Chetniks

The Chetniks are presented as Serbian militiamen in the wars of the former Yugoslavia, part of a conflict fought largely by militias rather than regular armies. The account places the name within a charged history of Serb-Croat hostility, then shows how contemporary Chetnik groups inhabited a wider paramilitary world of armed young men, intimidation, and violence. Their association with Eduard Limonov at an officers’ mess in Pale is striking, but the narrative explicitly distinguishes him from them.

Name and Historical Memory

In a discussion of Croatian independence, the Chetniks are identified as the Serbian-side counterpart to the Ustaše, the Croatian partisans named in the same account. The distinction surfaces amid arguments over national self-determination and the vulnerability of Serbs living in Croatia. Those fears, the narrator explains, had a historical basis: the Croatian government’s early measures included banning Cyrillic signs, dismissing Serbs from the civil service, and replacing Yugoslavia’s red-starred flag with a red-and-white checkerboard flag associated with the German-created Croatian state of 1941.

The memory of wartime brutality enters through an episode from a book by Malaparte. Visiting the Croatian leader Ante Pavelić, Malaparte is said to have seen a basket of grisly contents that Pavelić described as the eyes of Serbs, presented by his loyal Ustaše. In the account, the episode helps explain why the names Ustaše and Chetniks carried such force as opposing labels. It does not provide a full history of either organization; rather, it shows how memories of violence shaped contemporary fears and political arguments as Yugoslavia broke apart.

Militias and the Culture of Violence

The Chetniks appear within a broader militia environment that crossed lines between political affiliation and criminality. Jean Rolin describes an early-war roadblock manned by militiamen whose affiliations were difficult to determine. In his account, armed groups were learning to use weapons and wartime impunity to terrorize civilians, abuse women, and take what they could without payment. The groups included young peasants, football hooligans, delinquents, psychopaths, foreign mercenaries, Russian Slavophiles who came to defend Orthodoxy alongside the Serbs, neo-Nazis drawn to the Ustaše on the Croatian side, and, later, jihadists fighting with Bosnian Muslims.

Rolin’s description makes paramilitary culture visible through its equipment and habits: camouflage uniforms, green berets, sunglasses, Kalashnikovs, shotguns, and Uzi submachine guns, sometimes decorated with cartoon stickers. Alcohol-fueled groups drove unmarked four-wheel-drive vehicles, shouted and played loud music after returning from the front or a cleansing operation, and fired their weapons into the air or at people. In this atmosphere, war was not only a clash between organized forces. It offered armed men license to intimidate and prey on civilians, while the boundary between combat and criminal violence became difficult to see.

The Chetniks are one recognizable presence in this militia world, not a name for every armed group described. Rolin’s account singles out tattooed Chetniks in a vehicle, their long hair and beards flying as they returned from an operation. The surrounding details—drunkenness, gunfire, and the casual display of force—locate them in a violent social scene without establishing that every Chetnik shared every behavior attributed to the larger militia milieu.

Arkan and the Tigers

The account distinguishes the Serbian militia known as the Tigers from the Chetniks while placing both in the same wartime landscape. The Tigers’ leader was Arkan, a figure popular among Belgrade’s pimps who had acquired a reputation as a war criminal. The scene described by Jean Hatzfeld takes place in a warehouse after the surrender at Vukovar. Croatian prisoners, driven from their cellars during the final attacks, are assembled there; although nominally under the protection of the People’s Army, they are left to the Tigers’ decision.

The prisoners and their captors often came from the same villages or neighborhoods, where they had lived, worked, and drunk together before the war. The account stresses this proximity: men who had shared ordinary local life now used rifle butts to force their former neighbors onto military trucks bound for unknown destinations. This is a portrayal of the Tigers, not evidence that they were simply another name for the Chetniks. Together, however, the scenes show how militia power turned familiar local relationships into instruments of coercion.

Chetniks at Pale and Limonov

At the officers’ mess in Pale, filmmaker Paweł noticed a man in a People’s Army overcoat worn over a leather jacket, with large glasses, a crew cut, and a pistol at his side. The man appeared to be on close terms with a particularly unpleasant group of Chetniks, although Paweł could tell he was not one of them. The pistol seemed less like ordinary military equipment than a costume accessory, an impression that made the man’s affiliation and self-presentation seem deliberately theatrical.

The man introduced himself to a French television crew as Eduard Limonov, a writer interested in the world’s conflict zones. He identified himself not as a journalist but as a soldier, declared his support for the Serbs, and challenged the crew’s neutrality. When one of the filmmakers objected to a journalist carrying a gun, Limonov threatened that he could shoot them and suggested that his Chetnik companions might cover for him. He then returned to their table. The exchange shows the practical force of his association with the group: whether or not he belonged to it, he invoked their presence as protection and as a threat.

The filmmakers’ reaction also unsettled Limonov’s pose. They were perplexed and disgusted, and one called him an asshole. A soundman recognized him as the author of a book about his years in New York; the filmmaker’s laughter at the contrast between that literary reputation and Limonov’s Chetnik company punctured the scene’s self-dramatization. The episode therefore makes proximity, rather than formal membership, central: Limonov was visibly aligned with the group, but the narrative does not call him a Chetnik.

Narrative Significance

The Chetniks connect the book’s discussion of contested national histories to its on-the-ground portrait of militia warfare. The name carries the weight of the conflict’s Serbian-Croatian divisions, while the scenes of armed groups show how those divisions operated in places where neighbors could become captors and local authority could give way to intimidation. The account does not offer an organizational history or a comprehensive description of Chetnik aims. It records particular appearances and associations, and preserves distinctions among the Chetniks, Arkan’s Tigers, and Limonov.

That limited but concrete treatment matters to the narrative’s wider refusal to make the early stages of Yugoslavia’s collapse immediately legible as a simple division between good and bad. Historical fear among Serbs in Croatia is described alongside the militia violence that followed, not as an excuse for it. The Chetniks consequently occupy two registers at once: a name shaped by inherited political memory and a present-tense group encountered amid weapons, paramilitary spectacle, and civilian danger.