By Jovan Dučić
First published in Amerikanski Srbobran, 1942
XII
The European War, initiated on the Serbian question, brought to the surface a new name in Yugoslavism, the most significant in a certain regard since the time of Bishop Strossmayer.
This was Dr. Ante Trumbić.
Dr. Ante Trumbić was a lawyer from Split and a deputy in the Dalmatian Assembly, known as a former staunch supporter of Starčević’s Croatian Party of Rights. He was elected as the primus inter pares president of the Yugoslav Committee, which was formed during the war on the side, under the guise of an auxiliary body to Pasic’s government of Serbia. The Committee also included some Yugoslav patriots who were Serbs and were not satisfied with expanding Serbia to the State of Serbdom, meaning all Serbian united lands under the Serbian crown, a state nearly as large as that Yugoslavia! They sincerely and selflessly wanted a common kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes…
In reality, this Committee aimed to control the Serbian government in its actions. Trumbić’s Committee, with its first act, went on to gather volunteers from non-Serbian areas into the “Yugoslav Legion,” with the condition that it would assemble in Italy and have weapon drills there. But not a word was mentioned that it was created to operate in line with the statement of the Serbian government in Nis on November 24, 1918, nor that it was going to the Serbian front where the war was being fought for a common cause! To many Serbs, this Committee looked suspicious, especially when it was heard that a circle of Croatian patriots asked the Italian undersecretary, de Martini, to create Greater Croatia. Croatians could not imagine their liberation without Rome, which they always criticized most vociferously. Therefore, the news caused a sensation. But unfortunately, the London Pact was concluded, gaining Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Allies, and in return, the Allies solemnly promised Italy a large number of Dalmatian islands and land on the coast, deeply shaking the Croats. From that moment, they began to believe more in Serbia than in their Legion and even more than in their diplomacy.
It was certainly very interesting to keep the Croats in the Yugoslav Committee, which was initially called Croatian and only later Yugoslav. Early in the war, Frano Supilo, a well-known journalist and leader, traveled to St. Petersburg as a delegate, representing Trumbić’s first Committee. There he presented a Croatian Memorandum to the Russian Tsar on behalf of Trumbić’s Committee, after which Sazonov wrote to Krupensky, his ambassador in Rome, that His Imperial Majesty could not take it into consideration, as the Russian government found this Supilo Memorandum inconsistent with the earlier received Memorandum of the Serbian academician Ljuba Stojanović, containing Serbian territorial claims. (Serbia and Yugoslavia, 53)
The archive of the Yugoslav Committee of Dr. Trumbić has never been published, except for a few memoirs by N. Stojanović. Only one foreigner, Dr. Matilda Paulova, wrote about him! It would be very interesting, however, to examine some cases. Much can be disturbed by assumptions alone. Certainly, the influence of Dr. Trumbić, a small town lawyer with limited spiritual capabilities, who was not known to have written, said, or done anything important but was disproportionately ambitious and a Serbophobe, was a heavy burden for the Serb extras in his company; obsessed with constant visions that Pašić would betray him and that Serbia would deceive Croatia. Hinković was fatal in the Committee as well. There is a presumption that the Yugoslav Committee forced Pašić to sign the famous Geneva Declaration of November 6/9, 1918, which, if held, would have conceded all the gains of the war to Croatia instead of Serbia, which, as is known, fought against the Allies on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary until the last day.
But Pašić did not miss the opportunity, soon after the war, to publish, under the editorship of a well-known Belgrade publicist, Milan Đorđević, certain documents about the relations between the Serbian Government and the Yugoslav Committee of Dr. Trumbić. In this publication by Pašić (page 33), it is written that on April 13, 1916, the Yugoslav Committee addressed the French government with a Memorandum stating that on matters concerning Serbs and Croats and Slovenes from Austria-Hungary, in any case, the Yugoslav Committee must have its say, not just Serbia, with which they agree only in principle; and that the Yugoslav Committee is the legal representative of the entire emigration and the only representative of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes altogether. – At the same time, the Memorandum presented a plan to be executed at the end of the war: the unification into an independent state, but with them having the main say, as supposed
ly approved by all emigrant organizations. Of course, according to one writer, the Allies never approved this competence of the Yugoslav Committee (see Serbia and Yugoslavia).
Trumbić’s slogan was “that Serbia is lost” and “that Serbia no longer exists,” in order to put that country on the level of Croatia. However, at the beginning of the war, Serbia had its entire 5 million population, expanded in the Balkan wars, and with its 87,303 square kilometers, according to the small Croatia that did not distinguish itself in the borders of a foreign monarchy. Trumbić’s intrigues were indeed known in Allied circles in Paris. Once, according to one writer, Lloyd George replied to Trumbić that “everything the Allies do for the Yugoslavs, they do because of heroic Serbia”… Trumbić, like today’s Krnjević or Šubašić, will never understand that they are complete “personae non gratae” in the home of the Allies because they are fighting for one ideal, and the others for another; therefore only the compromises that the Allies endure, thanks only to the bad and incomprehensible intentions of certain Serbs.
Trumbić, at one moment of “lucid intervals,” felt that he still had to approach the Serbian government to get closer to its Allies. Thus, the Corfu Declaration became a reality on July 7/20, 1917, a manifesto about future state unity. But it was noticed that with this manifesto on Corfu (July 20, 1917), one was signed there, just a little earlier (May 30, 1917) in Vienna, the so-called May Declaration, in which local representatives of our language in the Reichsrat declared that Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs form one state body – Yugoslavia, within the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and under the Habsburg crown… (see “Um die Jugoslavia” by Professor University Usenitski). – One of our writers sees a connection between the events on Corfu and this one in Vienna (Milosavljević, I). He adds that at that time, and according to the testimony of the Osijek “Hrvatski List” of February 2, 1922, many politicians from Croatia went to maintain contact with Trumbić’s Committee (Šušterčić, Maček, Andrić, Barac, and that in Bern, Zurich, Lausanne, and Geneva). This is confirmed by Frano Potočnjak in his work “Rapalski Ugovor,” page 32.
However, by signing the famous Declaration with Pašić in Corfu, Dr. Trumbić soon made the same Declaration attacked by the American Yugoslav National Council (Don Niko Gršković) in his “Open Word,” how the Constitutional Assembly played Article 1 of that Declaration, which relates to the dynasty, by voting that the Karađorđevićs remain the rulers of Yugoslavia. This “Open Word” demanded that the King abdicate so that he could then be elected ruler by the Croats!… It is added that in this regard, the Corfu Declaration was only a “suggestion and desire” with regards to the dynasty, but nothing more. This meant undermining the authority of the crown right away.
However, this was a falsehood because Article I of the Corfu Declaration literally read as follows:
“The state will be a constitutional democratic and parliamentary monarchy, with the Karađorđe’s dynasty at its head, which has always shared the ideas and feelings of the people, placing freedom and the will of the people above all.”
Those Croats who, a few years earlier, dared not do the slightest thing to any Austrian dignitary, rushed with all their fury against our glorious dynasty. Only our fools could believe, after this, that this action by the Croats against the Serbian dynasty would not remain the main subject when overthrowing the state.
*
Such too was the “Yugoslavism” of Dr. Trumbić at the dawn of the Yugoslav era. Don’t forget that Dr. A. Trumbić switched over to Radić precisely in the days when he most vociferously attacked the state that Trumbić supposedly created himself and against the dynasty which that same Trumbić first attacked.
It would come later, as a natural consequence of Trumbić’s action, Radić’s speeches against the King, the Marseille assassination, and finally the plebiscite of the American Croats, which was recently conducted by the Croatian musician Vlado Kolić with the help of patriotic corporations, with regards to the future reign of Petar II.
It should be known that Don N. Gršković sent his “Open Word” after Wilson’s statement on the freedom of self-determination of peoples, which then erased all responsibilities of Croats for complicity in the war. Just as Croats today consider Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s statements on that self-determination, which makes Krnjević’s position in London arrogant and otherwise shameless.
Translated by Books of Jeremiah
