Uroš Drenović

Uroš Drenović was born in 1911 in Sitnica, Ribnik, near Mount Manjača in the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria-Hungary.

He attended school in Mrkonjić Grad and finished teachers' college in Sarajevo.

After graduation he became a schoolmaster at Baraći, near Banja Luka, in the Bosanska Krajina region of Bosnia in what had become the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Prior to the outbreak of World War II, he attended the Royal Yugoslav Army (Vojska Kraljevine Jugoslavije, VKJ) reserve officer training school at Bileća, and was serving in the VKJ reserve.

Following the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Ustaše implemented genocidal policies against the NDH's Serbs, Jews and Roma.

Drenović joined the Partisans and distinguished himself during the initial uprising against the NDH government by capturing the town of Mrkonjić Grad in August 1941.

He was then appointed to command the 3rd "Petar Kočić" Battalion in central Bosnia and was appointed the deputy commander of the 3rd Krajina Detachment.

A Serbian nationalist with anti-Muslim and anti-Croat views, Drenović eventually betrayed the Partisans and sided with the royalist, Serbian nationalist Chetniks, whose ideology more closely matched his own.

After their invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Germans created an Axis puppet state called the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), governed by the Ustaše.

Shortly after its creation, largely spontaneous uprisings began to occur throughout the state, caused by the genocidal policies implemented by the Ustaše against Serbs, Jews and Roma.

On 4 July, in the wake of the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (Komunistička partija Jugoslavije, KPJ) decided to launch a general uprising against the occupying forces across Yugoslavia, in solidarity with the Soviets, and a full-scale rebellion broke out in Bosnia on 27 July.

This included local uprisings in the Bosanska Krajina, which spread across the NDH, but the KPJ organisation was initially swept along in the popular uprisings rather than leading the rebellion.

On 29 August, Drenović distinguished himself by planning and leading the capture of Mrkonjić Grad by the rebels, but when the town was recaptured by NDH forces four days later, the KPJ blamed him and his troops, citing their poor discipline and anti-Muslim chauvinism.

In September, four battalions of fighters were formed in the Ribnik, Janj and Pliva region.

One of these, the 3rd "Petar Kočić" Battalion, was commanded by Drenović who, unlike the other battalion commanders in the region, did not allow the KPJ to appoint political commissars to his companies.

Mrkonjić Grad did not have a strong KPJ presence, but was under the sway of the sectarian Serb elite, allowing Drenović to arrest Muslim communists, even confronting senior members of the Partisan leadership in the Bosanska Krajina.

On 26 September 1941 at the Partisan conference in Stolice in the German-occupied territory of Serbia, the leadership decided to standardise its military organisation across occupied Yugoslavia.

During October and November, three detachments were formed in the Bosanska Krajina from existing units such as the 3rd "Petar Kočić" Battalion, and Drenović was appointed as deputy commander of the 3rd Krajina Detachment responsible for operations in the territory of central Bosnia.

The Serbs of this region had strong pro-Chetnik/Serb-chauvinist sympathies.

The Chetniks were a loosely-organised Serb-chauvinist guerrilla movement putatively led by Draža Mihailović.

Of the 34 companies in the detachment, only 13 had KPJ organisations, only 11 had commanders who were members of the KPJ, and only 18 had a political commissar.

Many KPJ activists in the region were Muslims or Croats, not easily accepted by the mass of the rank-and-file who were largely Serb-chauvinist peasants.

Drenović himself was the leading exponent of Chetnik ideology in central Bosnia.

This narrow ideology involved extreme Serbian nationalism, and irredentism focussed on the creation of a Greater Serbia, and was anti-Croat, anti-Muslim, monarchist, and anti-communist.

Drenović himself despised Muslims and Croats but was "diplomatic enough to keep his feelings in check when necessary".

In October, the leadership of the 3rd Krajina Detachment attempted to win over the Muslim village of Crljeni by gaining the agreement of the headman to contribute five armed men to the detachment.

When the headman reneged on the deal, the bulk of the detachment attacked the village, and the remainder of the detachment had to prevent Drenović's men from burning and looting it.

On 26 November 1941, at a meeting of the leadership of the 3rd Krajina Detachment, Drenović advocated collaboration with the Italian occupation forces on the basis that the Italians were protecting Serbs from the Ustaše.

This was rejected by the senior KPJ members of the detachment, but they were not in a position to force him to abandon the idea.

At the same meeting, Drenović refused to commit the 3rd "Petar Kočić" Battalion to fight the Italians.

Under pressure, he agreed to advise neighbouring battalions if the Italians moved through his territory.

In return, the leadership of the 3rd Krajina Detachment agreed that Drenović could refer to his force as a "Military-Chetnik Detachment".

In April 1942, Drenović fled to Banja Luka after his units were defeated by the Partisans.

There, out of military and political necessity, he concluded an alliance with the NDH against the Partisans.

Uroš Drenović (Урош Дреновић; 1911 – 29 May 1944) was a Bosnian Serb military commander in the central Bosnia region of the fascist puppet state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), led by the Ustaše, during World War II.

After distinguishing himself in resisting the Ustaše alongside communist-led rebels, Drenović betrayed the communist-led Partisans and began to collaborate with the Ustaše, Italians and Germans against them.

Drenović later began collaborating with the Italians and Germans against the Partisans, and continued to do so until his death in an Allied bombing raid on Banja Luka in May 1944.

Despite his extensive collaboration with the Axis, a Banja Luka street is named after him, and within Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the actions of his Chetniks are celebrated and equated with those of the Partisans.

The celebration and rehabilitation of Chetniks such as Drenović has been criticised by the civil society organisation the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights as reflecting a “deeply ill society”.

On 10 December, the senior KPJ members of the 3rd Krajina Detachment concluded that 50 percent of their command staff did not support the leading role of the KPJ in the uprising.