chetniks as anti-fascists, describing this as a secret that was well-kept in the Yugoslav period, the narrative of resistance movements in plural underlined the event.

Yugoslav liberation becomes Serbian victory

Serbian Army special units take part in a military parade to mark Victory Day in the city of Nis in May 2019. Photo: EPA/DJORDJE SAVIC.

On prominent anniversaries such as May 9, state officials from Serbia and Republika Srpska nationalise and appropriate the communist-led and Yugoslav Partisans. Judging from official discourses, it was a Serbian army that achieved victory against fascism and liberated Belgrade, Yugoslavia and Europe together with Russia.

The Victory Day commemorations erase the Yugoslav and Soviet character of the two armies, as well as the ideology that drove them. The speakers at this year’s victory celebration disentangled socialist Yugoslavia from the Partisans, blaming the Yugoslav leadership for keeping the history of Serbian heroism and suffering secret.

In Serbian memory politics, the Partisans not only become transformed into a heroic Serbian army, but it is also claimed that Serbs of all ideologies were the only ones in Yugoslavia who took up arms and committed themselves to the anti-fascist struggle.

Vucic, Dodik and other officials accuse the other peoples of Yugoslavia, particularly Croats and Albanians, of welcoming the occupation by the Axis powers with open arms. The whitewashing of the Serbian World War II experience involves denial of collaboration and focuses on Serbs’ victimhood in the Nazi-allied Independent State of Croatia, which complements the narrative of heroism.

The official Victory Day celebrations in Serbia are not about World War II, but they represent a textbook example of the blatant instrumentalisation of history for political purposes.

This usage of history is evident in the notion of liberation wars that underlies every May 9 commemoration and represents the basis of the populist memory politics of the Serbian Progressive Party.

The party’s idea of Serbia’s liberation wars merges wars and uprisings into a composite history which depicts the Serbian armed forces as fighting for freedom and never engaging in offensive warfare. The 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia are also depicted as liberation wars.

The veterans’ association of former Partisans, SUBNOR, which now has 1990s war veterans among its membership, exemplifies this myth of Serbia’s liberation wars. Its president, Vidosav Kovacevic, emphasised in his Victory Day speech: “Serbian soldier has never attacked others and he has always and only led liberation wars”, from Austria-Hungary to the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO.

Populists across Europe and beyond strive to mobilise memory and heritage to appeal to the broader public, narrating their efforts as finally breaking the taboos of national history.

While engaging in the appropriation and nationalisation of anti-fascism, the ruling elites led by the Serbian Progressive Party paradoxically represent themselves as the bastion against revisionism and falsification of history.

To construct a heroic story of ‘liberation wars’, they have seized one of the most emancipatory moments in the history of the region formerly known as Yugoslavia.

This year’s Victory Day commemoration embodied the radical revision of World War II that has taken place since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, and which has only intensified in recent years.

Jelena Djureinovic is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna.

The opinions expressed in the opinion section are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.